How to use advertising to make your book a bestseller (Facebook and Google ads)

book advertising, facebook ads, google ads

26 Jul 2015

Book marketing is hard work, and this is why: when you talk about your book on social media, tell people to go buy it or support you, it’s annoying and spammy. These days you need to be more subtle, with content marketing and indirect ways to catch readers’ attention.

Unless you advertise: it’s fine to be promotional and direct in advertising.

And advertising is very powerful, in that you can target specific groups of people, or people already searching for certain keywords. But you can also waste a lot of money without selling any books.

So here’s a long-ish guide to advertising your book, what to avoid and watch out for, how to stay in the green and avoid advertising failure.

#1. Look Good and Be Awesome

The first rule of advertising = have a super cover design, nice 3D graphics and promotional images, and a stellar author website or landing page. Also make sure, if you’re using graphics, that they look good.

What if you don’t know how good your stuff looks?

There are ways to test: try running a text only ad, and then some ads with your book cover or images. Do more people click on the text than the image ads? Then your graphics aren’t good enough. Excellent graphics should always perform better than text only ads; if they don’t, just stick with text only ads – although if you have a bad cover, that’s going to kill sales anyway.

You can also send people directly to your website, and directly to Amazon.

If your website looks great and is amazing, it might “warm up” buyers, who will then buy the book on Amazon. But if it doesn’t, you’ll see more sales sending them straight to Amazon.

UNLESS you don’t have any reviews, have a poorly written book description, or an ugly cover. If people are clicking on your ad but not buying the book, it means your book or ad or topic is interesting enough, but you lose them on the sales page (probably because of poor design or lack of reviews).

#2. Know your readers

You need to know who your readers are and where to find them. Don’t just buy ads on any website promising book marketing or advertising (most of those sites are built for authors, you won’t see any readers there). You need to find the sites where YOUR readers hang out – we’re making that easy with our genre-specific book marketing resource pages.

Look at those sites, evaluate how much traffic they get, check out whether they offer advertising and how much it costs. There’s a video down below that talks more about that. You can also find the with BlogAds but it’s usually cheaper to go direct.

If they have advertising but it’s Google Ads, you can actually use Google Ads and set it up to just display on certain sites – sometimes you can do this and pay for less to get on sites that try to charge you much more.

#3. Hook and sell

You need to capture attention – that’s easier with a good offer. Maybe your book is discounted, today only, for 99 cents. Maybe it’s free. Scarcity and a good deal can work wonders… but it probably isn’t enough. People don’t buy books because they are cheap. They won’t to know what the book is about, the genre or topic, and whether it’s any good. You’ll have to convey all of that, really quickly, usually with a great cover and a tagline or blurb by someone. You usually don’t have much space so you need to be as impactful and concise as possible: just get them to click.

After they click, you need to fulfill. Why did they click? What did you promise? Do they get it after the click?

If you’re paying for clicks, you may be hoping to drive sales – but it’s hard to be cost effective this way, as you’ll probably get a lot of people who click but don’t buy.

It may be a better strategy to focus on building your list first, by offering a free book, or for non-fiction a great free resource. People will click to get the resource and sign up to your list; then you can use an autoresponder to share value and get them used to you, before finally asking them if they want to buy the book, after you’ve sent a few emails.