The other day someone mentioned that they’d run an experiment with names that use initials (like R.K. Thorne) and that they’d determined that you get the most impressions from AMS ads if you leave the periods out of the name.
I haven’t done as systematic of an experiment as the individual who posted about it, but I had been thinking that AMS ads do behave strangely with author names that have initials in them and had wanted to go look at my results to see what I could see.
While I generally agree with that person’s conclusion, I’m not sure for me that it was quite as black and white.
So let me share some numbers.
One of the authors in my fantasy novel’s also-boughts is R.K. Thorne who is listed on Amazon as R. K. Thorne, which interestingly seems to be the one variant I hadn’t tried. At various points I had used r k thorne, r.k. thorne, and rk thorne. And the clear winner was rk thorne which had almost three times as many impressions as r.k. thorne. The r k thorne option had almost none.
Another one though isn’t as clear-cut as that. It’s T.A. White who is listed that way with no space between the two letters. In that case I had at various points used t a white, t.a white, t.a. white, and ta white. The one that had the most impressions was the one with the typo, t.a white, followed closely by t.a. white and ta white which were almost equal. The last one, t a white, had the least. (One reason for the difference might be because when I type ta white into the Amazon search bar it shows towels instead of books.)
One more example would be K.A. Linde. I had tried ka linde, k a linde, and k.a. linde. By far the best performing of the bunch was ka linde. Neither of the others did much.
The problem with my numbers is that I didn’t do this in a controlled experiment where the bids were the same and the words were started at the exact same time. What I think I’m comfortable in saying is that if you do go without a period in there don’t bother with spaces between the two initials. So use ka linde not k a linde or rk thorne not r k thorne.
Also, if you do have names with a period in them anywhere, definitely be sure to test out variants of the name without the period included. I have a few with full first names and a middle initial where dropping the period from the middle initial seems to have resulted in more impressions as well. (But others where it didn’t.)
M.L. Humphrey 