From Jane Friedman:
When authors want to advertise their books, three advertising platforms spring to mind for most: Facebook ads, Amazon ads, and BookBub ads.
And while each of these platforms can be amazing in their own right and even more so when used holistically together, without a strong foundation (i.e. a great book that has been edited and proofread, a strong book description, right pricing for your category or genre, a professional-looking book cover that fits in your genre, etc.), no amount of advertising can sell a poor quality book.
Once you have a strong foundation, the truthis that advertising takes time to perfect; it takes testing; it takes patience, persistence, and, ultimately, it takes money.
However, let’s brighten things up.
When you get your ads dialed in, they can truly transform your career.
As an example, my wife is an author of fantasy novels. Before we started advertising her debut series of books, we were lucky if they pulled in $40 per month!
Last month, this same series earned $8,550 in royalties, with $5,200 of profit—and that’s with just one series of three books; the fourth book is due out later this year.
And the advertising platform that did the brunt of the leg work was…
Facebook ads.
Let’s dive into it. Here’s what you’ll learn.
- Why Facebook offers authors an incredible opportunity to position themselves in front of their ideal readers
- When to use Facebook ads
- Are Facebook ads worth your time and money?
- How to create scroll-stopping Facebook ads
- My top 5 Facebook ads tips for authors
The Facebook ads opportunity
Facebook’s biggest and most valuable asset is data. As an advertiser on Facebook, you can tap into this data and pinpoint the exact people (readers) you want to reach with your ads.
As an example, if you know your readers:
- Live in New York
- Are female
- Aged between 45 and 55
- Work as an accountant
- Have been a newlywed for 6 months
- Recently moved
- Enjoy French cuisine
- Own a dog and a fish
- And do yoga
You could potentially target them! Now, I wouldn’t recommend being this granular with your targeting; this is just an exaggerated example to show you how much Facebook knows about its user base. In fact, I have seen better results by leaving my targeting fairly open. I trust Facebook enough to go out and find the right people to position the books I’m advertising in front of.
So what sort of targeting should you be doing with your Facebook ads?
Targeting is a big topic and what works for one author won’t necessarily work for another. However, myself and many other authors have seen the best results by targeting:
- Author names
- Book / series titles
- TV shows
- Movies
- Genres (e.g., romantic fantasy)
As long as your targeting is relevant to the book you’re advertising, it’s worth testing. That’s not to say that every target you test will be a winner, but the more relevant you can be, the higher the chance of your Facebook ads converting into sales and therefore providing you with a positive Return on Ad Spend (ROAS); in other words, profit.
When researching potential targets, I can’t recommend enough that you keep track of all your tests in a spreadsheet. I have built my own Targeting and Tracking spreadsheet which you can use for free; it’s included in my Author Ads Toolkit, which comes with several other valuable resources.
It’s also worth noting that Facebook ads allow you to advertise not just on the Facebook News Feed, although that is where you are likely to see the majority of your traffic coming from, but also on Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, Instagram Feed, Facebook Messenger and many more.
. . . .
Before we move on, let’s first take a quick look at what a Facebook ad actually looks like.
This is one of the ads I’ve run for my wife’s series of fantasy novels.
If you’ve spent any length of time scrolling on your Facebook News Feed, I’m sure you recognize the layout and style of this ad. As you can see, Facebook wants their ads to fit in with an organic post (i.e., not an ad) that you might see from one of your Facebook friends.
. . . .
When to use Facebook ads
Facebook ads can be extremely powerful in many scenarios; whether you use them in all these scenarios or just one or two will depend on your ultimate goals and your strategy for building a career as an author.
Here are the 6 scenarios I like to use Facebook ads for:
- Book launches
- Promotions (e.g., $0.99 sale for 7 days)
- Evergreen sales (e.g., continuously advertising Book 1 of a series)
- Cross-series Retargeting (e.g. retarget people who have seen Book 1 of your series in a Facebook ad with Book 1 of another of your series in a similar genre)
- Same-series retargeting (e.g. if your books can be read in any order, retarget people who have seen one book from your series in a Facebook ad and show them another book from that same series)
- Building your mailing list (e.g., giving people a free copy of one of your books in exchange for their email address)
By no means do you need to use Facebook ads for each of these scenarios! Start slow and then build at a pace that works for you once you begin to see results.
Link to the rest at Jane Friedman