Okay, so I'm still new to this writing thing and still learning the ropes. There are so many parts to putting a book out there that go beyond just writing: getting a decent cover, having a strong launch, etc. One of the many issues you have to get your arms around is marketing and promotion.
To be honest, you can't just release your book with virtually no fanfare and expect it to become a bestseller. Like winning the lottery, it just isn't going to happen for most of us. That being the case, you have to market and promote your work. And it was with that in mind that I looked at Amazon Marketing Services.
AMS is almost exactly what you'd expect based on its name: it's a service that allows you to market and promote your products on Amazon. You have two ways to tailor your marketing efforts: 1) you can target prospective customers based on categories, or 2) you can target them based on products. I took a two-fold approach and did ad campaigns both ways. Thus, I was marketing my book based on certain categories or interests (eg, women's fiction, romance, etc.), and also promoting it by tying it to the best-selling books in my genre. In short, if someone searched for books in the women's fiction category there was a chance that an ad for my book would pop up. Likewise, if they were looking at the bestsellers in street literature or urban fiction, an ad for my book was likely to appear.
The point of all this, of course, was to get sales. So the question is, how effective was AMS?
If I'm being perfectly honest, the answer is "not very."
In the 15 days prior to using AMS (which is roughly the two weeks that followed the release of The Dumb Bitch), I sold about twice as many books as during the 15 days after signing up. And while it was nice to see the ads for my book popping up (and realize that I was getting something for my money), they didn't translate into the amount of bang I should have been getting for my buck.
Long story short, I applaud Amazon for trying (and there are some bright spots to AMS), but I don't think this one is a winner in the long term. If you're thinking of trying this to promote your book, I'd advise you to save your money. The payoff for this for utilizing this particular product just isn't there.
