7 Guidelines for Running Book Ads

If you've written a book and now are looking for ways to boost the sales, you're probably considering running ads. Whether it's Amazon ads, bookbub ads, paid banner ads, Facebook or other social media ads, if you want to make sure you put your money where it's most likely to get results for your book, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of a fabulous full service publishing company called Book Launchers. We are marketing focused in everything we do. We layer in marketing into every step of the process, from writing, to editing, to design, and of course to promotion. When you've launched your book, we're right there beside you helping you sell books. And that means we run ads for our authors and to make sure those ads are most likely to perform and it's what our author needs to reach their goals, there's a lot of pieces we take into consideration. So if you're thinking of paying to promote your book, here are seven guidelines for you to keep in mind before you spend money on ads. Guideline 11 size does not fit all when it comes to book market. But let's be real. Even after working on the launch and promotion of more than 200 books, if I had a system that guaranteed results for every book, book launchers would charge 10 times or 100 times what we charged. And that's also considering that almost every single one of the books we worked on got at least one Amazon bestseller or new release flag. And many of our authors have gone on to have incredible results like a documentary, a TED global ideas talk, bulk purchases, dream publishing deals, and so much more. So we do get results, but it's never one thing that gets the results for every author. And that's what you need to understand when it comes to book marketing. Everything changes. And what works for one book likely doesn't work exactly the same for another book. So the answer to everything in marketing is test it. Don't believe that somebody's got the proven system. It might work, but it might not. And you won't know until you test it. Guideline 2 give the test some time, but cut the bait if it's not working when I say test it and then cut bait if it's not working. I don't mean try something one time and then say it's not working and quit. We have some people who will have us run their Amazon ads for a month and when it's not getting results, they tell us to turn it off. Amazon ads in particular can take a few months to get dialed in. The great thing is that it's giving you data to start troubleshooting. That said, if you've gone through everything it could possibly be and the ads still aren't working, stop and try something else. It's the same with everything in book marketing. When we pitch our authors to podcasts, media, or live events, if one angle doesn't work on an audience, we try a different angle. If that still doesn't work, it's time to try a new audience. It takes patience and persistence and a willingness to keep trying until you find the things that do work really well. Guideline 3 Make sure your fundamentals are strong before you start paying for ads. I'm talking sales page. Your Amazon page. Wherever you're driving traffic, it needs to be stellar. And if you're talking Amazon, you need to have at least 25 reviews if you're running ads to really, really help your conversion. And conversion is the most critical variable. When people land on the page, do they buy? That's what conversion is and that's what you should care about. The experience that readers have when they arrive on your book's page will make that happen. Or not. It's so important that your title, cover, reviews, book description, and product price point are working together to get that credit card. So have you optimized your page in every way to appeal to your target reader? Is your book already selling even a bit when you have traffic going there? If the answer is yes, then paid ads can be fuel on a fire. If you're using paid ads to try to ignite that fire, well, the wood you're trying to light might be wet and you could be wasting your time and money. I actually think that analogy worked. What do you think? If you don't think it worked, give me your best analogy to replace it in the comments below. I love hearing from you and I will Always reply. Guideline 4 Don't spend money you don't have Some people throw money at ads like it's a wishing well fountain. All right, that was the most family friendly analogy I could come up with for things you throw money at. But seriously, running ads takes time to get a return. As a company, I look at my ad spend today as providing an ROI in the next 60 days. But when I first started running ads, I actually expected it to take three to six months. Months before it was really humming. Along. With books, you have a tiny margin, so there isn't a lot of room to pay for ad costs and still make money. So if you're not able to allocate a few hundred dollars a month to this while you're testing and learning, then ads might not be for you. If, however, you can afford to lose a few hundred a month testing ads until you find what's working, then I would do it. Because when you find an ad that works for the roi, that ROI could be pretty big. Most of our authors are selling books to grow their brand and their business. It's is part of building a legacy and thought leadership. So rolling profits into their marketing and reinvesting it is going to be exactly what they want to do. But if you're an author trying to make your living on being an author, you want to be strategic about the dollar spent and not spend money you don't have. Guideline 5 Focus on one Approach at a Time it might be tempting to do all the things, but focusing on mastering one platform at a time is a smart move. It can also help you better identify where momentum boosts are coming from, even though you have tracking on the ad platforms. And you'll notice when something starts working that the sales will increase. And not always directly from an ad, but it can be from people seeing the ads and then finding you organically or by referral or some other way, and then they finally buy. Ads have a lot of benefit over time, but you won't know precisely what's working when you do everything at once, and chances are you'll struggle to get everything working if you try to do it all at once. Each ad platform has its nuances. I'm going to be doing a video on BookBub ads specifically next month, so so make sure you've subscribed to the channel and turn notifications on if you want to catch that and other great videos. But it's also odd with bookbub that it doesn't actually have tracking links to show you conversions, so you have to guess and use affiliate links in other methods. So only running one type of ad at a time is very useful there. It's taken me several months of playing with it and I still don't have a perfect system. But ultimately doing one at a time will help you master them. And then you can layer on another and another. Or if you're getting great results on one, there's no rule that says you even have to add something else. There are very few experts in all the ad platforms. Most people are specialists. Guideline Number six Pay for results, not Likes if you're using social media and you're in the early stages of building engagement, even when you're in the later stages, it probably feels like nobody's listening or not as many people are seeing your posts and they probably aren't. That said, paying to get likes does not help book sales. It helps you feel better, but it doesn't tend to get any sort of ad related results. Experienced Facebook or even Google advertisers might use the strategy of paying to promote a post to hopefully get a click to a website that you can then use to retarget to the person later. But when it comes to selling books, unless you have a back end strategy to sell something a whole lot more valuable and with a bigger margin than your book, that strategy is equivalent to flushing money down the toilet. Focus on the things that get your books sold or get you book reviews. The rest, well, it might feel good, but it's not the way you're going to get results with your dollars. Guideline 7 Be patient and Persistent A lot of authors are in a rush for results, but patience and persistent action are the path to success. Your book first of all needs to be awesome. The metadata needs to be on point and you need reviews. And then you need to test, test, test and you guessed it, test some more. When something works, do a lot more of it. If your ads aren't getting enough impressions, well, it's usually an issue with your bid or your budget. If your ads are getting impressions but no clicks, it's usually a problem with your ads themselves. It could be your cover, your title, your targeting ad, text or book description. And if you're getting clicks but no sales, then it's usually a problem with your page. Not lining up with your market or something else on your page is killing the sale. The good news is ads give you data to help you troubleshoot. So be patient. Take action on one thing at a time so you can see what's working and what's not. And be persistent. You got this. And if you want more on running ads, this video right here will help you out with that. And for tips on getting more reviews because that's going to impact your book ads, well that is right here. Click on over. I'm waiting for you.