Selling Books, Part 3: Paid Marketing

From my observations, paid book marketing is a generational thing. Older authors (ye old timers) have been bombarded with ads their whole lives; TV commercials, magazine ads. "That's just how you do it," they figure. Nowadays, no young person watches commercial television, and who reads the few magazines still in circulation?  

Sadly, neither group approaches book marketing the right way, because there is no right way. 

I believe book promo sites exist to exploit the authors who still believe that one just needs to run an ad and voila! And when that ad doesn't work and the lone brave author dares to voice his dissatisfaction, he'll be told he did something wrong--wrong price, wrong cover, wrong attitude (probably). 

But social media doesn't work, either. Most people are on social media to be seen; not to see. It's marketers marketing to other marketers. 

I have no idea of the number of promo sites that exist, but I know it's enormous. With my current novel, I tried 26 of them, got rejected by one other, and decided that a few more were too expensive. In choosing where to spend my ad dollars, I referred to several published lists that ranked the companies according to their perceived success rates. That's not an ideal way to choose, because so much depends on a book's genre, but every author has to start somewhere.

The most touted site, and has been the most touted for a long time, is BookBub. BookBub doesn't set a flat fee to promote a book; an author can spend as much or as little as she wants (within realistic limits, of course). BookBub also has targeting options: one can choose to designate comp (comparative) authors, and an author can target specific geographic regions. (Both Facebook and Amazon offer that as well, but most promo sites do not.) Bear in mind that all sites except for Amazon and Facebook heavily encourage discounting the book's price. That makes sense, because readers who subscribe to these newsletters are looking for bargains. 

When one takes a look at a BookBub newsletter, however, they find that they are scrolling through a block of trade-published books that the publisher has chosen to discount. Your little indie book will appear at the tail end of the list, and it's going to be swallowed up by all the big guys that come before it. It just looks puny sharing the same space as a New York Times best seller. Any author who's advertising with any site really needs to subscribe to its newsletter, preferably before purchasing an ad, to find out what they're getting themselves into.

BookBub does other things that put an indie book at a disadvantage. Whereas the trade books' ads include big red blocks showing the various places to purchase the book, the indie book doesn't get that same treatment. The indie book is really an afterthought. And if you want to go with BookBub, have a short, snappy tagline ready, because you'll only have room on the template to use about six or seven words (again, unlike the full descriptions accompanying the trade books).  

Regardless of David Gaughran's affection for BookBub, the place is not what it used to be. Like everything else in the book-pushing world, everyone now knows about the place and it's become over-saturated by authors trying to outbid each other to score that one lonely newsletter placement. I've run a few ads for a few different books over the past year or two, and my results, while never good, have deteriorated to the point where I didn't secure one purchase for Running From Herself.

Then there are what I call the "baby" sites; not baby as in age, but in reach and efficacy. Many of them have animal names, and I'm not going to list them, but here and here are two of the lists I consulted when deciding where to spend my marketing dollars. Here is Indies Today's list of rankings. The average cost of all the places I used was $32.00, but their prices ranged from $10.00 up to $40.00 (my bid for a BookBub ad).

As I noted, an author really needs to subscribe to these sites' newsletters before deciding to place an ad with them. Some sites lean heavily toward specific genres, while some are not represented at all. If a promo site's hook is romance, don't bother signing up to advertise your literary fiction novel. Along with studying their newsletters, learn the number of subscribers each site has. Generally this will be listed on their "About" or "FAQ" page.

It's possible that my novel was an anomaly, but none of these sites except three sold any copies of my book; two sold three copies each and one that was only rated a C+ managed to move 11.

If an author wants an ego boost and is not averse to giving his or her book away, FreeBooksy produces great results. Luckily (?) for me, my genre is on its less popular list, so a one-day promo cost me $60.00. I ran two separate promos for Running From Herself, which resulted in a total of 1,275 downloads. All that got me, honestly, was a very brief Amazon rankings bump; no reviews. For authors with a series to promote, a giveaway could be beneficial in driving sales of the follow-up books in the series, although very few free books ever get read.

The two biggies are Amazon Ads and Facebook (Meta) ads. Both of their pricing models have pros and cons. The pros are that you can choose to spend as little as you want per day; the con is that an author is easily tempted to overspend, particularly if her ad is not producing desired results. (Doubling down is something I've been notorious for.) Almost everyone advises doing A/B testing, which is trying different ads out to determine which one works the best (sigh). If I'm buying an ad, I'm already spending money I can't afford to spend, so "auditioning" is not in my budget. Nevertheless, when my Facebook ad, which I was assured was really, really going to work phenomenally, didn't work at all, I, yes, doubled down and created a different ad. That one did even worse. I managed to stop myself from overspending, though. My per-ad dollar output was minimal and I stopped the second ad before its scheduled end date.

I do not (yet) know if Amazon ads fare any better. I mentioned in a previous post that I never gave Amazon a fair trial. On the plus side, since I didn't get any clicks, the one-time ad for my novella didn't cost me anything.

It's important to note that marketing tactics one might think of as free, generally aren't. Bookstagrammers and whatever TikTok reviewers call themselves charge for reviews. Most book bloggers do, too. Whatever you do, don't hire a marketing firm unless you're rich enough to afford a reputable one. Those who advertise their marketing services online are scams--scams that cost thousands of dollars for basically things an author can do for free.

No, you can't sell your book without people knowing about your book. But do your research before committing dollars to anything. You'll probably not know what works well and what doesn't until you try things, but you owe it to yourself to be as well informed as you can be.