Bryan Cohen's Author Ad School review: is the $9 challenge enough?

Last reviewed by Robert Prime — August 2026

Almost every review of Bryan Cohen’s Author Ad School rests on a fact that stopped being true.

The standard line, repeated on blogs from 2020 through 2025 and still printed on Amazon’s own advertising library page about Cohen, is that he runs a free 5-Day Ad Profit Challenge every quarter, and that Author Ad School is the paid upgrade offered at the end of it. The advice that follows is always the same: take the free challenge, see whether you like him, decide about the paid programme later.

I went to check that advice on 6 August 2026. It does not survive contact with his current checkout pages. The old challenge registration URL now 302-redirects to a paid page. The challenge runs fourteen days rather than five, it is on-demand rather than live, and it costs $9. I could not find a free tier anywhere on his estate.

One naming note, because readers and search engines both trip over it: Author Ad School is the flagship course of Best Page Forward LLC, Bryan Cohen’s company. If you came here looking for a Best Page Forward review, this is one. The company, the course and the challenge are the same operation under three names.

So the question changes. “Is the free version enough?” becomes “is the $9 version enough?”, and for most authors I think it is. What follows is the evidence for that, plus a pricing finding I did not expect to write.

Our position, so you can weigh it. We sell our own author-marketing course at £197 (£347 standard), which includes one module on Amazon Ads (setup, spend and return), and an AI discoverability course at £149, so treat that as the bias it is. It is also why every figure below is dated and sourced to the vendor’s own live page, and why there is a section recommending a competitor’s free course over anything we sell. Neither of our courses is a dedicated Amazon Ads course, and neither goes as deep on campaign mechanics as Bryan Cohen or Dave Chesson — which is why the recommendation below points away from us, and I would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise.

The short version, if you read nothing else

A fuller comparison against the alternatives sits further down. The detail behind those numbers, including why the same membership has five prices, is next.

What I checked, and when

Prices in this market move constantly and secondary sources go stale within months. Everything below was fetched from the vendor’s own live page on 6 August 2026. Where a page would not load without a login, I say so rather than guessing.

Currency conversions throughout are indicative only. I used the mid-market rate published by XE.com at 03:37 UTC on 6 August 2026, $1 = £0.742819, so roughly £1 = $1.35. Your card issuer will use its own rate and may add a fee.

There is no free version any more

Cohen’s free quarterly challenge was, for about five years, one of the best-known free things in indie publishing. Amazon’s advertising library still describes it as a “free 5-Day Ad Profit Challenge” that grew from “a group of 1,600 authors in September 2019” to “over 8,000 participants”. Cohen’s own bio pages carry similar copy.

Neither description matches what happens when you click through to buy.

The live product is the 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge, sold at $9 (about £7) through a ThriveCart page carrying a “© 2026+” footer. There are no cohort dates on the page and you can buy at any time, but the sales page describes the videos being delivered “straight to your inbox” across the fourteen days rather than a library you get all at once — so treat it as a self-paced drip, not instant access. I could not confirm from outside the checkout whether all content unlocks on purchase. At checkout there is a single one-time order bump: his ebook Self-Publishing with Amazon Ads plus four mini courses on ads, book launching and other marketing, for another $9 (the page puts a $393 value on it).

Free-but-quarterly to $9-and-drip is not obviously a downgrade. Under the old model, an author who decided in week two of a quarter to learn Amazon Ads waited up to ten weeks; now you can start any day, even if the material still arrives across a fortnight rather than all at once. What has gone is the live element: the scheduled sessions and the shared cohort, which were a real part of why the free challenge worked. The current page does not claim to replicate them.

What the $9 challenge publishes, and what it does not

Taken verbatim from the sales page, the $9 purchase includes “Step-by-Step Training Videos”, “Written Guides for Every Lesson” beneath each video, “Simple Action Plans” as homework, a “Supportive Author Community … led by our friendly Ad Squad coaches”, and “The Amazon Ads Framework”. The page assigns a component value to each item ($97, $37, $97, $97, $97) and totals it: “That’s a value of $425 for Just $9!” Standard direct-response framing, and I would not read anything into it either way.

Two omissions matter. First, no money-back guarantee appears in the sales copy. The checkout does carry a tickbox reading “I agree to the refund & return policy”, but the terms of that policy are not displayed on the page. At $9 the exposure is small; it is still worth knowing, particularly since the paid membership carries an explicit 30-day guarantee. Second, there is no lesson-by-lesson curriculum with running times. You are told there are videos across fourteen days. You are not told how long they run.

On that second point there is a useful cross-reference. The paid Author Ad School Unlimited curriculum is published in full, and it opens with a section called “Author Ad Profit Challenge” containing ten videos with running times, from “Day 1: How to Log Into Your Account and Create the Easiest Amazon Ad (19:45)” through “Day 10: How to Improve Your Book’s Profitability and Our Profit Challenge Recap (24:42)”. Those ten videos total 3 hours 17 minutes. An “Advanced Amazon Ads Webinar” (63:56) and “3 Ways to Scale Up Your Book Sales” (59:23) sit beneath them.

I cannot verify that the ten videos inside the membership are the same files as the ones in the $9 challenge. The naming is identical, and it is a reasonable read that the core teaching is common to both. If so, roughly three and a quarter hours of instruction is what $9 buys.

What Author Ad School costs depends which of Bryan Cohen’s pages you land on

This is the finding I did not expect, and it is the single most useful thing here for anyone about to spend money. Author Ad School Unlimited is sold at five different prices across pages his business currently operates. Same product name, same feature list, different numbers.

Ranked cheapest first, all for twelve months of the same stated membership:

1. $799 (~£594) — /get/, paid in full
2. $999 (~£742) — Shopify listing, “One Year Enrollment (One payment of $999)”, and the list price on Teachable
3. $1,188 (~£882) — /get/, “twelve easy payments of $99”
4. $1,198.80 (~£890) — Teachable checkout, UK visitor, paid annually
5. $1,428 (~£1,061) — Shopify listing, “One Year Enrollment (Twelve payments of $119)”

Top to bottom, that is a $629 spread (about £467) on identical stated access.

Paying monthly costs between $48 and $429 extra

Both pages that offer instalments charge a premium for them, and neither flags it. The options sit side by side in the same dropdown, one click apart.

Instalment plans usually carry a premium and there is nothing improper about one. What matters is the interaction between the two, which no review I have read picks up: the instalment price on Cohen’s cheapest page is higher than the cash price on his dearer one. Twelve payments of $99 at /get/ totals $1,188. One payment of $999 on the Shopify listing is $189 less.

So “open all his pages and buy from the lowest number” needs one extra clause. If you can pay in full, the cheapest route is $799 at /get/. If you cannot pay $799 but could pay $999 in one go, that beats spreading the cost at /get/. Only if instalments are the only route open to you does /get/ win again, at $1,188 against Shopify’s $1,428.

UK and EU buyers see about 20% more at the Teachable checkout

The Teachable sales page lists $119 a month and $999 a year. Opened from a UK connection, the checkout quoted $142.80 and $1,198.80 — exactly 1.2 times those list prices, which is consistent with UK VAT being added. I did not complete a purchase, so I cannot confirm from a receipt that VAT is the cause, and I do not know whether VAT is also applied at the ThriveCart checkouts used by /get/ and the $9 challenge. Budget as though it will be.

The cheapest page is not linked from anywhere on the site

The /get/ page carries the lowest prices, a “Copyright 2025. All Rights Reserved. Best Page Forward LLC.” footer, and the line “But we wanted to step it up here in 2025.” It reads like a campaign page nobody retired. Rather than shrug at that, I checked whether it is reachable from the current site.

It is not. Best Page Forward’s navigation runs HOME, COURSES, COACHING, BLURBS, SERVICES, THE TEAM, JOBS, CONTACT. No link on the homepage points to /get/; nor does anything on the courses page or the coaching page. The page itself carries no top navigation at all, only footer legal links. And the enrolment URL the site actually uses, /author-ad-school-enroll/, 302-redirects to the Shopify listing at $999 or $1,428 rather than to /get/ at $799.

/get/ is therefore an orphan: live, taking orders, priced lowest, and reachable only if you already have the URL or arrive from an old inbound link. It is also the only place selling a three-month term, which is by some distance the sensible way to trial a membership like this. Whether that is a deliberate evergreen offer or an abandoned page still hooked up to a payment processor, I cannot tell from outside. What I can say is that it is not part of the funnel a new visitor gets walked down, and it is where the money is.

The Plus tier is not in the public catalogue

Author Ad School is described elsewhere as having two tiers, Plus and Unlimited, with third-party reviews quoting $59 a month for Plus and $99 a month for Unlimited. Neither figure matches Cohen’s live pages.

The $99 does appear, on /get/, but as an instalment amount against a fixed three, six or twelve-month term rather than as an open-ended monthly subscription. The actual rolling monthly price is $119, published in three places: the courses index, the Shopify listing and the Teachable sales page.

Plus is harder. Cohen’s Teachable school lists exactly two public products, “Author Ad School: Unlimited” and “Bryan Cohen’s Pathfinders”. Plus is not among them. Its product URL (selling-for-authors.teachable.com/p/amazon-ads-made-easy) redirects to a Teachable account login/SSO page rather than showing a public sales page, so the product appears to exist behind an account wall rather than to have been retired outright. Either way, no price is published anywhere I could reach without logging in, and I will not print one I cannot see. If Plus matters to you, ask Best Page Forward and get the answer in writing before you buy.

What you are actually buying at the membership level

Strip out the challenge content, which is available for $9, and the published feature list for Unlimited is overwhelmingly about people rather than information:

• Five or more modules on finding your most profitable book or series
• Quarterly “Ad School Accelerators” with weekly live Q&A sessions
• Weekly “Authors Learn Live” virtual events
• Genre Guilds and weekly live Q&As
• Daily “Page Pals” silent writing rooms
• One two-hour group coaching session per quarter with a certified coach
• Two or more monthly sessions of the Bryan Cohen Coaching Show
• Four three-hour workshops a year hosted by Cohen
• A 10% rebate on Best Page Forward book descriptions and services
• Workshop replays and year-round group support

The stated refund policy on the Teachable page: “If you are unsatisfied with your purchase, contact us in the first 30 days and we will give you a full refund.”

Judge it as a community and accountability product with a course attached, rather than the other way round. If what is stopping you selling books is not knowing what a category ad is, this is an expensive way to find out. If you have been running ads alone for eight months, cannot tell whether your numbers are good, and have nobody to ask, the picture changes.

The evidence for results

Cohen’s own credentials are unusually well documented for this corner of the market. Amazon’s advertising library carries a case study on him, published by Amazon rather than written as a testimonial, stating that his anthology Once Upon a Happy Ending earned “$3 in royalties for each $1 in ad spend, eventually yielding over $21,000 in royalties and over 10 million pages read”. The same page gives his own book sales as “over 140,000 copies” in one paragraph and “over 150,000 copies” in another. Those are checkable facts about the man. They are not evidence about your outcome.

The customer evidence is thinner than the badge suggests. The Shopify listing carries 37 reviews at a 5.0 average — confirmed in the page’s own review metafield (rating: 5.0, rating_count: 37) on 6 August 2026, so that figure is re-checkable. What is not verifiable is how old that social proof is: no publish date, created-at timestamp or review date exists anywhere in the page’s server-rendered HTML, and the review widget itself renders client-side and did not load on a plain fetch. Treat any claim about the age of these reviews, including any you read elsewhere, as unconfirmed.

There is no published outcome data anywhere: no completion rate, no median return on ad spend, no percentage of members reaching profitability. That is true of essentially every course in this industry, ours included. Nobody publishes the denominator, so read every “I went from $200 to $7,200 a month” testimonial accordingly, whoever is printing it.

Why other Author Ad School reviews are already out of date

The top result for this topic is a review published by a company that sells a competing self-publishing programme. It scores Author Ad School 3 out of 5 and recommends its own offering instead. It also quotes $59 and $99 monthly prices that match nothing published on Cohen’s live pages today, which is what happens when a review written in August 2025 is never re-checked.

I am not suggesting bad faith. But a reviewer who sells the alternative has a structural reason to land on “good, but”, and a reviewer earning affiliate commission — which covers most of the remaining results — has a structural reason to land on “surprisingly good”. We are not an affiliate for anything in this article, and the closest thing we sell is one Amazon Ads module inside a broader marketing course, not a dedicated Amazon Ads course — which is the main reason I can comfortably tell you the $9 option is probably enough.

Author Ad School alternatives in 2026, compared

Note on the book row: Amazon blocks automated price checks, and I could not retrieve a live Amazon.co.uk figure on 6 August 2026, so that cell deliberately carries no number. Open the listing and read it yourself rather than trusting any blog’s cached price, including ours.

For a beginner who cannot spend anything at all, the one I would push hardest is Kindlepreneur’s free Amazon Ads course. Its own page states “And it’s absolutely free. No…really, no catch, no nothing”, it is co-created with Janet Margot, described there as a former Amazon Ads insider, and it carries an “Updated Jul 14, 2026” stamp. Being updated three weeks before I wrote this matters more than almost anything else in the table, because the ad console keeps changing. Yes, it exists partly to sell you Publisher Rocket at $199. Every free thing in this market sells you something, and it does not make the teaching worse.

Is Author Ad School worth it? The verdict

For most authors, the $9 challenge is enough, and it stays enough for longer than you would expect.

What Cohen teaches at entry level is the material almost everyone needs: how the three campaign types work, how to pick targets, how to read the dashboard, how to work out whether an ad is making money, and when the real answer is that your ads are fine and your cover is the problem. Roughly three and a quarter hours of teaching, for nine dollars, is not a close call.

What the $9 challenge cannot give you is a second opinion on your specific numbers in month four. Author Ad School Unlimited fills that gap, and if you are in it the membership is a defensible purchase at $249 for three months. It is much harder to defend at $1,428 for twelve, bought on instalments, before you have run a single campaign.

Author Ad School earns its money when all four of these are true:

1. You have completed the challenge, or an equivalent, and understood it
2. You have run ads with real money for at least 60 days and have data
3. Your problem is now interpretation, isolation or discipline, rather than information
4. You can afford the membership and a meaningful ad budget in the same month

Skip it, for now, if you have one book with no reviews and no series, because ads amplify a working sales page rather than creating one — fix the cover, blurb and categories first. Skip it if your book is not yet published, since there is nothing to advertise. Skip it if buying the membership would eat the budget you would otherwise spend on ads. And skip the $9 challenge itself if you need a refund safety net, because none is stated; buy the ebook instead, which Amazon will refund.

How much should you budget for Amazon Ads on top of the course?

Here is the figure that should drive the decision, and it is on nobody’s sales page.

Amazon states plainly that “Sponsored Products campaigns have no monthly or upfront fees” — you pay per click. Your entire learning cost beyond the course is whatever you are willing to lose while you work out which targets convert.

A serious first test is roughly £5 a day for 60 days: about £300 (about $404). At that level you will generate enough clicks in most genres to see patterns, and you will lose some of it. That loss is tuition, and it is the tuition that actually teaches.

Now put the options on a single line. The challenge plus a real 60-day budget comes to about £307. Twelve months of Author Ad School at the highest price I found, with the same budget, comes to about £1,361. The second buys you community, coaching and live sessions. It does not buy you more clicks, and clicks produce the data you are trying to learn from. Under about £500 total, the sequence is straightforward: $9 challenge, everything else into ads.

Our amazon ads for authors guide covers the campaign structure to start with, and scaling Amazon ads for authors covers what to do once you have data worth acting on. Both are free and neither requires you to buy anything from us.

Specifically for UK authors

Four points that US-written reviews of this course tend to skip.

Everything is priced in dollars. The challenge page states “All prices in USD”, so you will pay an FX spread and possibly a non-sterling transaction fee on top of the sticker.

Add roughly 20% at the Teachable checkout, for the VAT reasons set out in the pricing section above.

You can advertise on Amazon.co.uk, and it is worth thinking about which marketplace you are learning in. Amazon lists Sponsored Products across 23 marketplaces: the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Poland and Turkey; the US, Canada, Mexico and Brazil; Japan, Australia, India and Singapore; and Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and South Africa. Most course examples, Cohen’s included, are built on Amazon.com data. The tactics transfer. The click prices and the competition do not.

Finally, the live sessions run on US time. Daily writing rooms, weekly live events and a coaching show are a substantial part of what the membership costs. If you cannot attend them, you are paying for replays, and replays are worth considerably less than the sales page implies.

What I could not verify

In the interests of not repeating what the other reviews did:

• A price or feature list for Author Ad School: Plus. It is absent from Cohen’s public Teachable catalogue and its product URL redirects to a Teachable login page, so I cannot say whether it is retired or sold only to existing accounts behind that login.
• Whether any live, cohort-based challenge still runs. The current pages sell an on-demand product with no dates, while Cohen’s bio and Amazon’s library page still describe a free quarterly challenge. That may be stale copy, or there may be a live version I found no registration route to.
• Whether VAT is added at the ThriveCart checkouts used by /get/ and the $9 challenge. I did not complete a purchase.
• Whether the $9 challenge videos are identical to the ten challenge videos inside the paid membership. The naming matches. I cannot compare the files.
• The terms of the refund policy referenced at the $9 checkout, or any refund policy on the three, six and twelve-month terms sold at /get/. Neither is published on those pages.
• A live Amazon.co.uk price for Cohen’s book. Amazon blocks automated requests.

If you get clarity on any of these from Best Page Forward, tell me and I will update this page.

Where we fit, and where we do not

We format books from £69, run a free KDP readiness audit, build author websites at £199 and run a launch service from £499. We also sell two courses; one includes a single Amazon Ads module (setup, spend and return), but neither is a dedicated Amazon Ads course.

The recommendation above therefore costs us nothing, which is rather the point. If your problem is Amazon Ads, spend $9 with Bryan Cohen or nothing at all with Dave Chesson, then put the rest into clicks. Come back to us when the problem is that the book itself, or the launch around it, is what is holding the ads back.

Related guides

• Amazon ads for authors — the campaign types, structure and starting budgets
• Scaling Amazon ads for authors — what to change once you have 60 days of data
• Amazon ads vs BookBub ads — which platform suits which kind of book
• KDP keyword research — the targeting work that makes ads cheaper
• Book marketing UK: the complete guide — where paid ads sit in the wider plan

Frequently asked questions

Is Bryan Cohen’s 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge still free?

No. As at 6 August 2026 the free 5-Day Amazon Ad Profit Challenge no longer exists. Its former registration URL redirects to a paid page selling a 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge for $9 (about £7). Cohen’s bio page and Amazon’s advertising library still describe a free quarterly challenge, but those descriptions no longer match his live checkout.

How much does Author Ad School cost?

It depends which of Bryan Cohen’s own pages you buy from. On 6 August 2026, twelve months of Author Ad School Unlimited cost $799 (about £594) paid in full on his /get/ page, $999 (about £742) as a single payment on his Shopify listing, $1,188 (about £882) as twelve payments of $99 on /get/, $1,198.80 (about £890) at the Teachable checkout for a UK visitor, and $1,428 (about £1,061) as twelve payments of $119 on Shopify. A cheaper “Plus” tier is quoted at around $59 a month by third-party reviews, but it does not appear in Cohen’s public Teachable catalogue and I could not verify a price for it. Compare every page, and every payment method, before entering a card.

Is Author Ad School worth it?

Only once your problem has stopped being information. If you have completed the $9 challenge or an equivalent, run ads with real money for at least 60 days, and your difficulty is now interpreting your own numbers rather than learning the mechanics, then $249 for three months is a defensible purchase for the coaching and community. Before that point it is an expensive way to learn things the $9 challenge already teaches, and the twelve-month instalment price of $1,428 is very hard to justify pre-data.

What is Best Page Forward?

Best Page Forward LLC is Bryan Cohen’s company, and Author Ad School is its flagship course. The same business sells book description copywriting, one-to-one and group coaching, and the 14-Day Author Ad Profit Challenge, across three domains: bestpageforward.net, learn.bestpageforward.net and authors.bestpageforward.net. A review of Author Ad School is a review of Best Page Forward’s main product.

Is the $9 challenge enough, or do I need the full course?

For most authors the $9 challenge is enough. It covers auto, category and keyword campaigns, dashboard reading, targeting and profitability, which is what almost everyone actually needs, and the equivalent ten videos inside the paid membership run 3 hours 17 minutes in total. The membership adds live community, weekly sessions and quarterly group coaching, which are worth paying for only after you have run ads with real money for 60 days.

Is there a free Amazon Ads course for authors?

Yes. Kindlepreneur’s free Amazon Ads course, created by Dave Chesson with Janet Margot, a former Amazon Ads insider, costs nothing and carried an “Updated Jul 14, 2026” stamp when checked. Amazon Ads Academy is also free, including its certifications, but is written for general advertisers rather than authors. If your budget is zero, start with the Kindlepreneur course.

How much should I budget for Amazon Ads on top of a course?

Amazon states that Sponsored Products campaigns have no monthly or upfront fees, so you only pay per click. A realistic first test is about £5 a day for 60 days, roughly £300 (about $404), which generates enough clicks in most genres to reveal patterns. If your total budget is under about £500, take the $9 challenge and put everything else into clicks rather than into a membership.