Cost-effective advertising for self-published authors

The One Sale on the One Book is Never Enough

Advertising is expensive, and I'm going to share with you what I'm learning as I build Bookmotion and test advertising for our members. We've made an intelligent step in pooling our resources to direct advertising toward one site, thus reducing the cost individual cost. A second intelligent step was made in combining this with managed Bookfunnel services, because our members pay less for the benefits of being in Bookfunnel promotions, and part of the money they do spend goes toward their advertising here. All funds spent on Bookmotion by Literary Salon subscribers go to pay for advertising and Bookfunnel memberships. As wise and wonderful as all that is, though, it's not enough.

The next step in cost-effective advertising is not to fully rely on paid advertising in the first place. In the Literary Salon newsletter, I'll feature free and discounted books from Bookmotion, and while normally I would have written an article like this for the newsletter, more of the Bookmotion-specific content will appear here on the website. Our authors will link to these articles in their own newsletters, and all this effort will go to improve search-engine optimization for the site. That way more people will find us through free searches.

When it comes to advertising your books, this brings us back to the reality of the expense, and I'll share with you my current efforts to reduce that cost. First, I'm concentrating on CPM not CPC, and that means I'm paying per one thousand impressions and not per click. Per click gets more expensive and can pay off when your product is more expensive than buying a novel, an eBook, or a free giveaway. Those freebies are the reason for our existence, and I've had to work hard to justify the expense of advertising.

I've tested small ad runs, changing one aspect at a time and watching for differences in generating clicks, but I've also experimented with the pages these ads point to, watching to see what would lead to the greatest conversion rates. Finally, I've tested ads on both Facebook and Bookbub, and while these tests are ongoing, I've learned a great deal already about squeezing the greatest value out of every dollar.

For now, I've abandoned two concept that were early assumptions for how this site would run. First, I'm not currently running any Facebook ads, and second, I'm not using the front page as a our landing page for the ads.

Instead, I'm leaning into Bookbub. 

I need to mention that I test the ad graphics, and this is important because the results surprised me. The more sophisticated looking ad underperformed the simple, nearly cheesy-looking version. That being true, I'm running with the cheese. 

A good ad conversion rate on Bookbub is considered 2%-3%, according to the experts. Those experts have big ad budgets and are happy with that conversion rate. I have to make every penny count, so I'm doing two things; I'm targeting comparisons to author's with minor followings--which is good practice in general--and I'm restricting my advertising to markets where eBooks trend the most expensive.

Let me explain those two concepts. 

When targeting an author, what you're doing is targeting that author's audience. On Bookbub, authors have their pages and their fans will follow that page. I'm looking for an author whose audience will want to pick up your book and whose following is in the neighborhood of 10k people, not hundreds of thousands and not millions. Nobody cares if I say a book is for fans of Stephen King, but if you love a lesser-known author and the book is for their fans, that captures your attention. This brings us back to the physical ad where the most important factors are the name of the comp author and the price. There's not much room for anything else. This isn't a branding opportunity.

The second of those concepts is regional targeting. Currently, all my advertising efforts are in Canada and Australia because that's where eBooks are more expensive. A free book and a discounted book mean more there. I said earlier that click rates of 2-3% are considered good. By limiting by regional focus, I'm getting click rates above 6 and 7%.

The better our click rates, the less we're spending per visitor, but those visits don't mean anything if they go away empty-handed. I had to learn to give the customer what they expected. They clicked on an ad for a specific book, and coming to a page where they're given many choices, of which that book is one, isn't what they expect. That dissonance between expectation and reality results in the visitor leaving the site. Instead, they need to land on a page dedicated to that book and which gives them the information they couldn't get from the ad. That page takes them to a newsletter sign-up page, and once that's done, they come to the fulfillment page where they can download the book.

This results in more conversions from visitor to subscriber, but it's still too expensive. If you're advertising a 0.99 book on Amazon, for example, you're likely to lose money on that one sale. The purpose is to generate a number of those sales across a string of days so that Amazon takes notice and promotes you more in-house. For Amazon, the greatest importance of your sales is that it creates more opportunity to cross-sell other items and make that customer worth more. To make advertising work, it's imperative that we do the same.

I'm testing a number of ways to extend the sale, and one question will be how much can we offer before we confuse the customer and reduce response instead of increase it. On my current test page, after they download the free book, they have an opportunity to go to Amazon to grab another book for 0.99. That offer is above the download, so the customer won't miss it, and below the download they're presented with a couple of books, as closely related as possible, to continue their browsing and maybe download a new freebie. Of course, all the menu choices are available, but early results suggest these largely go ignored.

Not yet implemented is a questionnaire, asking what they would like to see in the site for them to become regular customers. The concept behind this is that in addition to the suggestions it will generate, it shows we're interested and it plants the idea of becoming a regular customer. The questionnaire will be available as a menu item, as well as embedded in the fulfillment page, allowing them the freedom, should they feel so inspired, to explore the site more before they answer. 

Naturally, that's exactly what we hope it inspires.

Running advertising is a an expensive proposition for self-published authors, and it takes more than slapping in a graphic and paying to have it run, but there are ways we make advertising work for us. It takes planning, testing, and adapting to our findings to capture the best results for our money spent.

Check back for more updates and tips as we learn and grow.

Many thanks,

Thaddeus Thomas