ShelfLife BookMark

ShelfLife BookMark is an automated Amazon Ads platform built for authors. Instead of you logging into the Amazon Ads console every day to adjust bids and keywords, BookMark connects to your Amazon Advertising account through Amazon’s official Advertising API and manages your campaigns using a codified set of rules — the same playbook ShelfLife has developed managing over $10M in ad spend for authors.

In practice, that means BookMark:

• Creates campaigns for your book with proven structures
• Researches and adds keywords based on your book’s category, comparable titles, and performance data
• Optimizes continuously — adjusting bids, pausing what isn’t working, and scaling what is
• Reports results in plain language, so you can see what your ads are actually doing

You stay in control: your ads run in your own Amazon Advertising account, on your own Amazon payment method, and your dashboard shows you what BookMark has been doing.

Three things:

• A book live on Amazon.com (US) — published through KDP or otherwise available for sale on Amazon. The advertised book can be an eBook, paperback, hardcover, or Audible audiobook. Audible ads require your pen name to be claimed in Author Central; tell us when it is and BookMark adds your Audible edition to the same campaigns as your other formats — same budget, same keywords. BookMark currently supports the US marketplace only.
• An Amazon Advertising account — if you’ve never run ads, you can create one at advertising.amazon.com using the same login as your KDP account. It’s free to create; you only pay when ads run.
• A BookMark subscription — $189/month plus applicable tax, no minimum commitment.

Note: some books aren’t eligible for Amazon Ads (certain content categories, erotica, books not available in the US marketplace). If your book is ineligible, Amazon — not BookMark — makes that call.

Yes. Once your first book is set up, an Add a book button appears on your dashboard — each additional book gets its own campaigns, its own dashboard view, and its own $189/mo subscription (books are paused or canceled independently, too). Starting out, signup covers one book: if you have a series, pick the title you most want to grow first — usually the one with the strongest sales page and reviews — and add the rest after. Don’t see the button on your dashboard? Email bookmark@getshelflife.com and we’ll set the next book up for you.

Amazon Ads have a learning period. Expect the first 2–4 weeks to be about data gathering: BookMark’s rules need real performance data (impressions, clicks, sales) before they can optimize meaningfully. Judging results in the first week is like judging a book by its first page.

Also note that Amazon’s sales attribution lags — a sale from an ad click can take up to 14 days to appear in reports. This is an Amazon-side delay that affects every tool, including the Amazon console itself. See Reporting below.

After you sign up, BookMark’s guided setup walks you through it — a few minutes, all in your Amazon Ads console:

1. Log in at advertising.amazon.com (same login as your KDP account — the videos below show the way in if you’ve never run ads)
2. Go to Account info → User management, invite admin@getshelflife.com and set the permission level to Admin
3. Add a credit card for your ad spend under Billing and payments — Amazon bills it directly for the ads BookMark runs
4. Share your Entity ID (the ENTITY… value in the console’s address bar) in the setup wizard

We accept the invite and BookMark builds your campaigns — ads are live within 72 hours of setup.

Already set up and heard from us that access is missing? The invite in step 2 is the usual fix. BookMark keeps checking for it on its own, so there is usually nothing to tell us. If the Entity ID you gave us was wrong, reply to that email with the right one and we will correct it for you.

Your Amazon password is never shared with BookMark — you’re granting scoped access inside Amazon’s own permissions system, and you can remove it at any time (see below).

The access you grant via user management applies only to the advertising console. Specifically, BookMark can:

• View and manage your ad campaigns, keywords, targets, and bids
• Read advertising performance reports (impressions, clicks, spend, attributed sales)

BookMark cannot:

• See or change your KDP account, book files, pricing, or royalties
• Access your Amazon customer account, orders, or payment methods
• Spend beyond the budget cap you set

You can revoke access at any time from your Amazon Advertising console: Account info → User management, then remove ShelfLife’s user. Your campaigns and history stay in your account.

Amazon.com (US) only, for now. Support for additional marketplaces (UK, CA, DE, AU…) is on the roadmap — if international markets matter to you, email bookmark@getshelflife.com and we’ll note your interest.

Better not to — for the book BookMark manages. BookMark makes decisions based on the campaign state it set: if you change a bid, add a keyword, or pause a target by hand, BookMark’s next run optimizes around it, and it may be undone — either way your dashboard stops matching what you did. Hand-tweaking alongside an automation tool is the most common way authors hurt their own results.

You have full visibility instead: your dashboard shows what BookMark has been changing, and if you want something changed — a keyword excluded, a campaign paused — email bookmark@getshelflife.com and we’ll handle it inside the system.

Campaigns for books you haven’t enrolled, or campaigns you were running before BookMark, are yours to manage as you like — BookMark only manages the campaigns it creates for your enrolled books.

BookMark builds Sponsored Products campaigns for your book, typically including auto-targeting campaigns for discovery, keyword campaigns built from research on your niche and comparable titles, and product-targeting campaigns aimed at comparable books’ pages.

BookMark pulls keywords from several sources:

• Your book’s own metadata — title, subtitle, series, categories, and description on Amazon
• Comparable titles and authors — books similar to yours in genre, category, and reader appeal, which surface the search terms readers use to find books like yours
• BookMark’s cross-account learnings — patterns and converting keywords learned across BookMark’s broader customer base, applied to books in similar categories
• Your own converting search terms — as your auto campaigns run, BookMark harvests the actual customer searches that led to clicks and sales on your book, and feeds high-performing ones into your keyword targeting

So your targeting starts broad — based on your book’s metadata and comparable titles — and gets progressively more precise as BookMark learns which real searches convert for your specific book.

Not yet — negative keyword support is in the works. Once live, it will let you exclude specific terms from triggering your ads (for example, your own name overlapping with unrelated searches).

In the meantime, BookMark shifts spend away from underperforming keywords and search terms as part of its daily optimization — pausing what doesn’t convert — so non-converting terms see reduced spend over time even without manual controls. If a specific term is bothering you, email bookmark@getshelflife.com and we’ll deal with it.

BookMark sets your monthly budget using Amazon’s native portfolio budget cap. Rather than juggling a separate daily number, your monthly cap is applied at the portfolio level on Amazon’s side, and Amazon paces spend across your campaigns against it. A few things to know:

• Amazon’s pacing aims to spread your budget evenly across the month, but it isn’t perfectly linear
• Amazon can occasionally overpace — spending faster than a strict daily average — during periods of high demand (competitive keyword auctions, seasonal shopping spikes). That’s normal behavior on Amazon’s end, not a BookMark error
• Your monthly cap is still the hard ceiling — Amazon won’t exceed your total portfolio budget for the cycle, even if spend is uneven day-to-day

At signup you’ll set a monthly ad budget between $500 and $2,000. We recommend starting around $750.

The right starting point depends on demand for your book’s category and keywords — competitive genres typically need higher budgets to gain meaningful visibility, while niche categories can perform well at lower spend. BookMark uses your budget to explore keywords and placements during the learning period, then shifts spend toward what’s converting — so starting at or above the recommended level gives it more room to find what works. In a highly competitive category, consider starting above $750 to stay competitive in auctions.

Amazon enforces it: once your monthly portfolio budget is fully spent, your campaigns stop serving ads for the remainder of the cycle, and they resume automatically when the next cycle begins — no action needed from you.

Your dashboard shows your ad spend for the dates you choose (the final 30 days by default — the newest days Amazon has finished crediting). For your month-to-date number, pick This month at the top of the dashboard — it runs through yesterday, so today’s spend isn’t in it yet.

Your cap is set on Amazon when BookMark launches your campaigns. After launch, change the number on your book’s page and BookMark updates the cap on Amazon right away. If you change the cap directly in Amazon Ads, that number wins — BookMark picks it up here within a day or so.

Three separate reasons, all normal:

• Attribution lag. Amazon can take up to 14 days to attribute a sale to an ad click. Recent days will always under-report sales, then “fill in” over the following two weeks. BookMark’s data updates as Amazon’s does.
• Ads data ≠ all sales. Your Amazon Ads reports (and BookMark) show ad-attributed sales only. Your KDP dashboard shows all sales, including organic ones. KDP should always be higher.
• Sync timing. BookMark syncs from Amazon once a day, so there can be a gap of a few hours versus the console.

If numbers differ by more than $50 after 14 days, email bookmark@getshelflife.com.

ACOS (Advertising Cost of Sale) = ad spend ÷ ad-attributed sales revenue. If you spent $10 and got $40 in attributed sales, ACOS is 25%. What’s “good” depends on your royalty rate and goals — and early on it will look high; that’s the discovery phase, not steady state.

Every insight you’d want on your campaigns — and a level deeper into what your readers are actually looking for.

Top-line metrics (for the dates you choose, with change vs. the previous period): ad spend with clicks and average cost-per-click, ad sales, ACOS, conversion rate, and cost per reader — what you’re currently paying to acquire each new reader.

Trends: cost per reader over time (falling is good — each new reader costs you less) and orders over time, week by week; a monthly view unlocks once there’s about 45 days of history.

Reader insight: the match feed — a live feed of the real search terms that matched and led to orders, so you can see the exact phrases readers used before buying your book; top concepts — the themes readers are searching for, with clicks and conversion for each; and performance vs. competitor titles — the competing books your ads share an audience with. These deeper panels fill in as BookMark gathers enough data to be confident in them.

The dashboard also keeps a running summary of what BookMark changed recently — bids adjusted, keywords added, targets paused — in plain language.

And remember the attribution note above: recent orders can take up to 14 days to attribute, so the newest days always under-report.

Two separate charges, from two separate companies:

• Your BookMark subscription — $189/month plus applicable tax, paid to ShelfLife. This covers the software and the rules engine managing your ads. Month-to-month, no minimum commitment.
• Your ad spend — paid directly to Amazon, on the payment method in your Amazon Advertising account. BookMark never touches this money; it manages how it’s spent, within the budget cap you set.

So if you budget $750/month in ads, your total cost is $750 (to Amazon) + $189 plus tax (to ShelfLife).

A receipt is emailed to you after each successful charge. For anything older — or to download invoices for your records — open Billing & receipts in the Subscription section of your dashboard. It shows your full billing history with downloadable invoices and receipts, and it’s also where you can update your card. Your history stays available there even after a subscription ends.