F is for Facebook Ads or Free book promotions

Facebook Ads

I know lots of indie authors (and increasingly traditionally published authors who are buying stock of their own book and selling it directly to readers) want to know more about FB ads and how to get more eyes on their brilliant books!

I’ve had some experience with FB ads, trying a range of strategies for both my MG and YA books over the first year or so I was indie published - I’ve not tried it for over a year now, so do bear that in mind as I discuss my experience - things may have changed.

With children’s books, it’s much harder as hardly anyone under 30 is on Facebook and so unless your audience is 30+ adults, then it will be a tough sell - I think you’re likely to be losing money.

The exceptions to that are when maybe parents or grandparents are targeted, and PBs in particular can still work with FB ads but especially if you are POD and not printing offset in bulk, the margins are so small, it’s difficult to make it work.

Those who do make it work are generally doing offset print runs and selling direct for the much greater margins that are available via that method.

Amazon Ads gave both me, and several others I’ve spoken to about this, a much better return for kids books, so that’s worth looking into instead of FB ads, perhaps. I’m no expert, so do all your research and hard work before doing any ads.

All that said, I’ve done 2 FB Ads courses and here are some of the things that are suggested to help make them work if you’re going to go for it:

• Audience targeting

  • Now I’ve seen some recent discourse on this, and pros and cons of targeting and not targeting but generally speaking you want your ads shown to people who are in the right age range and have the right interests to potentially purchase your book. In the past, it was iron clad that you should use targeting of geography, age, using keyword like ‘kindle reader’ or ‘free book’ or lookalike authors for your work. I’m not sure everyone subscribes to this approach now and they target much wider, but again this is where you’ll have to do your research and make a choice that’s best for you.

• Good images/videos/text

  • It goes without saying (I hope) that these elements are the thing that will get your potential reader to stop scrolling and pay attention to your ad and hopefully entice them to click on the link and buy your book.

• Compelling blurb/cover

  • If you’ve got them clicking your ad, now you need to sell the book - your cover and blurb will do the heavy lifting here - and this is why I always say to not scrimp on the cover. I don’t care what anyone says, books are JUDGED on their covers, especially in such a wide-choice and crowded market.

• Offer incentives

  • You might offer a free chapter or even a free novella/novel to anyone who clicks on an ad and maybe signs up to your newsletter. This might seem crazy but it’s been proven to help grow newsletter lists and those are your only real surefire way to connect with your readers directly, so it’s often worth it in the long run if that subscriber gets the free book and then buys your next 5 or 10 books and tells 5 friends about it.

There’s loads and loads more but that’s enough to get a start with, I think.

I would just finish on a word of caution with ads, especially if you only have 1 book in a series out, or if it’s standalone. It’s hard to generate a low enough click rate on the ad to actually generate any profit, especially if your margins are tight, so do all the maths in the advance, so you know exactly what kind of cost each click should be for you, and keep an eye on the numbers especially initially to make sure your budget doesn’t spiral out of control.

FB ads, unlike Amazon ads, will use up ALL of your daily ads budget, no matter what. Amazon ads use pay per click, so it can be a slightly less costly way of exploring ads.

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Free Book Promotions

This is a topic I’ve covered quite a bit already, and I don’t have loads more new stuff to say about it, so I’ll link all my previous posts on it below.

However, just to say that again this is a great strategy for those who are a few books in and where giving away a first book for free can be a great way to get sales on later books in the series, to get more eyes on the book for reviews, to boost your Amazon ranking in the free charts, or to get people signed up to your newsletter.

It’s a viable and useful strategy to have in your indie author armoury, so do consider it, if you think it’s appropriate for where you’re at in the your career. Probably with only 1 book, you’d not want to give that away for free unless there’s a clear purpose.

If you’re a few books in, it might be perfect for you.

I’ve also talked about these more specifically in the B is for BookBub and D is for Discounts sections of my A-Z, both below:

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See previous posts below for much more info on both ads and promotions:

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I hope these emails are still useful to you all - it’s always good to get a comment or some feedback from those reading it, or just a like on the post to show you’re reading it - definitely encourages me to write another one and to spend more time on making it as useful as possible.

Until next time,

May the Force be with you!