How to Sell A Book, if you are made out of GOLD

Last week, we dealt with the cheap and unglamorous world of book promo sites.

This week, we go to Madison Avenue, or at least to Silicon Valley. We’re talking digital advertising and, specifically, advertising on Facebook.

Now, before we go any further, I need to tell you that this is a complicated subject and small errors can quickly become costly. One email is not enough to fully explain the ins and outs.

Also, while I’m a more than competent Facebook advertiser, I’m not a seasoned expert. For both of those reasons, you should use this email as an introduction only – a first step. I’ve put some further reading in the PSes.

Please use it; it’ll be expensive if you don’t.

What is a Facebook ad?

A Facebook ad looks something like this:

The various components of the ad are as follows:

• Sponsor identifier: You’re the sponsor of the ad so it’ll be your name (or writer-pseudonym) in the top left.
• Primary text: That’s the bit of text that sits above the image. “6,000 5-star reviews…” The position of the text will vary depending exactly where in FB’s ecosystem the ad is shown.
• The image: That’s the picture, obviously. (Andjust so you know, the sale ISN’T running, so don’t bomb over to Amazon to find it.)
• Destination URL: The ad won’t send people to Amazon’s home page, it’ll send them to my book series page. But you want to show a tidied up version of the URL, just to keep the ad looking pretty.
• The headline. This is the text right at the bottom. (“Save over 50% …”) I always think it’s weird that the headline sits at the very bottom, but I don’t make the rules.
• The Call-To-Action (CTA): That’s the “Shop Now” button, in this example.

This email is going to offer a very swift overview of how to use these various elements – but, again, please think of this as a quick orientation only.

What you’re aiming to create

A good ad is sexy, spare, focused – and repellent.

It’s sexy, in that it should attract the eye, and arouse reader-lust in the right group of readers.

It needs to be spare, because you don’t have a lot of text to play with and you need to make sure that you give the essential messages fast and unmistakably.

It has to be focused, because your ad needs to tell people what it’s advertising. In the example I’ve given, it should be clear that I’m offering (a) a crime series, (b) it’s on sale [except, it’s not – this is just an example], and (c) what I’m offering is ebooks on Amazon.

This is also why the ad also has to be repellent. I actively don’t want ad-clicks from people who want to watch TV crime, or only buy print, or only use Apple as their bookstore. Those clicks will cost money and destroy returns. To those people, the ad has to say, very clearly, “this ad is not for you.”

How to build a persuasive creative

In terms of primary text, the basic rule is that you need your tagline followed by an explicit statement of what you want the user to do next. In my example, the tagline spends two lines pitching Fiona’s unique quality and reader reactions, followed by half a line which tells the user what to do next. (And you’ll note, I’m explicit about “download on Amazon”: I don’t want clicks from non-Kindle users.)

Don’t use more than 125 characters for all this, or your text will be cut off. It’s best to come up with several (three?) variants for primary text. One variant might emphasise a price discount, another might emphasise social proof (“X number of 5-star reviews!”), a third might pick out some key property of the book. Facebook will be able to test which variant works best for you, so give it some options.

Your ad image matters immensely. The basic rule here is that you use the cover art (without text) as a background and overlay a book cover on that art. You might think that sticking a book cover on top of the artwork is not exactly a way to make the artwork look its best, and it’s not. But again, your ad has to say: “I am selling books, nothing else.” You can get cheaper clicks if you don’t include a book cover… but your conversions are likely to suffer.

It’s also tempting to overcrowd your image. You’ve got some great reader quotes! You’ve got how many 5-star reviews? And wouldn’t it be nice to cram a bit of your blurb on there as well?

But radical minimalism tends to work best. A few words to convey whatever it is you want a reader to hear and retain. And a price alert. That’s it.

The colours you choose to do all this should, almost always, be either black text on yellow (like wasps) or white text on red (like danger signs). Using other combinations steps away from the tools used by generations of marketers. That’s probably not a good idea.

One positive in all this: you don’t need a designer or any fancy software to create these images for you. I made this image on the free version of Canva in well under an hour. The image above is 1080×1080 pixels. A letterbox format is also possible but tends to work less well. You can try both, but make sure you’re working to the standard FB formats.

Your headline is the only other element that truly matters. You have 45 characters to play with here, but shorter is often better. Pick the thing you want to emphasise (“Sale, now 50% off”, for example) and keep it short.

Your call-to-action button won’t make a huge difference, but on the whole you want to tell users what you’re expecting: so “Shop now” rather than “Learn more”.

No, but really: how to build a persuasive creative

What I’ve just told you is not the law; it’s a set of guidelines that works for most ads and most authors most times.

But you need to test. Testing is the only route to excellence. You need to generate multiple bits of text. You need to generate multiple images. You need to refine those, by eye, the very best you can. Then you feed them to FB and let it test what works. And that, in the end, is how you perfect the ads. You build several great variants, then test. Then you do it again. And then again.

Where do you want to show your ads?

Facebook will offer you a million different placement options, across its whole sprawl of websites. Many of those placements will offer much lower cost clicks than the Facebook Feed placement, but they tend to come with lower conversion rates too. So you need to test. Try (a) letting Facebook do its stuff, and (b) restricting placement to the FB Feed only. Remember, you’re not looking to see which option delivers a better cost per click. You’re only concerned about sales. There are good indie authors who favour approach (a) and others who favour (b). All that matters to you is what works for your readers.

Who do you want to show your ads to?

A big question, this.

A few years back, I’d have been encouraging you to go and ferret out your audience by targeting the readerships of comparable authors, and TV shows that chime with your work, and figuring out the demographic niche that works best for you.

These days, Facebook’s AI can essentially figure this all out by itself. On the whole, I think you need to tell FB:

• What country to target
• That you want people who read books on Kindle
• That’s it.

There are highly successful marketers who don’t even restrict by Kindle usage, which somewhat puzzles me, but again: you can test with and without that restriction. And remember, Facebook’s AI is very effective, but it needs data. You can’t spend $20 and hope to have found your optimal targeting. It doesn’t work like that!

What results are you looking for?

When you’re setting up your ad, Facebook will ask you what you want to achieve. Do you want engagement (clicks and likes and so on)? Or website traffic? Or sales?

Now, of course you want sales – but you have a problem, because the sales are being made on Amazon, a website you probably don’t own. Since Amazon won’t tell Facebook which user has or has not bought your book, that route is simply closed.

You therefore have to ask Facebook to optimise for “website traffic”, and Facebook will duly oblige. It will report its success or failure in terms of CPC, or cost-per-click. And yes, this metric is important. But in practice what matters most is cost-per-sale, and Facebook can’t tell you, because it doesn’t know.

You can solve this problem in one of two ways, and they’re both fine.

One is: you just average out your baseline sales before you start advertising. Then you advertise and see how much above baseline you achieve.

The second (and my preferred) approach is to use the Amazon Ads attribution tool to figure out precisely what sales come from what campaigns. I’ve put a link in the PSes to some useful resources.

But whichever way you approach this, the arithmetic is little muddy. What counts as success?

The obvious way to think about things is:

1. How much have I spent in terms of ad-spend?
2. How much money have I earned in royalties as a direct result?

Except –

Directly boosting the sales of Title #1 by advertising will also increase its sales indirectly by lifting its visibility on Amazon and thereby attracting more organic sales.

And that visibility lift will have some afterlife – if you engage in an intense promo, you may feel the effects of it some 30 days after a promo ends.

And if you’re writing a series (as you kind of need to be for this kind of approach to work), then you should in principle be happy to pay, say, $0.10 to get a reader into #1 of your series, if you have a high degree of confidence that a sufficient proportion of readers will go on to buy #2, #3, #4 and so on.

So the benefit of a sale is very likely worth more than that one sale… you just don’t know how much.

As a result, it’s hard to say what an adequate cost-per-sale is. It genuinely does depend on your objectives and what you have to sell. You need to figure this out for yourself, based on the data you have in front of you.

How much do you want to spend?

I’ve told you to generate multiple versions of your text, and multiple images, and to test them all. I’ve said to test placements and audiences. I’ve said that estimation of actual success is somewhat muddy. Furthermore, Facebook’s ability to snuffle out the right traffic for you has become impressive – but it needs data to work with, and those early clicks cost money.

Unfortunately, all that says that you can’t really engage intelligently in a Facebook campaign without being willing to plonk down a significant sum of money, which you are very likely to lose. I’d say that you probably need to commit $150-200 just to get your feet wet: that is, to get your testing to a point at which you might start making (or at least stop losing) money. And that would actually be a good result. You’ll only achieve that if your images, your text, your campaign set up, and your Amazon books page itself are all excellent.

When and if you think you have a successful campaign, you’ll probably want to run that at no less than $10 a day, and perhaps more like $20/day. Just go carefully – and watch that data!

When and how to use Facebook ads

The book promo sites, which we looked at last week, can certainly add a chunk of low-cost, fair-quality traffic on demand – but you can’t scale up, or not beyond a point.

Amazon ads have a huge potential audience, but – even for really proficient advertisers – it’s hard to get scale and it’s essentially impossible to support a surge-marketing campaign.

Facebook, on the other hand? If you want to surge market via FB, it’ll be more than happy to take your cash – and deliver your ads in potentially huge volumes. That quality of scalability is vital to most seasoned book marketers. It’s going to be an element of any large-scale, professional digital marketing campaign for books.

That said, it is NOT likely that you can earn money by marketing a single book: you probably want to have a decently performing series of three books first. (Decently performing? That means good evidence that a good proportion of Book #1 readers will end up buying Books #2 and #3.) As I say, Facebook is not a newbie-type technique.

In short…

Facebook ads are powerful – potentially career-altering – but also dangerous. It’s easy to overspend and lose money. People who lose are more common than those who win.

And again: please don’t forget the qualifiers that have studded this series of emails. You can’t sensibly market bad books. You can’t sensibly market books whose packaging (covers, blurb, and the rest) are subpar. You are competing – literally, not metaphorically – against the best authors and book-marketers in the world. So match those standards.

Next week

Next week, we’re going to talk about mailing lists – and a ship that can sail faster than the wind.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: Query Letters

It’s been a while since we’ve looked at Query Letters on Feedback Friday, so let’s go for it today. 

Your task: simply this – present your draft query letter. Post yours here when you’re ready to share it.

Simple, right? 

Till soon 

Harry