CASE STUDY: How Meta Ads helped me rank #5 on Amazon

Cracking the code on how to convince Amazon to help sell your books has been a long serpentine road for me. You must get enough downloads to boost your ranking and running Meta ads is the easiest way to do it. This is a behind-the-scenes on how I used Meta ads to push A Spy Forged up to ranks to #5 in Amazon's Hard Science Fiction category.

TL;DR: I dedicated the last year to learn each part of producing a novel—narrative, publishing, and marketing—so executing each part went smoothly, including successfully running Meta ads. Updated results at bottom of this post.

I started one year ago without much to work with. There was already a first draft of A Spy Forged but in my heart, I knew it was bad—everything had to be radically rewritten from the ground up. The story had a rough spine, but the details were frustratingly evasive. Everything needed a makeover.

Start With the End

My primary goal wasn't only to publish my first novel, but to publish an award-worthy first novel. I'm still not sure I nailed that part, but I know I did my best work and I also know each book will get incrementally better, and easier. Winning awards isn't really my goal because awards are outside of my control. However, shooting for excellence is my goal because that's something I can control.

My secondary goals, then, were in support of that primary goal. I needed to understand the entire novel-production workflow so I could write more books as quickly as possible. I was using this novel, then, as a test case for each phase of the workflow. My goal breakdown looked something like this:

1. Write an award-worthy first novel.
   1. Understand storytelling (story, characters, dialog, theme, rewrites, etc.)
   2. Understand book publishing (formatting, ISBNs, eBook validation, etc.)
   3. Understand book marketing (Meta ads, Amazon ads, ARC teams, etc.)

Each of those tasks would become deep dive projects over the coming months:

• In December, I began doing preliminary testing with Meta ads. That little experiment ended with an embarrassing whimper... clearly, I needed to skill up on Meta ads in the coming months.
• In January and February, I re-plotted my novel in much more detail. This outline would continue getting hammered into shape over many subsequent months.
• In March and April, I decided I could benefit from really understanding the nuances of storytelling (which I feel paid off 10x). Honestly, I thought I knew storytelling... but the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. I remain thankful I can stay humble enough to keep improving my craft.
• By April, I dedicated time to master Meta ads by testing ad creatives with a powerful process called 'click testing', a cheap and fast iterative testing method to identify and combine winning ad creatives. After only $200 of ad spend, I knew with certainty which art creatives worked and which didn't. I even started consulting on others' ad campaigns. I ended the month by ordering a copy of a physical book to test book printing formats (and keep me inspired over the summer).
• In May and June, I began documenting and stress-testing my new dictation workflow by dictating not one but three novellas. Amusingly, all three novellas are pretty awful, but each was important to spot workflow problems. All three novellas will get rewritten eventually, so it wasn't a waste of time.
• In August, while on a train vacationing with my family, I dutifully researched how to do fast rewrites... so when I had only 3 weeks to rewrite 70,000 words, I wasn't freaking out.
• In September, I dictated my novel's first draft in under three weeks. I also published Metal Mosaic, a sci fi anthology to refresh my memory on each step of publishing on KDP, using ISBNs, cover design, reaching out to ARC readers, etc. From start to finish, the entire publishing process took me three days so I had demonstrated to myself I knew how to publish quickly.
• Last week (October 21)... the finish line: I launched my first novel on Amazon in three formats: ebook, paperback and hardcover. (Audiobook is next up, sometime in November?)

"Meta ads... ve meet again."

In October 2025, I barely understood Meta ads but after April 2026, I had mastered them. Instead of logging onto Meta's Business Suite to scratch my head and ultimately give up in disgust (because Meta is insanely complicated), I was able to create and launch two ads before my coffee got cold.

The question was, would my ads make any difference to my Amazon rankings?

My Strategy: Release Free... then launch Ads

Leaning on various strategies I'd read about over the year, my plan was:

1. Publish the book.
2. Make the book for free for 5 days.
3. Wait for pre-orders to get delivered, allow my ARC team to download their copies, and see where Amazon's rankings settled.

On launch day, my best sellers rank in the Kindle store was #2,344,516. Ouch. Well, at least we had a baseline!

The three other sub-categories—Hard Science Fiction, Hard Science Fiction (Books), and Galactic Empire Science Fiction eBooks—were in the top 10,000. Not great, but still useful as a baseline. It's helpful here to remember that Amazon swaps out categories to only show the ones you're doing best in, so tracking category feels like a moving target at first.

Here were the rankings on Launch Day:

By day two, rankings had dramatically improved, and some categories had been swapped out. I didn't feel quite as shitty as the day before.

On day three, something amazing happened—I landed in the top 100 of Hard Science Fiction (Kindle store)! Crazy!

Day four offered another huge jump in rankings, with rankings in all three categories in the top 100:

By day five, I could tell things were starting to level off. Better, but not substantially so.

Now it was time to run ads. This was one of two ads I ran:

In April, I had already used Meta ads to "click test" most of the elements in this ad (the image, the quote, the inset). The metrics CPC (links) and CTR (links) needed to be lower than $0.40 and higher than 2.5%, respectively, and the ad above was the most successful (the line with five ✅).

All I changed was the art in the bottom left, and included a synopsis in the ad description and pointed the ad to the Amazon free ebook. I'd been meaning to test this ad further but I'd run out of time. Now or never!

As of this right now (1:46 PM PST), the ads are still doing very well. (Stupidly, Meta does not allow conditional formatting for CTR (links) and CPC (links), so there's no way to see green-colored boxes on those columns.) It's gratifying to see both ads are performing exactly as my original click testing had suggested they might.

Aa of this morning, here's what that's meant for units processed. Book launch was 10/21. Ads were started mid-day 10/26 (see bottom for the most updated numbers).

Here's my ranking as of this morning:

And then just now, 12:38 PM PST:

Honestly, there is nothing quite so thrilling as the screenshot below. Without being a huge publishing company with a limitless marketing budget, I don't think I'll ever be able to claw my way up in the rankings higher than this... though of course, I'm going to keep trying.

If I could boost one number, it would be that #1803 in the Kindle Store. I'd be ecstatic if I could get anywhere close to the top 100, so the goal now is to see how long I can use Meta ads to get more downloads and up that ranking.

If all this leads to Amazon organically recommending my book in their "Also bought by", then this whole affair will have been worthwhile. Of course, the final goal bringing more subscribers on my email list; I have a strategy in place for that... but I'll talk about that at another time.

What's Next? Strategy For The Coming Months

My 5 day free promotion ends tonight and the book's price is set to revert to its original $9.99... but that will kill whatever sales momentum I've built up. So I'll lower that price to $0.99 for about a week, raise it by $1 every week until I eventually return $9.99. If that kills all sales, I'll be able to tell almost immediately, so I'll shoot for reaching ROAS equilibrium, i.e., if I make as much or more in revenue as I'm spending on ads, I'll let it ride indefinitely. That can only lead to more readers, more reviews, more exposure...

Of course, there's the audiobook to think about. Sometime next month, I'll hop into the studio to record it so once that's fully uploaded, I'll finally have a completed product page on Amazon. Because audiobooks are super popular these days, I expect having a completed product page with ebook, paperback, and hardcover will only lend more legitimacy to the audiobook, which should lead to more sales.

Updated Numbers (10/27 2:03 PM PST)

• 10/27 Ad Spend: $13.64
• 10/27 Link Clicks: 75 ($0.18 CPC per link click)
• 10/27 Units processed on 10/27: 40 (53% conversion, or $0.34 Cost per Result)
• 10/27 KDP ranking: #1848
• 10/27 Hard Science Fiction: #5