I wrote this post about things authors should know about Amazon this week but I had to revise #4 upon discovering today that authors who are NOT self-published can no longer run their own Amazon ads.

Here’s the revised #4 (with consequence to authors who’ve been enjoying running their own campaigns):

4. As of March 2022, any author registered with Author Central can run their own Amazon ads—and there are some things to know about doing this well.

***Correction to #4 as of 3/11/25: I discovered that as of March 2025 (possibly earlier) Amazon has revoked the privilege from authors who are not self-published to run their own ads. Therefore, this has to be rewritten. In this in-between time, all authors have been able to run their own ads, accessed through Author Central. Before 2022 and again now, if you have a publisher, you cannot run your own ads. This is a disappointing development because our authors enjoyed being able to set, control, and track their own ads. Not being able to do that anymore means that we, the publisher, have to manage authors’ Amazon ads on their behalf. It’s a lot of work! And the authors have better success when they can watch their campaigns in real time. When I asked Raquel, the Amazon employee or AI I was chatting with, why they revoked this, she answered:

[embedded chat thread here]

So “some” liked it but “most” were not comfortable. I’ve shared before how much I dislike the way that publishing infantilizes its authors, and here’s another example of that. Taking away the privilege to run your own ads, if it’s indeed publisher-driven, and I believe Raquel that it is, happens only because the publishers want to fully control their own ad campaigns. That said, you better believe that if Amazon had been making good money on authors running their own ads, they wouldn’t have discontinued it. Nevertheless, this is a bummer for indie publishers (like me) who trust their authors to be able to run their own ad campaigns, and it’s particularly frustrating that Amazon would roll something like this out only to take it away.