- Plenty of authors want to sell their book
without leaving their house
or having to talk to other humans.
I get that.
And while building an audience
and connecting with them regularly
remains the best way to sell books,
there are plenty of ad platforms you can use
to give your book a sales boost.
For the last three months,
I've been deep into one of those platforms,
testing ads, BookBub.
So if you're curious about running promotions on BookBub,
then this video is for you.
(upbeat music)
Hey there, I'm Julie, the Book Broad,
multi award-winning author and founder
of the fabulous self-publishing services company
Book Launchers.
Of course, at Book Launchers, we have a wonderful team
of writers, writing coaches, editors, and designers
to help you create a great book.
And then we also surround our authors with support
to help them sell copies, build their brand,
and grow their business with their book.
We run Amazon ads,
but we can't target audiobooks specifically with Amazon ads.
So I've been playing around with Chirp
and running book BookBub ads.
I've submitted for feature deals three times
and I've been rejected every time.
I'll keep going and keep trying,
but in the meantime, I've been running BookBub ads
and today I'm gonna share my five best tips
about BookBub ads for you.
Number one.
You should start by setting up a BookBub profile
and if you can, start building a presence on BookBub
if you plan to run ads.
It will help you with your overall success on BookBub.
Here's my profile.
Here's a quick look at how to edit it.
It's pretty easy to set up,
but having your bio and a tagline ready to go
will make it easier.
You'll also wanna know what genre
people will be using to find you
and you can also try and boost your credibility
by putting some accolades in your profile.
Ultimately, I haven't done that much to develop the profile
of my own on BookBub,
but if you're on BookBub, you can follow me.
Where I think it's really useful
is when you go to an author's book page
and click on get deal alerts,
"save this book to your wishlist
"and we'll notify you when we have a deal."
I think you could be encouraging people
to click on that if you'd like.
So go ahead, do it for my profile,
and let's see if that helps me get a featured deal.
Then you can make sure you've subscribed to this channel
with notifications on
and I'll share all the details
when I do get that featured deal,
including cost and results.
All right, tip two.
BookBub is not like Amazon
or any other ad platform you've been on.
So shake off the idea
that it's going to function like you expect
and be ready to start fresh.
The best resources I have found on BookBub ads
are from BookBub itself and David Gaughran.
Specifically, I followed David Gaughran's book,
BookBub Ads Expert to set things up.
This book is a must-read
if you are serious about going on BookBub.
But here's a few things that I found super weird
about BookBub.
First, their ads are primarily driven
by their featured ads newsletter,
which means the traffic is really in waves.
It isn't like Amazon where they're delivering ads
when someone searches keywords
or like Facebook where they're constantly targeting people
that you want to show your ad to.
This is driven by an email newsletter that is sent out.
So you see a spike and then nothing
and then a spike and then nothing.
It's just a little bit weird when you're not used to that.
For me though, the weirdest and most uncomfortable thing
is that we're tracking CTR, click through rate,
not conversions.
The only way to track conversions is with affiliate links.
This is not a simple process for a lot of authors
because you have to be approved to be an affiliate
in some cases
and then you're monitoring the affiliate links
as well as the ad dashboard.
Can you say dances with spreadsheets?
If you don't have affiliate links,
you're left to estimate your conversions
based on a spreadsheet that BookBub provides
or, if you do a search on Google,
you may find some other people
that have created BookBub ad spreadsheets.
It's all a little unsettling and is a lotta data,
which can be fun for some,
and if you are like me, it's as fun as sitting on pins.
What I found after spending $325 on audiobook ads,
I sold five books.
The click through rate was doing really well on this one,
so I left it,
but after a month, I dug into the data
and realized that I had a really bad ROI on that one.
So if putting a bunch of data into a spreadsheet
and updating it weekly sounds like fun,
you're gonna love BookBub ads.
If you're like me
and you didn't do it every single week like you should have,
you may find yourself spending more money then makes sense.
Number three.
Your imagery matters a lot.
I tested a lot of different images
for the audiobook in particular, but also my e-book,
and I found that different images performed better
depending on the platform I was targeting,
but I really struggled
to hit a 2% click through rate on anything,
which is what David Gaughran was really pushing in his book
and on his website resources.
At this point, I've turned off all my ads
and I'm going to start it all over again
with an e-book sale we're running
to celebrate Book Launchers five-year anniversary.
So I'll share a recap of how that went
with BookBub afterwards.
But a couple of notes on the images
that did perform the best.
The image with reviews
from places like Midwest Book Reviews, just had an excerpt
performed the best on e-book sales on Apple,
Kobo Canada, and Kobo USA.
This is the winner overall.
But even this one only ever hit a 1.8 click through rate
and it never got higher.
The audio version of this image did not perform over 1%.
So that tells me
that you need to test the imagery by platform
you're selling on
and by what they are doing.
Are they reading the ebook
or are they looking for the audiobook?
This image got the most clicks, but the CTR was weak,
so I had to turn it off after a while.
But because it was getting clicks,
I wanted to give it more time
to see if it would convert to sales,
which it was doing at a 1% click through rate.
It was a challenge.
Now, these are examples of hit imagery
from David Gaughran's website.
The link is in the description below.
As you can see, the examples lean heavily to fiction,
which could also be why
some of the non-fiction books I'm testing
are having a challenge on BookBub.
But there are certainly non-fiction examples here.
Number four.
Finding authors to target your ads to
isn't as easy as you think.
It's less about the author
and more about how many BookBub followers
they have specifically,
which is not as directly correlated
to the popularity of the author as you might think.
Let's face it, there aren't as many business book readers
signing up for BookBub deals as the fiction readers
who often read a book a day.
So here's the list of authors I was researching at first
to give you a sense of who I was targeting.
My thinking was
that if someone was thinking of writing a book,
they might be following these folks
and possibly would be a good fit
for self-publish and succeed.
This is how we approach a lot of Amazon ads and it works,
but again, this is BookBub, not Amazon,
and these follower numbers are just too low
to do much of anything as far as BookBub ad performance.
So, I had to widen the list to more prolific,
well-known writers and the performance was stronger.
But I think that is largely just because
there are more readers of these authors.
And I do get a lotta of clients
that say they wanna target Brené Brown's audience
or an audience like Ryan Holiday or Tim Ferriss.
So it made sense as well.
It's just a much wider net than I expected to have to use
and it could have contributed
to the click through rate challenges I had.
Tip five.
BookBub has a much bigger learning curve than I expected.
Honestly, after three months of working the platform,
I thought I'd be able to share more
of a here's how to succeed on BookBub video with you.
The reality is that I'm starting over with new graphics
and new approaches to get featured deals
and brand new targeting as mentioned above.
Like with any other paid ads,
not all money is going to generate an ROI
in straight dollars.
My spend did generate some sales,
but my return was largely in what I learned about BookBub
and now, I can go at this for round two
and be ready to try it differently
and hopefully make a positive financial ROI this time.
Plenty of authors who have taken the time to master BookBub
do rave about its ability to sell books and grow platforms.
So I'm not giving up after just one round of testing,
but I am curious, have you had success with BookBub ads?
Do you have resources or recommendations
for me or for others?
Please share it in the comments below.
And if you wanna see what else I learned from this journey,
make sure you've subscribed to the channel
and turned those notifications on
so you catch my update videos.
Now, if you're not familiar with Chirp,
this video is one you need to see next,
and if you just want the latest and greatest
from the channel,
well that is waiting for you right here.
So go ahead, click on over,
and let's hang out a little more.