Blurbly.appBlurbly.appSo you've just published your first book. Congratulate yourself! This is quite an accomplishment. You've put in the time and effort to write, edit, and design the cover for your book. It's been a long road, but you've made it. Now it's time to take a deep breath, sit back, watch the readers roll in. Right?
Wrong!
Now it's time to market your book, and with so many available methods for an author to do that it can get kind of confusing. You may wonder to yourself, what's the best advertising platform for authors, or should I use Amazon or Facebook ads? This is no easy and obvious choice. Both advertising platforms have their advantages, as well as their disadvantages, and today I'm going to break down my experiences using both Facebook ads and Amazon ads to market my books.
If you're an author looking to use Facebook ads to market your book I'm here to let you know that it can be very advantageous. Facebook ads drive traffic. Facebook ads also allow you room to really sell your book with text. By that I mean that you can write almost as much as you want about your book. You don't have to limit yourself to a short piece of ad copy while trying to fit all of the juicy, intriguing bits about your book into it.
But I will suggest that you start your Facebook ad copy with a strong enough hook to make a potential reader click to see more, or better yet, click the link to buy your book without needing to see more. Facebook only displays the first couple lines of ad copy when a Facebook user scrolls past your ad. That hook has to be strong enough to pique their interest.
Targeting can be a bit interesting on Facebook when it comes to marketing books. Facebook allows you to target big name authors, but I will admit that the selection is slim, especially if you don't write in a big name genre.
For example, my book Sire is an African American romance novel. I couldn't find ANY authors in that genre to use for targeting. So it was necessary that I think outside the box. A number of keywords that were related to my book and genre were searched for on the Facebook ad platform and in the end I found a few really good target keywords that I used to run ads for Sire. The keywords black books, African American books, and African American fiction worked great for driving traffic to my sales page. My sales were profitable as well.
But here's the problem. Book royalties are usually dispersed a few months after the sell has happened. Facebook spends your ad budget no matter what that budget may be. So when spending a lot of money on Facebook to drive traffic you'll need another source of income to invest in your advertising until your royalties get deposited. This can be difficult for people who don't have much extra cash lying around - like me!
Overall, my experience with using Facebook ads as an author was a positive one. The user interface of the Ad Manager app was simple and easy to use, but also limited compared to setting up ads on the desktop site. But if your budget doesn't allow for a big ad spend while you wait for your royalties then maybe Amazon's advertising platform may be a better and more sustainable option.
I absolutely love the way Amazon ads don't spend my budget. Yeah, that might sound crazy, but Amazon is the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race advertising platform. That's because authors only get charged when a potential reader clicks on the ad, differing from Facebook's pay per view advertising model.
When advertising your book on Amazon you can target pretty much any author you can think of. Even a specific book or genre. This makes finding your target audience super easy, and one of the most important aspects of marketing is targeting your desired audience.
It's important that you be patient when first advertising on Amazon. You probably won't get a ton of impressions on the first day. That's fine. Just keep creating ads and be patient. Don't use too many keywords in your keyword ads and I also suggest you only target one book or genre/category per ad as this will allow you to more accurately monitor data and make adjustments. Simply put, you'll be able to easily see which books or categories are converting readers and making a profit so you can turn off those that aren't.
One con of Amazon advertising is that your ad copy is limited to 150 characters, including spaces. This means you'll have a very short window to give enough information to make a potential reader want to know more about your book. Not an easy task at all.
A great resource for learning about advertising on Amazon and writing ad copy is Bryan Cohen's Ad Profit Challenge. Bryan and his team are absolute professionals when it comes to writing ad copy and the challenges teach you a lot about the process of writing ad copy. But the Ad Profit Challenge only happens periodically. Sadly.
If you need to advertise your book now and know nothing about writing ad copy, Blurbly.app has an ad copy writer that allows authors to generate book descriptions using the power of artificial intelligence. And the best part is that Blurbly.app is completely free to use. I love the results, but I'm biased. So check out the free ad copy writer yourself here, and if you feel the same way I do about the results you can give us a little love on social media by using the hashtag #blurbly in your post.
Blurbly.app is a free tool to help authors write a book description or ad copy for their books, as beginning authors go through their own learning process. While not meant to be the end all of book description writing, Blurbly.app is a great starting point for both new authors and veteran authors and it's my advice to always edit book descriptions and ad copy to your specific needs.
And since Blurbly.app is free you can generate book descriptions until you are satisfied with the result. As a free tool I do ask that you shop our affiliate links to keep Blurbly.app up and running as a free tool.