An Interesting Development In My Marketing

Greetings all,

So I actually just finished another round of key-wording, which is where I collect new key words and use them to generate campaigns, and while I was doing so, I got notifications about my adds for Caught.

Here’s what the email said:

The following ads are non-compliant to creative acceptance policies :

• Your ad titled “Caught: Book One of the Oneiros Log” no longer complies with our current Creative Acceptance Policies. Specifically for the following reasons:
  • Your ad contains content that is not allowed for advertising. Please ensure your ad does not contain any excessive violence or gore.
    The ASIN that needs to be corrected Is B01N9N5TUS.

After some research, I’ve come to learn that Caught does indeed violate that policy because the entire book involves some of that content.

The strange thing to me is that the horror genre is sort of based in violence. Still, after I think about it for a bit, I am more and more OK with it. Fans of the horror genre in general are going to find what they’re looking for (as with other forms of content). I would argue the Caught is rather tame in comparison, however, I do accept that there is blood and violence, so it should be restricted.

Then I went to study further, and I’m actually very happy with what Amazon is doing to protect people from content that may not be appropriate for all audiences. So I simply have to focus my efforts on my other projects.

I’ll have to see how this development will affect my sales. On one hand, I’ll save on clicks, so I wonder if I’ll actually end up helping my ACOS. On the other, Caught was one of my better selling books, and I fear this development might affect those sales.

Either way, I support this decision by Amazon. I am completely OK with any measure a company makes to guard against people accidentally getting to content they don’t want.

So I thought I’d mention this as I track sales over the next three months.

Thanks for reading,

Matt