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 >
How to Set Up Amazon Attribution for Facebook Ads
By: Ginger | Posted on December 16, 2022
If you’ve ever tried to advertise your book on Facebook, you are probably already aware of how difficult it is to judge their effectiveness and whether any of the clicks you’re paying for ever really turn into sales. Well, Amazon has finally rolled out a feature that can give you all that information, and it isn’t even that hard to start using. Ginger talked about it last week, but today he’s back to tell you just how to set up Amazon Attribution so that you can track not only your sales and other clicks, but your KU page reads as well. As he mentioned, this is a game changing feature that can really help authors improve their ad performance, so it’s definitely something you need to start using right away if you aren’t already! It’s finally here. After years of struggling to track the effectiveness of our Facebook ads (and… Read More >
How To Create a Facebook Lookalike Audience
By: Ginger | Posted on November 25, 2022
As Ginger pointed out in a recent blog post, creating a Facebook lookalike audience is a powerful way to use your own mailing list to build an audience of likeminded readers more likely to buy your books than a more generic group. After reading that article, one author left a comment asking for more details on how exactly they would do that. Well, ask and ye shall receive. Today, Ginger is providing step-by-step instructions on not only how to create such an audience, but how to make sure you’re pulling the best people from your own list as the source. A few weeks ago, I posted a blog entitled Is Your Freebie Lead Magnet Costing You Money? That was a post about how the source of your mailing list subscribers could be impacting how effective they are at marketing your book – and how it’s more valuable to gain subscribers… Read More >
Spending your first $1,000 on digital advertising
By: Ginger | Posted on September 2, 2022
There’s an old adage: “You’ve got to spend money to make money.” Nowhere does this wisdom apply more than in the digital advertising industry – especially when it comes to the business of selling books online. However, it’s important to make sure that any money you spend provides some kind of value – even if it isn’t initially in direct book sales. Here are some of Ginger’s guidelines regarding what authors should focus on when spending their first $1,000 on advertising their books. In 2020, advertisers spent $378 billion on digital advertising, and that looks set to double by 2024 – equivalent to the GDP of the nation of Somoa. Much of what’s driving this is access to self-service advertising platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Self-service ads generated $28.5 billion in revenue for Facebook last year, for example. Authors comprise a significant number of those advertisers. In fact, the… Read More >
Latest Tips for Advertising on Amazon
By: Ginger | Posted on July 22, 2022
Over the years, we’ve posted multiple blogs about how to get the most out of Advertising on Amazon. However, things change – and some of the the advice Ginger has given authors a couple of years ago isn’t necessarily what he’d recommend today. So here are a few of his latest thoughts on how Advertising on Amazon is working these days, and what authors can do to take advantage of the changes. A Changing Landscape Technology changes. It’s inevitable. If it wasn’t, we’d still be stuck using the same interface and operating systems we were a decade ago on platforms like Facebook and Amazon. There are multiple reasons why ecommerce and social media platforms update their layout and interface, and many of the choices the folks in Silicon Valley make don’t necessarily make a lot of sense to the likes of us. However, there’s no use complaining about these updates… Read More >
Has Apple’s recent update killed your Facebook ad performance?
By: Ginger | Posted on December 17, 2021
One of the constants of being a self-published author is that just when you think you have this game all figured out, one of the other players goes and changes the rules and throws everyone back a few steps. This time, it wasn’t one of the usual suspects making our lives more difficult, and what was done wasn’t targeting authors at all, but many of us have been negatively affected nonetheless. I’m taking about Apple’s recent ‘Do Not Track’ 14.5 iOS update. Designed to improve the privacy of Apple users, one of the side effects has been that authors everywhere are seeing their Facebook ad performance drop significantly. Today, Ginger goes into some detail about why this is happening, and some of the things you can do to try and compensate for it. Earlier this year, Apple announced that their IOS 14.5 update would include a “Do Not Track”… Read More >
From the Mailbox: Amazon Advertising Questions
By: Ginger | Posted on July 9, 2021
Our Friday blogs aim at helping self-published authors by covering broad topics to do with writing, marketing, and advertising their books. Sometimes authors send us questions via email as well, and one of the most asked about topics is Amazon ads. So this week we’ve rounded up some of the most commonly asked Amazon advertising questions that we’ve recently received, and Ginger has put together some answers that will be useful to many of you. Question #1 I’ve followed all your advice about generating keywords and setting your bid – but my ads aren’t getting any impressions! What am I doing wrong? Advertising is elegant in its simplicity. Normally, there are only three variables you need to worry about, and impressions is one of them. Impressions refers to the number of people who see your ad – and when it comes to Advertising on Amazon, if you’re not getting… Read More >
The Power of Defensive Advertising on Amazon
By: Ginger | Posted on April 23, 2021
There’s nothing worse then spending money on advertising, only to have the readers that land on your product page get distracted by someone else’s sponsored book and click through to that one instead. Even if they don’t buy that book, they might never remember to return to yours, and consequently you may have lost that customer and potential new fan of your work forever. To combat this, there are certain tips and tricks you can use with bids and keywords that will ensure that you own a lot more real estate on your Amazon product pages. It’s called defensive advertising, and Ginger is going to tell us all about it. One of the most frustrating things about Advertising on Amazon is the fact that the website is almost designed to drive people away from your products. On the product page of your book, you might have multiple competing ribbons… Read More >
The right mindset can lead to successful advertising
By: Ginger | Posted on April 2, 2021
Buying all the right courses, reading all the right books, and watching all the right YouTube videos still won’t guarantee a successful advertising campaign strategy for your books – so consider Ginger’s tips for dipping your finger into marketing without losing your mind (or the shirt off your back.) The Advertising Mindset Here’s something I often hear from frustrated authors. “Advertising doesn’t work.” And I know exactly how they feel. After you’ve conquered the initial challenges of self-publishing – namely just getting your book out there – it’s not uncommon to get even more frustrated when your book just won’t sell. With all of the changes Amazon’s made recently, a successful advertising campaign right out of the gate is a more elusive dream than it’s ever been – but even with great book ads, it’s not exactly easy to supercharge your writing career. That’s because writing books and selling… Read More >
