When it comes to your ads, don’t trust your gut!
By: Ginger | Posted on May 14, 2021
Often, the quickest way to fail when it comes to promoting and marketing your book is to make decisions on how you feel. Feelings are great when it’s time for writing, but only cold, clinical data can truly guide you forward after publication – or talk you off the ledge when you’re ready to quit. It doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur, a billionaire, or an author looking to market your latest novel – numbers don’t lie! A few months ago, we published a blog about how to calculate the value of your advertising spend. Since then, I’ve worked with several authors who’ve benefited from a deeper dive into the subject, since it’s one of the biggest and most deadly stumbling blocks for those authors hoping to make a living out of writing. The Importance of Data Billionaires become so through fractions of a percentage. An increase of a… Read More >
Scaling your ads means thinking outside the box
By: Ginger | Posted on May 7, 2021
Any author who has tried to scale their book’s advertising campaign has probably experienced the pain of a corresponding drop off in ad performance. Unfortunately, simply increasing your advertising spend doesn’t mean your sales will also increase at the same rate. In fact, in some cases they may not even increase at all, you’ll just spend more money for the same results! Ginger explains why that is, and offers up some alternative ways at scaling ads up on the different advertising platforms. I hear the same questions from authors again and again when I do consulting sessions with them – and I’m painfully familiar with them myself, because they normally involve challenges I’ve also encountered on the path of self publishing success. One of the biggest is the issue of scaling your ad spend. Facebook, Advertising on Amazon, or BookBub, it doesn’t really matter where it is – the… Read More >
Newsletter Promotion Sites deliver bang for your buck
By: Ginger | Posted on April 16, 2021
When it comes time to plan for your new release, if book promotion newsletters aren’t a part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing an important trick! Newsletters can blast out the details of your book to thousands of customers looking for their next read, which makes them almost as useful and important as Facebook or Amazon ads. There are plenty of newsletters to choose from, which is good because most authors use more than one per release, stacking them for even greater effect. Today, Ginger is giving the low down on these promotions, as well as some of his own top newsletters to try. In addition to my best-selling romance penname, I recently began publishing books under my real name – which presented me with a unique challenge. After having published 25 books and selling 65,000+ copies in the last few years on that romance penname, I was suddenly… Read More >
BookBub Ads – Part Three: Building an Audience
By: Ginger | Posted on March 19, 2021
So now that you’ve decided that Bookbub advertising is for you, and you have your creative figured out, the final step in the puzzle is targeting the right audience. Bookbub works a bit differently than some of the other ad platforms, which means you may need to alter your current strategy. In this final installment of our Bookbub ad series, Ginger outlines his steps for successfully figuring out who should see your ads. In our last blog post, we wrote about coming up with creative that could be effective on BookBub. Of similar importance is the audience you show this creative to – and that’s where BookBub appears ‘deceptively’ simple in its targeting. One of the incredible things about BookBub is that it allows authors to target their advertising to an incredibly granular level – by selecting specific authors who are included on their platform and targeting the readers… Read More >
BookBub Ads – Part Two: The Creative
By: Ginger | Posted on March 12, 2021
If you’ve been thinking about trying to advertise your book on Bookbub’s relatively new advertising platform but aren’t sure where to start, this is the series for you. In part 1, Ginger discussed what the service offers and how to determine if it’s right for you, and this week he’s diving into what sort of images to use in your bookbub ads. What can, and should, you include? It’s all explained below, with a real example ad Ginger created and used for one of his own books to help illustrate his points. Last week, we pitched the idea of using BookBub to market your books. It’s an incredibly powerful serve-yourself advertising platform that has arguable advantages over both Facebook and Advertising on Amazon – but the interface is deceptively simple and a lot of authors get their fingers burned by jumping in without a strategy in place. Today, we’re… Read More >
Fiction Apps Can Increase Your Income
By: Krista Lakes | Posted on February 19, 2021
Most self-published authors sell their book on one or more of the traditional online eBook stores like Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc. Lately, however, a new option has emerged that is worth looking into, at least for those not tied to a long term exclusivity agreement. You may not have heard of Fiction Apps, or if you have, you may have brushed them off believing that they only exist to give books away for free and can’t be used to earn real money from your novels. Times have changed, though, with new apps emerging and gaining popularity among both readers and silicon valley. NY Times and USA Today bestselling author Krista Lakes uses them, and she’s here to let us know why it’s time for authors to start taking these apps seriously, and what some of the options are. I think I’ll be experimenting with one of them in… Read More >
Calculating the real value of your book ads
By: Ginger | Posted on December 18, 2020
As an independent author in charge of your own marketing success, you owe it to yourself to make sure you can properly determine just how effectively your book ads are performing. But if you’ve been assuming that you can simply rely on the advertising dashboard provided by Amazon or Facebook to give you the answers you’re looking for, you need to understand that those numbers can be very misleading, if not completely wrong. To illustrate this, ad expert Ginger takes us through some actual numbers pulled from one of his own recent ad campaigns. Before I finally published my first successful book, I had spent 25 years carving out a career in advertising and marketing; which probably gave me an advantage when it came to promoting my books. I’m old enough to have entered the advertising industry before the days of Facebook and YouTube – back when people still… Read More >
Amazon Exclusive vs Wide: A Case Study
By: Isabel Jolie | Posted on October 23, 2020
The case for going wide or remaining in KDP Select as an Amazon exclusive is fiercely debated, but at the end of the day there is likely no right answer that fits everyone. Like most things, it comes down to experimentation and doing your research. That’s the approach romance author Isabel Jolie took, and luckily for us she was willing to put together this blog breaking down her numbers and what she learned from her experimentation. To KU or not to KU? It’s a question every author has at least considered and weighed. “Any romance author should do KU.” “KU is a no-brainer for a new author.” These are things I was told – repeatedly. I ultimately chose to go wide, but I did briefly test KU, and the following is what I experienced. Background I released my first book in January 2020. In September, I released my fourth… Read More >
Choose an Email Marketing Service That Works for You
By: Annabeth Saryu | Posted on September 25, 2020
Most independent authors are well aware of the importance of a newsletter and the benefits of using a mailing list to handle it, but a quick google search will result in plenty of different email marketing services to choose from. Unfortunately, it’s not a one-size-fits-all sort of problem, since every author has different needs. Luckily, author Annabeth Saryu has already done a lot of research into what factors need to be considered, and she’s put it all together here to make it easier to determine how to pick the service that will work best for you. Regardless of where an author is in their career, they eventually encounter a piece of universally accepted advice: build your mailing list. Your mailing list not only consists of your most avid readers, but if cultivated properly, also includes your most dedicated customers. While many experts on author marketing stress the value of… Read More >
Increase Book Sales with In-house Promotions
By: Erin Wright | Posted on August 14, 2020
One of the things that sets wide storefronts apart from Amazon is the hand-curated element to their sales. Unlike Amazon, where your placement in the store depends on how much you’re willing to spend on AMS ads, the promotion of books on all the other online storefronts is handled in a completely different way. Author and going-wide expert Erin Wright explains how to increase your book sales by getting featured in these in-house promotions. Here’s a run down of what you need to know for each of the major wide storefronts. GooglePlay GooglePlay is the easiest storefront to cover: They don’t do in-house promos, period. The books that are shown to a customer are 100% driven by algorithms. If I pull up https://play.google.com, I’ll see a very different storefront than when you pull up the same URL. This means that more than any other wide storefront, it’s very important that… Read More >
