5 Tips for Running BookBub Ads to Sell Your Book

Plenty of authors want to sell their book without leaving their house or having to talk to other humans. I get that. And while building an audience and connecting with them regularly remains the best way to sell books, there are plenty of ad platforms you can use to give your book a sales boost. For the last three months, I've been deep into one of those platforms testing ads. BookBub. So if you're curious about running promotions on BookBub, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad, multi award winning author and founder of the fabulous self publishing services company Book Launchers. Of course, at Book Launchers, we have a wonderful team of writers, writing coaches, editors and designers to help you create a great book. And then we also surround our authors with support to help them sell copies, build their brand, and grow their business with their book. We run Amazon ads, but we can't target audiobooks so specifically with Amazon ads. So I've been playing around with chirp and running BookBub ads. I've submitted for feature deals three times and I've been rejected every time. I'll keep going and keep trying, but in the meantime, I've been running BookBub ads and today I'm gonna share my five best tips about BookBub ads for you. Number one, you should start by setting up a BookBub profile. And if you can, start building a presence on bookbub. If you plan to run ads, it will help you with your overall success on bookbub. Here's my profile. Here's a quick look at how to edit it. It's pretty easy to set up, but having your bio and a tagline ready to go will make it easier. You'll also want to know what genre people will be using to find you, and you can also try and boost your credibility by putting some accolades in your profile. Ultimately, I haven't done that much to develop the profile of my own on bookbub, but if you're on bookbub, you can follow me. Where I think it's really useful is when you go to an author's book page and click on Get Book Deal Alerts. Save this book to your wish list and we'll notify you when we have a deal. I think you could be encouraging people to click on that if you'd like. So go ahead, do it for my profile and let's see if that helps me get a feature deal. Then you can make sure you've subscribed to this channel with notifications on and I'll share all the details when I do get that featured deal, including cost and results. All right, tip 2 BookBub is not like Amazon or any other ad platform you've been on. So shake off the idea that it's going to function like you expect and be ready to start fresh. The best resources I have found on BookBub ads are from BookBub itself and David Goggren. Specifically, I follow David Goggren's book BookBub ads expert to set things up. This book is a must read if you are serious about going on BookBub, but here's a few things that I found super weird about BookBub. First, their ads are primarily driven by their featured ads newsletter, which which means the traffic is really in waves. It isn't like Amazon where they're delivering ads when someone searches keywords, or like Facebook where they're constantly targeting people that you want to show your ad to. This is driven by an email newsletter that is sent out so you see a spike and then nothing, and then a spike and then nothing. It's just a little bit weird when you're not used to that. For me though, the weirdest and most uncomfortable thing is that we're tracking CTR click through rate, not conversions. The only way to track conversions is with affiliate links. This is not a simple process for a lot of authors because you have to be approved to be an affiliate in some cases, and then you're monitoring the affiliate links as well as the ad dashboard. Can you say dances with spreadsheets? If you don't have affiliate links, you're left to estimate your conversions based on a spreadsheet that BookBub provides. Or if you do a search on Google, you may find some other people that have created bookbub ad spreadsheets. It's it's all a little unsettling and it's a lot of data, which can be fun for some. And if you are like me, it's as fun as sitting on pins. What I found after spending $325 on audiobook ads, I sold five books. The click through rate was doing really well on this one, so I left it. But after a month I dug into the data and realized that I had a really bad ROI on that one. So if putting a bunch of data into a spreadsheet and updating it weekly sounds like fun, you're going to love BookBub ads. If you're like me and you didn't do it every single week like you should have, you may find yourself spending more money than makes sense. Number three, your imagery matters a lot. I tested a lot of different images for the audiobook in particular, but also my ebook and I found that different images performed better depending on the platform I was targeting. But I really struggled to hit a 2% click through rate on anything, which is what David Goggren was really pushing in his book and on his website resources. At this point I've turned off all my ads and I'm going to start it all over again with an ebook sale we're running to celebrate Book Launcher's five year anniversary. So I'll share a recap of how that went with BookBub afterwards, but a couple of notes on the images that did perform the best. The image with reviews from places like Midwest Book Reviews just had an excerpt performed the best on ebook sales on Apple, Kobo Canada and Kobo usa. This image is the winner overall, but even this one only ever hit a 1.8 click through Rate and it never got higher. The audio version of this image did not perform over 1%. So that tells me that you need to test the imagery by platform you're selling on and by what they are doing. Are they reading the ebook or are they looking for the audiobook? This image got the most clicks, but the CTR was weak so I had to turn it off after a while. But because it was getting clicks I wanted to give it more time to see if it would convert to sales, which it was doing at a 1% click through rate. It was a challenge. Now these are examples of hit imagery from David Goggren's website. The link is in the description below. As you can see, the examples lean heavily to fiction, which could also be why some of the nonfiction books I'm testing are having a challenge on BookBub, but there are certainly nonfiction examples here. Number four finding authors to target your ads to isn't as easy as you think. It's less about the author and more about how many BookBub followers they have specifically, which is not as directly correlated to the popularity of the author as you might think. Let's face it, there aren't as many business book readers signing up for BookBub deals as the fiction readers who often read a book a day. So here's the list of authors I was researching at first to give you a sense of who I was targeting. My thinking was that if someone was thinking of writing a book, they might be following these folks and possibly would be a good fit for self publish and succeed. This is how we approach a lot of Amazon ads and it works. But Again, this is BookBub, not Amazon and these follower numbers are just too low to do much of anything as far as bookbub ad performance. So I had to widen the list to more prolific, well known writers and the performance was stronger. But I think that is largely just because there are more readers of these authors and I do get a lot of clients that say they want to target Brene Brown's audience or an audience like Ryan Holiday or Tim Ferriss. So it made sense as well. It's just a much wider net than I expected to have to use and it could have contributed to the click through rate challenges I had. Tip 5 BookBub has a much bigger learning curve than I expected. Honestly, after three months of working the platform, I thought I'd be able to share more of a here's how to succeed on BookBub video with you. The reality is that I'm starting over with new graphics and new approaches to get featured deals and brand new targeting. As mentioned above, like with any other paid ads, not all money is going to generate an ROI in straight dollars. My spend did generate some sales, but my return was largely in what I learned about BookBub. And now I can go at this for round two and be ready to try it differently and hopefully make a positive financial ROI this time. Plenty of authors who have taken the time to master bookbub do rave about its ability to sell books and and grow platforms, so I'm not giving up after just one round of testing. But I am curious. Have you had success with bookbub ads? Do you have resources or recommendations for me or for others? Please share it in the comments below. And if you want to see what else I learned from this journey, make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turned those notifications on so you catch my update videos now. If you're not familiar with chirp, this video is one you need to see next. And if you just want the latest and greatest from the channel or well that is waiting for you right here. So go ahead, click on over and let's hang out a little more.