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Have you written a book?
Are you a speaker or consultant?
Regardless of your business, you are undoubtedly working hard to get the word out there. Paid promotions still remain one of the best ways to do that.
While there are plenty of publicity opportunities and unpaid promotional ways to put your book or business on the map, several strategically purchased paid promotions can make a huge difference when it comes to book sales. In this blog, we are going to specifically talk about the business of selling books in regard to paid promotions.
The main items we are going to address here are:
Meta Ads
Amazon Ads
Email promotions (like Bookbub)
Meta Ads
We’re going to start with one that everyone is familiar with, Facebook/Instagram meta ads.
When doing paid ads, it’s important to know your readers and where they are hanging out on social media. Generally speaking, the “older crowd” is on Facebook, the “middle/younger” audience is on Instagram and you can find a little of everyone on TikTok/YouTube. You can find some “official stats” in this blog on SproutSocial. Because the majority of your readers are going to be on Facebook/Instagram and you can do those particular ads from one location, I would suggest concentrating on those for social media paid ads.
Generally speaking, you don’t just plop an ad out there and expect people to throw you money. (Just like putting your book on Amazon right?) You’re going to want to be strategic in order to use your money wisely. Some general suggestions I have are below:
Start as low as they let you per day. Something like $5 a day for 5 days is a great start to gather information.
Before changing anything, you will want to try and get close to 1,000 + views/impressions to see if people are clicking.
Be sure you are using the Amazon attribution links if you are on Amazon so you can track. (It’s not perfect but it’s something.)
Look at some of the book marketing “gurus” before jumping in. I follow Bryan Cohen, The Writing Wives, Mark Dawson and Matthew Holmes for my learning here. They have plenty of free education options available in addition to their paid offerings.
Since this blog is meant as a general overview and not a step by step, we are moving on to Amazon ads next.
Amazon Ads
If your book is listed on Amazon (and I hope it is at least a part of your strategy) then you might consider doing some Amazon Ads. There are so many books out there that you need to take all of the opportunities you can to be placed in front of your readers. Ads are a great way to do that.
Before spending money to do the ads though, it’s imperative that all your metadata is optimized. Have you chosen the proper categories and keywords? How is your blurb? Is your cover an amazing representation of your book?
Take another look at those before you purchase ads. There are a few tools you can use to do this.
There are all sorts of “strategies” but the easiest thing to do is decide on a budget to start with (maybe it’s just $1 day) and do the simple sponsored product ad for your book and let Amazon choose who sees it. This is why you should make sure all the metadata is good before you start. Once you get going, you can change and adjust and add to your budget as you go along. If you do a series, you can advertise the series page but I would definitely suggest advertising book 1. Keep the read-through rate in mind. You can find various ways to figure that out. Kindlepreneur has a good blog on this. Amazon isn’t tracking this for you so will want to have some idea if your ads for book one are continuing to make you money.
I follow Bryan Cohen, The Writing Wives, Mark Dawson and Matthew J. Holmes for my learning on both Facebook and Amazon ads.
Paid Email Promotions
There are a couple of different things we can consider paid email promotions.
I’m specifically talking about promotions more along the lines of Bookbub- where your book is emailed out to a bunch of people who will then download it. I know that Bookbub typically has a long wait and they turn a lot of people away.
I have had some great success using Hello Books and Written Word Media. I have found the email promotions work best when you can do a FREE book in the giveaway and even better if it’s book one of a series. This, again, is an opportunity where read-through of the rest of your books is going to make your spend go a lot further. These types of promotions work really well when you have another book in your series coming out or when you have an event coming up. I’m affiliated with Written Word because I’ve had so much success with them for my authors. Written Word Media is the company behind promo sites like Freebooksy and Bargain Booksy. Premium membership is a must-have if you are serious about growing your author business. Premium members receive 10% off all Written Word Media promos, 14 days of advance access to inventory, access to the exclusive Limelight promotion, and much more. Here’s my affiliate link if you’d like to take a look at how they do the promos. I think you’ll be impressed.
BookFunnel bundles - because you pay for BookFunnel, I’m considering this in our paid promotions section. BookFunnel has many outstanding opportunities to partner with other authors to be able to use each other’s extended reach. You can do newsletter swaps as well group promotions. I encourage you to look into this when planning your strategy.
I’m a huge fan of doing stacked promotions. In that case, you’re going to do something like an email promotion, plus an Amazon ad, plus a Facebook ad plus emails and social posts. Are you catching on? Doing it this way, stacking your promotions, will make your ad spend go twice as far as doing one promotion at a time.
Beware of Scams
BEWARE: Once people know you are writing a book, you will have DMs coming out of the woodwork on your social media from people wanting to “review your book” and then they tell you it’s $50 (or whatever). Beware of this. You don’t need to do this and it’s really not the way to spend your money. Also, it’s against Amazon’s terms of service to pay for any reviews there.
Unless it’s something like the well-known Kirkus Reviews, you generally don’t want to be paying for reviews.
There are plenty of ways to spend money to promote your book from sponsorships to booths at festivals to paid ads. The above are the simplest ones that I have seen produce the most results and I encourage you to put these types of ads in your budget and plan on using them on an ongoing basis.
If you are looking to join an amazing community of authors and create your marketing strategies and promotions piece by piece while writing your book [or living your life], email me for a FREE pass to check out the Authors' Allies RoundTable. We'd love to meet you.
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Rebecca Paciorek is an Online Business Manager specializing in assisting authors, coaches, and speakers in their business growth through traditional and digital means.
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