As an indie author, struggling to gain a little attention and grow a following, these early marketing campaigns take on added significance. The deck is already stacked in favor of the giant publishing houses with their automatic name recognition and generous advertising budgets. As an indie author, even if your book is as good or better than what the traditional publishers might typically produce, it's hard to get yourself to appear under the search results for Amazon or other book warehouses. If your book isn't already on a "bestseller" list, you're going to be pretty much invisible. The only way to boost your visibility is therefore to accumulate book reviews (which does boost your likelihood of showing up under Amazon's search algorithms), or with an advertising campaign (which most indie authors have a very limited budget for).
With my second installment in the series due out in December, I have been trying to step up my marketing efforts - which also means marketing the first book in the series as a lead-in to the second. I therefore decided to experiment with a BookBub campaign this past weekend.
To clarify, BookBub offers two distinctly different marketing opportunities. The best known are their "Featured Deals," for which they promote a very select number of book titles across their massive email list of readers. A Featured Deal on BookBub is considered pretty much a guarantee for a book's success. However - landing a Featured Deal can be next to impossible for a new indie author. They usually require a minimum number of positive book reviews before they will begin to contemplate offering a Featured Deal to an indie author.
The other opportunity that they offer is the BookBub ad, which any author, indie or otherwise, can sponsor. These are similar to ads on Amazon or Facebook, with a maximum cost-per-impression or cost-per-click bid being set by the publisher or author.
Not having run an ad on BookBub before, I entered into this using a strategy very similar to what I would have employed with an Amazon Marketplace Service (AMS) ad. There are a number of distinct differences between the two toolsets, however. AMS ads are targeted by keyword, which can be tied to the genre of the book, or to individual authors or book titles in that genre. With a little experimentation, and after reviewing which books readers also purchased in addition to their own, an author or publisher can begin to draw up a picture for where they should be promoting their book to find readers who would likely enjoy reading what they have to offer.
BookBub ads, in contrast, offer the publisher or indie author the choice of either targeting a relatively broad genre, or of narrowing their promotion to target readers who enjoy a specific author. For my first foray into the BookBub advertising world, I therefore set up two separate campaigns, using the same promotional image, one aimed at my genre (fantasy and young adult), and the other aimed at readers who enjoyed or followed particular authors (chosen based on my experience with AMS ads). I also set up both ad campaigns in a manner similar to what I would have done for an AMS ad, choosing to bid on the basis of cost-per-click. The results were surprising.
The BookBub ad campaign aimed at a broader genre pretty much worked in the same manner as an AMS ad would have, with relatively few clicks per impression. In fact, the performance was worse than I would have expected from AMS, with a click-through-rate (number of clicks per impression) of 0.064%. Most sources would suggest that a typical AMS campaign should expect a CTR of around 0.10%, or one click per every thousand impressions.[1] This conforms to my own experience, which would suggest that for a well focused AMS campaign I should expect a CTR of around 0.13%. The broader BookBub ad campaign was therefore unimpressive.
The story was different, however, for the more tightly focused BookBub ad campaign. For this I was targeting readers who followed or had shown an interest in specific authors - using my prior experience with AMS ads. For this ad campaign, I saw an overall CTR of 3.49% - more than ten times the rate that I could have expected from a similar campaign on Amazon. My sales numbers during this promotional period similarly showed that my conversion rate was similarly high.
So a couple of lessons learned from this experience. A well focused BookBub ad, one targeting readers with specific tastes, can expect to see a CTR that's an order of magnitude or more greater than what might be expected from an AMS campaign. Part of this might be due to the fact that for a BookBub ad campaign, the graphic image displayed is submitted by the publisher or author, and can be tailored to that particular campaign. I also concluded that, with a CTR in this kind of range, it becomes more cost effective to run the campaign on a cost-per-impression basis rather than a cost-per-click basis - the opposite of a campaign being promoted on Amazon.
I thought I should pass this experience along for the benefit of other indie authors out there. All told - I was very impressed by the results that a BookBub ad could deliver. Would still like to see my next book win a "Featured Deal" on BookBub, but that's an objective for another day.
References:
[1] McMullen, Chris. "Book Marketing by the Numbers." Writing, Publishing and Marketing Ideas, 4 Nov. 2017, https://chrismcmullen.com/2017/11/03/book-marketing-by-the-numbers/.
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