Plenty of indie authors tout the magic of BookBub for its Featured Deal promotions. These elusive deals can help spike sales, of course, but they’re not the only way BookBub can help you find new readers.
When it comes to advertising, you may think BookBub ads are only for books that are free or $0.99. But that is not how I use them.
On Facebook, authors who want to target the fans of certain authors with their ads can only do so for a handful of big names, such as Lee Child or Terry Pratchett. However, on BookBub, you can target almost anyone making worthwhile sales.
Let’s say, for example, that you write a Cozy Mystery with a dog in it and want to target me because your covers and stories are similar in flavor to mine.
The author targeting section on BookBub Ads
By targeting me—or, more accurately, my readers—with your ads, you can aim your ad directly at the readers who like my books. In some cases, the pool of potential readers you’re targeting will be small compared with the audiences you can find on Facebook. However, these are readers whose interest in books is sufficient to make them subscribe to a daily email.
You can test out comparable authors for just a few bucks and find out if their readers will be attracted to your books.
Why It Works
I don’t have the column space to explain all the reasons you want to target successful authors with BookBub ads, so here is the biggest one: Amazon ads are all about relevance. New books have no sales data, so those titles have no relevance. But you know what books and authors should be good targets for your ads, and you can game the system by using BookBub to connect your books to those with sales data.
This is how it works:
Target the author of your choice with BookBub ads.
Sell enough books to show up in that author’s also-bought section, meaning you’re now relevant and have sales data on Amazon.
Push more traffic to that author with Amazon ads.
Ad Creation
For my BookBub ads, I use the same images and captions as I do for Facebook ads. The pixel width and height are different, but most image platforms, such as Book Brush, have automated templates to account for this.
The image from a recent ad I ran
One good thing about BookBub is that you only need to worry about the image. There is no space for clever copy or headlines, so use images that worked for your Facebook ads and just give them a great caption.
Setting Up Your Campaign
In my BookBub ad campaigns, I use cost-per-click (CPC) instead of cost-per-thousand (CPM). Many may argue with this, but if your ads get no clicks, it costs you nothing using CPC. BookBub will suggest a bid range, and I usually go a few cents over the minimum and run ads continuously at a low budget of $5 per day. I then shut them off if they don’t sell books.
How do I know if they are selling? I use Amazon Attribution Links to track individual sales for each ad I run. You can remove the guesswork and gain data to analyze by giving each ad a unique link.
The campaign for one of my boxed sets. Fourth from the top is an ad group with BookBub in the title.
When you are setting up the attribution links, just click “New” in the Select A Publisher section and type in “BookBub.” In the ad group name, create a designation that makes it clear this ad is on BookBub. When you revisit to monitor your results, you will be able to see at a glance if the ad is generating sales.
Click “New” in the Select A Publisher section and type in” BookBub” to help accurately track your ads’ performance on the platform using Amazon Attribution.
BookBub’s Featured Deals earn plenty of attention among indie authors, but don’t overlook your advertising opportunities with the platform. Get the image and audience right, and you should see very good sales.
Steve Higgs
Now retired from the military, he is having a ball writing mystery stories and crime thrillers and claims to have more than a hundred books forming an unruly queue in his head as they clamour to get out. He lives in the south-east corner of England with a duo of lazy sausage dogs. Surrounded by rolling hills, brooding castles, and vineyards, he doubts he will ever leave.
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