In my previous blog post, we kicked off our deep dive into how to use ads without losing your mind. NINC member Pam Kelley shared her tips and tricks for running successful Amazon ads.
This month, we’re going to tackle Facebook ads and BookBub ads. Are you ready?
Sarah Woodbury should be no stranger to any NINC member! Not only is Sarah one of our membership committee chairs, she’s also headed up our conference sponsorship team for the last three years. When she’s not giving her time and talent to NINC, Sarah Woodbury is the author of more than 40 novels, all set in medieval Wales. She has sold over 2 million books to date!
During the conference, Sarah and I had breakfast one morning, and she was kind enough to offer me some insight into her success. While she mentioned using Facebook ads as part of her overall strategy, we didn’t have time to deep-dive into details in person, so she recently elaborated on her process.
Woodbury uses Facebook ads for increased visibility, especially within a cold audience.
“Since my business model is based on constantly bringing new readers into my world through a free first book, the daily Facebook ad (with a spend of $5/day on average) keeps that stream flowing.”
She also uses free first-in-series in order to draw new readers into her various series, and Facebook ads are an integral part of that strategy.
“I advertise the first book in each series, which is free,” Woodbury said. “I will also boost a new release to the people who have followed my page.”
Woodbury usually sticks to advertising free or discounted books on Facebook. “Unless it’s a new book that I’m trying to let my audience know is out there,” she said. “Even then, I won’t advertise it beyond a week or so because the CTR is too high.”
She runs her ads for traffic mostly. And when it comes to choosing targets in this era of Facebook ads?
“Facebook has made the targeting of ads difficult with many fewer categories. I focus on book, genre, and author categories, if they exist. Because my readers are primarily women over the age of 40, which is really everybody’s readers in the U.S., I check the box for women and age accordingly. I am a wide author, so someone who is in Kindle Unlimited might target Amazon Kindle, for example, but I probably wouldn’t.”
There’s a wide range of opinion on what kind of picture works best when advertising books on Facebook. Woodbury creates a graphic that also incorporates the book cover, adding the book’s tagline to the picture as well. She also makes sure to include the fact that the book is free in both the text body and the graphic itself.
While Facebook ads and Amazon ads are arguably more widely used in publishing, BookBub ads are a close third in popularity. Most authors are familiar with BookBub’s wildly popular Featured Deals but may not have experimented with the self-service CPC or CPM ads that appear at the bottom of almost every email that is sent by BookBub to its audience.
NINC member Lainey Davis, a USA Today bestselling author of steamy contemporary romance and romantic comedies, spoke up at UnCon this year, sharing with us how she uses BookBub ads to drive readers to her non-Amazon platforms.
“My best performing BookBub ads link to a free first-in-series,” Davis said. “I point to all wide retailers. I sometimes run separate ads to my direct store because I don’t do free on my direct shop, only discounted bundles.”
Davis uses BookBub ads only on her free or 99-cent-discounted books, which makes sense considering that the BookBub audience is primed to expect free or low-priced books.
The BookBub self-service ads offer the option to upload your own graphic or to create one on their site by inputting a book cover and text.
“I make my own,” noted Davis. “I tested everything on these from background color to button/no button.”
Her best performing ad shows the discounted book cover in an ebook template on a solid background with the word free along with the cover of the newest release in that same series, also in an ebook template, and the word new. Davis adds five stars and a short, one-line glowing review quotation.
“My strategy with these, I learned from Elana Johnson,” Davis shared. “I do $1 or $2 a day CPC (cost per click) ads to a curated list of comp authors I usually glean from Apple. I set them to run for a month with a budget of $30 (or $60 if I’m doing $2 a day, you get the idea). This tends to give me a steady trickle of downloads on the wide retailers, which often translates to sales. My sell-through rate from a free book is much higher on wide retailers than Amazon, and I try not to pay to direct traffic to Amazon. This could be because contemporary romance has such a strong Kindle Unlimited presence.”
She’s also learned through testing that ads don’t always perform the same way for all retailers.
“I have found there are different click-through rates for Apple/Barnes & Noble versus Kobo/Google, so I tend to run one version of the ad to Apple/Barnes & Noble and another version to Kobo/Google. I keep an eye on the click-through rate and sometimes turn off countries that aren’t performing.”
The overall lesson that I learned from all these ad-savvy NINC authors (Pam Kelley, Sarah Woodbury, and Lainey Davis) is that advertising can be a manageable, affordable tool—and that even low-spend ads can help boost sales and visibility. Running ads doesn’t have to be overwhelming, nor does it have to be scary or intimidating. I’m excited to implement everything I’ve learned—and I hope you are, too.
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Tawdra Kandle is the author of over 145 romances that span genres from contemporary through paranormal. Her engaging and realistic characters bring readers back again and again to devour the steamy love stories she spins. She lives in central Florida with a husband, a mischievous pup, and a snarky cat.