Negative Keywords for Amazon Book Ads: A Starter List
Updated 2026-07-15
Negative keywords tell Amazon when NOT to show your ad. They are the cheapest optimization in Amazon Ads: every click they prevent is money that would have been spent on a shopper who was never going to buy your book.
Why authors need negatives from day one
Broad match keywords will inevitably match searches with the wrong intent: people looking for free content, summaries, the movie adaptation, or physical products unrelated to books. Without negatives, those clicks quietly drain a small budget.
Starter negative keyword list
These terms signal intent that rarely converts into a book purchase. Add them as negative exact or negative phrase at the campaign level:
- free — shoppers hunting free books rarely convert on paid ads
- pdf, download, torrent, read online free — piracy-adjacent searches
- summary, sparknotes, cliff notes — study-guide seekers, not readers
- movie, film — media adaptation searches
- used, cheap — bargain intent on print
- library — borrowing intent
Genre-specific negatives
Think about adjacent audiences you don't serve. A children's author may want to exclude adult-content terms. A clean romance author may exclude explicit terms. A standalone author may exclude "box set" if it attracts the wrong expectation.
Grow the list from your search term report
The starter list handles the obvious cases. The real gains come from your own data: every 1–2 weeks, open the search term report, sort by spend, and add anything with clicks but no sales after a fair test (a common rule of thumb is 10+ clicks, zero orders) as a negative.
Our free tool includes this starter negative list — with genre-specific additions — as a separate CSV export alongside your keyword list.