Understanding the “Learning” Phases of Facebook Ads
By: Ginger | Posted on April 12, 2024
Maintaining a robust marketing and advertising strategy has become as crucial as writing a great book, and for many authors, Facebook remains the go-to platform for advertising. However, the complexity of Facebook’s ad interface can baffle even those who understand the basics of setting up an ad, especially when they find their ad in the “Learning” or “Learning Limited” state. Knowing how to optimize ads and take action when campaigns underperform is essential for campaign success. The “Learning” and “Learning Limited” phases indicate your ad’s performance and optimization stages, sometimes requiring action. Today, Ginger will explain what those terms mean, what actions to take when you encounter them, and how to optimize your ad campaigns to enhance visibility and achieve better results. Over the course of the last few years, the path to successful self-publishing has changed. Many authors used to find success simply by writing great books with a… Read More >
Successful Advertising Means Playing the Long Game
By: Ginger | Posted on November 24, 2023
If you’ve ever felt like your book ads aren’t converting as quickly as they should, it could simply mean that you need to adjust your expectations rather than your images or taglines. Successful advertising is usually more about building familiarity and trust over time, rather than via instant gratification. In today’s blog, Ginger discusses how advertising your book in the digital age requires patience, and why the customer journey often requires frequent exposure to your ads before any action is taken. That understanding, combined with some fine tuning and iteration, can lead you to long term success and a loyal fan base. Google ruined advertising. In the late 1990s, during what’s now known as the “Dot-Com Bubble”, the world was introduced to ecommerce. Before then, selling and advertising was a very different racket. Back before ecommerce, most businesses understood the importance of advertising, but often weren’t able to connect exactly… Read More >
Minding the Statistics: Key Ad Metrics to Focus On
By: Ginger | Posted on October 13, 2023
Whether you’re diving into Facebook ads or navigating Amazon’s advertising platform, understanding, interpreting and optimizing key ad metrics like CPC, CTR, Conversions, RoAS, Frequency and DPV can make all the difference in your marketing efforts. This week, Ginger is breaking all of these acronyms and confusing terms down as he attempts to lay out the main advertising metrics that authors should be paying attention to – which is in response to a very recent question posed to us via email. Once you have a deeper understanding of how these metrics play a part in the success of your campaign, you’ll be able to fine-tune your ads, maximize your book sales and reach new heights of success. Recently, we received an email from a reader and thought it would be a great topic for a blog post. The email read: I’d love to see a story about “minding the statistics”. Like,… Read More >
How can you refresh a Facebook ad campaign?
By: Ginger | Posted on June 30, 2023
As we’ve said many times in this space, advertising your book is an essential step in self-publishing success, but it is not something you can just set and forget. No matter how well your Facebook ad campaign performs initially, the sad and inevitable reality is that eventually, its performance will begin to decline. Since stubbornly letting a faltering ad continue to run is just a waste of money, you really need to monitor your campaigns for signs that your advertisements are getting stale and then take immediate action. The first step is determining the possible reasons for the decline of your ad’s performance, and then once you have an idea on that, you can figure out the best way to fix it. In today’s blog, Ginger has a number of suggestions on doing both of those things. The good news is that you don’t always have to pull a previously winning… Read More >
What 3 things can we learn from the Kindle Unlimited price hike?
By: Ginger | Posted on May 19, 2023
This May, Amazon announced the first Kindle Unlimited price increase since it’s inception, taking subscriptions from $9.99 a month to $11.99. What does this change mean, and will self-published authors benefit or be harmed? To answer these questions, Ginger delves into three key factors he believes led to this move. From the plateauing of KU subscriptions to Amazon’s strategic maneuvering against app transaction blockades, he explores what this means for your earnings and the competition within the program. Having already disrupted the entire publishing industry in 2007 with the invention of the Kindle and the self-service Kindle Direct Publishing platform, Amazon took another swing at traditional publishing in 2014 with the launch of Kindle Unlimited. A monthly subscription service, Kindle Unlimited (KU) was essentially “Netflix for ebooks.” Subscribers are able to download unlimited books from the Kindle Unlimited library for one monthly fee, while authors who opt into the program… Read More >
The 5 Rules of Good Advertising
By: Ginger | Posted on March 24, 2023
As an author, it can be difficult to navigate the world of advertising, but there are some tried and true principles that can be applied to book promotion. Ginger, a former New York advertising professional who now uses his knowledge to promote his books and help other Hidden Gems authors promote their own, has distilled his decades of experience into a list of the five most important rules for successful advertising. Despite the constantly evolving industry, these core principles remain relevant and effective, and authors should keep them in mind whenever they are trying to promote their work. Before I threw myself into self-publishing full time, I worked in advertising, and what I learned in that industry gave me an excellent foundation to succeed in this one. This is especially true now that Amazon has filled their homepage with so much advertising space, and that advertising successfully on Facebook and… Read More >
What I’ve learned after spending over $100k with Facebook Ads
By: Matt Holmes | Posted on January 13, 2023
We write a lot of articles about advertising your book on the various platforms, along with what we believe are best practices and the tips we’ve learned along the way. But when it comes right down to it, nothing beats hard data from the field. Matt Holmes has made a career out of helping authors with their advertising, starting with the Fantasy novels written by his wife. His ad spend tops six figures, which has provided him with a lot of data to draw conclusions about what works and what doesn’t. After so much time and money spent advertising different books of different genres from a variety of authors, Matt has come up with a list of the five biggest lessons he’s learned about advertising self-published books on Facebook, and he’s sharing them with us today. Spending over $100,000 on anything is going to provide you with some HUGE lessons… Read More >
Are Apple and Google Screwing Over Self-Published Authors?
By: Ginger | Posted on January 6, 2023
As the titans of the internet duke it out for as much profit as they can squeeze out from each other, those of us just trying to earn a living selling our books are getting caught in the crossfire. If you’ve seen a drop in your book sales, digging a little deeper may help you figure out if recent changes are affecting you and give you some ideas on how to combat it. Ultimately, though, the only real long-term solution may be for the big companies to finally realize that their current path hurts everyone, and it’s better to have a smaller percentage of something than a larger percentage of nothing. Is Big Tech punishing small-time publishers with their exorbitant transaction percentage fees? This June, Amazon quietly made a decision to remove the “Buy Now” button for books in the Amazon Android app – something they’d done on their Apple… Read More >
What can Lee Child teach us about writing?
By: Ginger | Posted on June 17, 2022
With each new book we publish, our writing improves and we become better authors. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from others, as well. By standing on the shoulders of giants, we might even be able to speed up that process, not to mention learn a new trick or two. And when it comes to thriller writing, Lee Child towers above all the rest, which means he might be the best person to teach us a few things. That’s why this week, Ginger is digging in to what makes Lee Child so successful and breaking it down for us in a way that makes it easy for us to use in improving our own writing. Amazon Prime has a hit on their hands. The first season of their streaming series Reacher, based on the character and books by Lee Child, became the first Amazon production to ever win the… Read More >
Using Dialogue to Drive Your Story
By: Ginger | Posted on May 27, 2022
Using dialogue properly in your novel is one of the most important things you need to get right, yet is one of the things that so many authors get wrong, or at least struggle with. Back when I first started writing seriously, I read a couple of books on dialogue specifically, and they helped me immensely. But you can gain just as much by simply studying some of the greats, and how they structure the conversations between their characters. That’s exactly what Ginger is looking at today, with a few examples from timeless classics. In a large part, these authors and books are still widely read because they were able to nail their own dialogue so effectively. Some of the most timeless writers of our age remain that way because of their dynamic use of dialogue. Certain writers remain as relevant today as they did when their books were… Read More >
