The number 1 Amazon Ads tool for Authors

$10M+

Author ad spend managed

1,000,000+

Books sold for clients

Join the BookMark waitlist.

What BookMark is, and how it works.

BookMark is a tool to help authors sell more books. Built by ShelfLife, it uses our Amazon expertise to research, build, optimize and automatically adjust your Amazon ads, putting your book in front of the readers most likely to buy it.

Upload your manuscript

Send us your book, your title, your budget, and your manuscript.

BookMark builds everything

Campaigns built, targeting set, budget applied.

You watch it work

Open the dashboard whenever you like. What changed, what it cost, what sold.

It started with a script that moved the needle.

In 2021 ShelfLife’s CEO Alex, a lifelong book nerd, built the first version of BookMark. It typed on its own and clicked through Amazon’s console to build ad campaigns, because doing it by hand was taking forever.

Since then ShelfLife has worked with some of the best known authors in the world, and learned what actually moves books.

ShelfLife keeps coming back to Amazon Ads for one reason. It reaches readers who are already looking for a book like yours.

Alex Strathdee, CEO and Founder, with author Allan Dib — **Alex Strathdee**CEO & Founder

Steve Sarner, VP of Sales, with an author — **Steve Sarner**VP of Sales

Laura Russom, CMO, with an author — **Laura Russom**CMO

Fast forward to 2026. $10M in research later, we’re proud to bring you BookMark.

Detailed campaign performance

Drill into any campaign to see daily performance, keyword-level data, and search term insights. Know what’s driving your sales.

Daily spend & sales trends
Keyword and target performance breakdown
Automated bid tuning and budget protection

Daily spend & sales

Impressions

87,952

Clicks

918

Spend

$223.45

Orders

Search term intelligence

See exactly which searches are finding your book, grouped into readable themes and scored by how many copies they’ve actually sold.

Every search term grouped into readable themes
Impressions, clicks and conversion rate per theme
A live feed of matches as they happen

Top concepts

Concept	Impr.	Clicks	CVR	Score
book marketing · 16 searches	14.2k	118	13.6%	100
self publishing books · 11 searches	9.6k	74	9.5%	61
how to market a book · 9 searches	5.1k	46	10.9%	58
author platform · 7 searches	2.4k	21	9.5%	37
book launch strategy · 12 searches	1.9k	18	11.1%	34

Every change, logged automatically

The keyword, the change, the reason, all in under a minute. BookMark reviews this book’s targeting every day.

Daily log of every bid and targeting change
The reason behind each change, in plain language
Nothing changes without a record you can review

What BookMark did

The last 7 days.

Aug 14

Lowered bids on 5 targets that kept spending without selling: "book marketing for authors", "how to sell more books" and 3 more.

Paused "publishing companies". Clicks kept coming without an order.

Aug 13

Promoted 2 converting searches into their own keywords so their bids can be tuned individually: "book launch checklist", "amazon ads for authors".

Aug 12

Raised bids on 23 targets that were not showing up in enough searches.

Lowered bids on 3 targets that kept spending without selling.

Plus 94 more changes in this period.

Wasted spend, shut down automatically

Keywords that take clicks and never sell get paused, so your budget stays on what’s working.

Targets that spend without selling get paused automatically
Budget protected total, updated as it happens
A breakdown of which reader themes are actually buying

Budget protected, 30 days

$186.30

Spent in the last 30 days on 9 targets since paused.

Who’s finding this book

Theme	Impr.	Orders
Self publishing & KDP	61.4%	78.5%
Book marketing & promotion	24.1%	16.9%
Author business & platform	8.7%	4.6%
Writing craft	5.2%	0.0%

Your dashboard.

ShelfLife BookMark

Before the Bestseller

Last 30 days BookMark is managing this book

Match feed

"book marketing" matched → order • "how to sell more books" matched → click • "self publishing guide" matched → order • "amazon ads for authors" matched → impression • "book launch checklist" matched → order • "author platform" matched → click • "book marketing" matched → order • "how to sell more books" matched → click • "self publishing guide" matched → order • "amazon ads for authors" matched → impression • "book launch checklist" matched → order • "author platform" matched → click •

Ad spend, 30d

$576.74

498 clicks at $1.16 average

Ad sales, 30d

$1,196.84

100 orders through ads

ACOS

48.2%

Ad spend divided by ad sales

Conversion rate

20.1%

Orders divided by clicks

Cost per reader

$5.77

Ad spend divided by orders

Cost per reader over time

Cost per reader is ad spend divided by orders for the period shown. Falling is good, because each new reader is costing less.

Orders over time

Orders placed through ads for the period shown, in whichever view is selected above.

This isn’t AI. It’s ten million dollars of experience.

BookMark runs on rules, not guesswork. Those rules didn’t come from articles about Amazon Ads. They came from watching real author campaigns, over and over, until BookMark knew which moves worked.

$10M+

In real ad spend behind every decision it makes.

1,000+

Books run, across wildly different shelves.

1,000,000+

Copies sold for the authors BookMark works with.

One price per book. No tiers.

Founding member pricing

ShelfLife BookMark

$189/ month

Per book. One subscription per title.

Builds and launches your Amazon Ads campaigns
Reviews and adjusts your ads every single day
Turns off targeting that’s spending money without selling books
Finds the keywords, competing books and audiences actually leading to sales
Shows you a live record of every change BookMark makes
Gives you a dashboard to see what’s working and how your cost per reader is changing

Join the waitlist

About your ad budget

The $189 is the platform. Your ad spend is separate and paid directly to Amazon on your own card.

BookMark suggests starting at $500 a month in ad spend. Below that, campaigns rarely gather enough clicks and orders for the rules to work, and you end up paying without getting the payoff.

Nobody will force you to spend it. But if your budget is going to be small, BookMark would rather you waited and started later with more.

Publishing a second title? Each book runs as its own subscription, because each book gets its own campaigns, budget and audience data.

Join the waitlist

Let your message market itself.

Founding members get early access pricing, priority onboarding, and a direct line to the BookMark team.

$189 per book per month at launch. $500 a month in ad spend recommended. Cancel anytime.

FAQ

Is $189 for my whole account or for each book?

Each book. One subscription per title, because every book gets its own campaign structure, budget, targeting and reporting.

Why do you need my manuscript?

The text of the book feeds the targeting work. It informs which keywords are worth seeding, how search terms get grouped into concepts, and which competitor titles are close enough to be worth targeting. A cover and a blurb only tell BookMark how the book is being sold.

The file is encrypted, it’s never used for anything besides your own campaigns, and it’s deleted 60 days after your subscription ends. Pausing doesn’t start that clock.

Do I need to understand Amazon Ads to use this?

No. That’s the point. BookMark builds the campaigns, and the dashboard skips the advertising jargon. If you ever want to know why something happened, it’s in the log or you can just ask BookMark.

Can I cancel?

Anytime, from your dashboard. No contract, no annual commitment, no setup fee. You can also pause advertising without pausing billing, or pause billing and keep the ads running through the period you already paid for. Those are two separate switches.

When does BookMark open?

BookMark is letting waitlist members in first, in small groups, to keep up with the support. Join, and BookMark will be in touch with timing and your founding-member price.