Amazon Advertising For an Audiobook Produced Through ACX

Shadow Fusion LLC recently published its first Audible audiobook, Search for Haven by Justin Oldham, through audiobook distributor ACX.  One avenue we currently use to advertise the print and e-books we produce and distribute through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), as well as the hard cover and large print books we produce and distribute through IngramSpark, is Amazon Advertising.  However, we were very surprised to discover that we’re unable to advertise the audiobook we produced and have distributed through ACX (another Amazon-owned company).

Before starting production of the audiobook, we looked at ways to market it.  We were pleased to find that, supposedly, one route we could use was Amazon Advertising.  We moved forward with production – signing up with ACX, entering the information about our title, auditioning and choosing a narrator/producer, offering a production contract, working with the narrator/producer on the content, agreeing to the finished product, and paying the narrator/producer the fee for their work.  Our Audible audiobook was released on July 1, 2024.

Shortly after the initial release, we went to our Amazon Advertising account with the intention of starting an ad campaign specifically tied to our new audiobook.  We were surprised to discover that the audiobook didn’t appear as a product that could be advertised.  We confirmed that the audiobook was available on both Audible and Amazon.com and that we had claimed it on Justin Oldham’s Author Central page.

In the Amazon Advertising interface, you can choose to advertise Sponsored Products or Sponsored Brands.  We’ve advertised Sponsored Products many times over the years, and are still doing so with some of our other books.  As part of setting up an ad using the Sponsored Products interface, you select one or more individual products (whether print book, e-book, or audiobook) listed on Amazon.com that the item you want to advertise from a list.  All of the versions of Search for Haven were shown as available products to be advertised – except the Audible audiobook distributed by ACX.

When we discovered this, we reached out to Amazon Advertising, thinking that there was something wrong with our account.  They told us it that something was set wrong in the listing and that KDP should be able to help us.  When we contacted to KDP, they said that, because we hadn’t released the audiobook through our own KDP account (having instead had it distributed by ACX), there was nothing they could do.  They suggested contacting ACX or Audible.  When we went to ACX, they told us there wasn’t anything in their settings that could be causing the problem and referred us back to Amazon Advertising. We never did receive a satisfactory answer.  After three weeks of going round and round with the three (all owned by Amazon), we finally came to the conclusion that there is no way we’ll be able to advertise this audiobook using Amazon Advertising.  Needless to say, we’re very disappointed by this.

Maybe someone out there has figured out a way to have their book produced and distributed through ACX and advertised on Amazon Advertising.  If so, we’d love to hear about it.