The Dos and Don’ts of Marketing Your Books with
BookBub Ads
By T.C. Wescott
BookBub offers a number of ways for an author to market
their book. Their most effective (and most expensive) options are the Featured
Deal and Featured New Release. These are also nearly impossible to get to get
your book into now that major authors and publishers have gotten savvy and
started using the service. However, at the bottom of all the BookBub e-mails
you receive is an ad for a book. In this realm, the independent author is on equal
footing with the big players. There is no review or selection process as long
as your ad isn’t inflammatory, misleading, and meets the dimension criteria of
the ad. When I learned of this feature I jumped in head first.
I’m not artistically bent by nature and did not know how to
create my own attractive ad, so in the beginning I was using Fiverr and paying
$5 to $15 per ad creative. I wasn’t very impressed with the results and do not
recommend it. Then I learned about BookBrush.com, where you can easily create
your own ads using their tools. You get three free per month, but I quickly
propped for the annual subscription for $96. You can create ads not only for
BookBub, but also Facebook, Amazon, Instragram, etc. The ads created from
BookBrush have thus far produced the best results for me.
The other lessons I’ve learned are that you want to choose
the CPC or cost-per-click option and set your bid at or above the range of
average bids they give you. This will generate instant activity and probably
instant sales. Now, if your book is priced at $2.99 or below, you may not
profit this way, because many if not most clicks will not result in sales. At
least not immediately. But this is a great way to expose a lot of people to
your book. And don’t forget that when someone looks at your page on Amazon,
Amazon reminds them later via e-mail and Facebook ads that they were interested
in your book, giving them more opportunities to purchase it.
If your books are part of a series, sometimes it makes sense
to lose money advertising one of the books because the new readers you get will
then pay full price for the other books in the series. Don’t be afraid to
market, but if a campaign is losing money several weeks with little or no
return, you’ll want to revaluate all aspects of the campaign. If the ad is
successful in getting a lot of clicks to your Amazon page, but little or no
sales result, consider changing your cover art or Amazon description. If you
have fake-looking cover art you made yourself, it’s unlikely any marketing you
do will be successful. Cover art is one area you must be willing to make an
investment. So, all this advice presupposes you care enough about your work to
pay for a professional cover artist or at least to purchase professionally
generated pre-made art.
Don’t run a single ad. Run a bunch and find out which
perform better. Then bump up your daily budgets on those ads and close the
others out. I also found that if I put the price of the e-book in Great British
Pounds and ran that ad only to the UK
while running the same ad with American dollars in other territories really
bumps up the return I get from UK
customers.
Simultaneous to the BookBub ads I’ve been running for the
preorder of my new cozy mystery, Slay Bells: A Christmas Village Mystery, I
also have spent a fair amount of money with Amazon Ads, which are also
cost-per-click. You would think the Amazon ads would be most successful, as
people on the site are actively looking to purchase a book. But as of writing
I’ve sold 250 copies of Slay Bells at $4.99 each and only 20% have come from
Amazon ads. I estimate 70% has come from BookBub ads and the other 10% from
residual marketing I’ve done elsewhere on the web.
I hope these tips prove useful for my fellow writers out
there who’ve yet to utilize BookBub’s ad feature, or who have tried it without
the success they hoped for. Keep at it. And most importantly, keep writing!
About the Author
T.C.
Wescott was born in Missouri but has lived in Oklahoma most of his life. Like pretty much every author who has
ever breathed, he is an avid reader. His favorites are classic mysteries from
the Golden Age, as well as just before or just after that period (which is
widely considered the period between the two World Wars). His first mystery
novel, Running from Scissors, was published in July 2018 and will be the first
of at least three books in the Running Store Mystery series.
The
Christmas Village Mystery series launched in November of the same year with the
debut title Slay Bells. The formula for his books is simple - mixing the
classic, traditional detective fiction standards with all the trappings of the
modern cozy mystery.
Wescott
is also (under another name) the author of two award-winning non-fiction books
as well as many essays and articles.
His latest
book is the cozy mystery, Slay Bells (A Christmas Village Mystery).
Website Address: www.tcwescott.com
Twitter
Address: www.twitter.com/MousetrapBooks
Facebook
Address: www.facebook.com/BetterMousetrapBooks
About the Book:
Title: SLAY BELLS (A CHRISTMAS VILLAGE MYSTERY)
Author: T.C. Wescott
Publisher: Better Mousetrap Books
Pages: 273
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Author: T.C. Wescott
Publisher: Better Mousetrap Books
Pages: 273
Genre: Cozy Mystery
BOOK BLURB:
‘Twas the
week before Christmas and all through the village, the night settled in over
swirling-smoke chimneys; the air was alive with pine and holly, with sugar and
cinnamon and cider, by golly!
Along
snowy lanes and through shadows it crept, past windows behind which each
villager slept, where sleeping dogs lie and cats rest a’purring-
Tonight,
in Christmas Village, a killer is stirring.
Welcome
to Christmas Village, a magical hamlet where even in December the roses hold
their luster and bees buzz among the bluebells. Nestled betwixt an opulent
garden with meandering footpaths and an ancient grove of plum trees, Rose
Willoughby’s boarding house is plum-full with lodgers. There are no vacancies,
but just wait. Soon there will be one…and another…and another.
When the Inn's guests
begin dying in inexplicable ways, some villagers believe a beast from old
village lore is the culprit. The sheriff knows better, but he’s just as
helpless to catch the invisible killer as are the town folk with their eyes to
the sky in search of a flying creature. But our mysterious murderer hasn’t
counted on yet another lodger coming to the cottage: Maribel Claus.
Short as a stump, round as a wheel,
sweet as a candy cane, and a sharp as a whip, Maribel loves a good puzzle. But
can she unmask the phantom killer in time and save Christmas?
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