The difference between making thousands on your next book and losing money can come down to a few cents, whether it’s a few cents per click, per impression, or per action. That’s the power of profitable advertising.
If your ads generate even a few pennies of net profit, you can keep running them until you have sold tens of thousands of books and built a massive reader base. But if you are losing money, you will eventually run out, and your book may get lost in the Amazon ocean. You cannot spend your way out of that problem.
Throwing good money after bad is not the solution.
Decreasing your cost of reader acquisition by a few cents can make as much difference as a few degrees temperature drop during a cold rain. A few degrees is the difference between a wet, miserable day and a winter wonderland.
For some authors, only a few pennies of margin stand between them and a perpetual advertising engine. For others, the gap is larger, and they have to work to bring that cost down.
A couple of weeks ago, we talked about measuring your marketing with Publisher Champ. Good measurement helps you keep score. It shows you what is and isn’t working. It is essential, but measurement alone will not make your advertising profitable.
So, how do you make your advertising pay for itself and but pay you as well?
If your ads are not profitable, the problem may not be inside the advertising dashboard. More often, the problem occurs before you ever open the dashboard or after the reader clicks. You have to look at the entire customer journey.
David Gaughran has been working in digital advertising since 2004. He is the author of Let’s Get Digital, Strangers to Superfans, BookBub Ads Expert, and Amazon Decoded. He is a friend of the show and the author of the blog post titled The 15 Rules for Advertising Books.
What are the biggest changes in digital book advertising since 2004?
Thomas: You have been advertising online since before the indie revolution. Over that time, what are the biggest changes you have seen?
David: Back then, the main platform was Google Ads, which was called AdWords. I was actually working there, but it was not the dominant player at the time. Yahoo Ads, called Overture, was the legacy platform we were trying to take down.
Facebook ads, BookBub ads, and Amazon ads did not exist when I started self-publishing in 2011. The biggest change has been the emergence of these platforms, which are far more effective for selling books.
It was always a frustration for me that Google Ads was not a great platform for advertising books. When Facebook ads started gaining traction around 2013 or 2014, I didn’t pay attention. As more success stories came in, I took a closer look and started experimenting, and those old ad skills started to come back to me.
Thomas: The dashboards change constantly, but the fundamentals do not. At the end of the day, we are trying to convince a human to make a decision, and humans do not change nearly as fast as platforms do.
What’s the worst way to fund your advertising?
Thomas: Your number one rule is “Don’t spend what you cannot afford.” People hear case studies of someone spending a lot and making a lot, and they think they need to do that too. Then they run up credit card debt. Why is that such a bad idea?
David: Do not borrow money for ads. When I started self-publishing, I was unemployed. I had just moved to Sweden with my partner, who was in grad school. I did not speak Swedish, which made getting a job difficult, so I had a very limited budget.
Other people come to publishing with more resources, but one of the biggest mistakes is spending too much money before you have enough books. The margins are so tight that if you are pushing one book hard, it is difficult to recoup that spend.
There is also a more fundamental issue. You have far more options when you have more books. If I am launching book three or four in a series, I might make the first book free, or drop it to 99 cents, or do both. That gives you multiple entry points to attract different types of readers and funnel them toward your new release.
Thomas: Some authors see a lack of money as a disadvantage, but it can actually be a blessing.
I have seen people with significant resources try to buy their way to success. They think, “If it costs $100,000, it costs $100,000.” But you cannot buy your way to success if your book does not have product-market fit. Advertising does not change people. It tells people, “Here is the thing you already want.”
David: There is this cliché that advertising is about tricks or gimmicks. For me, marketing is about finding the people who already like what you write and putting your book in front of them.
Of course, there is more to it. You need the right cover, the right packaging, and there is skill in targeting readers through platforms like Facebook.
But I often get emails from people saying, “I am about to launch my first book. I have a budget of $5,000. What should I spend it on?” The honest answer is that you should spend that money buying yourself time to write more books. That investment will pay off far more when you are launching book two or three.
By then, your packaging will be better. Your cover will be stronger. Your keywords and categories will be more refined. You will understand your genre and your readers better. That experience cannot be bought. You have to earn it.
There’s a real danger in overspending at the start and then getting disheartened. If you’re trying to create a sustainable business, that’s the worst way to start.
Thomas: One of my Ten Commandments of Book Marketing is “Do not publish your first book first.” Write it, then write another one before publishing. Most authors improve so much in that process that when they return to the first book, they are grateful they waited. I’ve never met an author who regretted waiting to publish the first book.
But what you are saying goes even further. Even after publishing, you need multiple books to understand your readers and your market.
Your books sell your other books. You can afford a higher cost of reader acquisition if your read-through rate is strong. If you break even on book one but profit on book two, and a good percentage of readers continue reading book three, that is a profitable system, even if book one alone is not.
What should authors do before spending money on ads?
David: I’m a huge fan of Facebook ads and have run campaigns with five-figure budgets during launch week. But when authors are starting out, even if they have unlimited resources, there are far better promotional tools to reach for first. For example, promo sites cost much less and require far less expertise.
Before even considering Facebook ads or any significant ad spend, authors should focus on a few fundamentals.
- Build your email list.
- Create a reader magnet from day one.
- Develop a strong welcome sequence.
- Send a regular newsletter, not just launch announcements.
One of my biggest regrets over 15 years of publishing is that I neglected all of this early on. It wasn’t until around 2018 that I completely changed my approach, and the growth in my newsletter was explosive.
Once authors are ready to drive traffic, there are cheaper and simpler options than Facebook or Amazon ads. Those platforms require a budget as well as significant knowledge and time to learn. When you’re on your first book, that time is better spent writing the next book or creating a free short story to attract email list signups.
Thomas: If you have a good reader magnet tightly connected to your first book and you feature it in the back matter, the subscribers you gain will be the absolute best on your list. These are people who already bought your book, read it to the end, and enjoyed it enough to sign up. When you release a new book, they’ll say, “Shut up and take my money.” They’re fans of you, not just your genre.
Without that direct connection, you’re relying on Amazon to notify readers about your next release. Amazon might send that email, or it might not. It’s completely unpredictable, and for avid readers who follow many authors, Amazon simply won’t send a notification for every new book.
David: The number one marketing asset you have, aside from your catalog of books, is your mailing list. It should always be the primary focus of your marketing efforts.
Even when I’m building large Facebook campaigns or putting together an intricate launch, the ultimate goal is to grow the mailing list, because that’s what makes the next launch bigger and more lucrative.
Think about it from the reader’s perspective. When you finish a book you truly love, you’re left with a sense of longing. You’ve just said goodbye to your new best friends, and what you want most is more story with those characters or more time in that world.
That’s the perfect moment to make an ask of the reader. In this case, the ask is to sign up to your mailing list.
What gets readers to actually click and complete the signup is offering them another little taste, like a short story, a lost chapter, or something connected to the characters and world. For nonfiction, it might be a downloadable workbook tied to the book’s themes.
This is the moment when you have your hooks deepest in the reader, when they’re most willing to act on a call to action. Readers get more story, and you get their email address.
Learn more about building your email list in the following episodes:
- How to Build an Email List Before You Publish Your Novel
- How Jason Porterfield Grew His Email List from 0 to 6,000 in One Year
- How to Grow Your Email List from 0 to 10,000 – Author Media
- How to Pick the Right Email Marketing Service for You – Author Media
Why does concentrating sales during launch week matter?
David: If I’m going to get 10,000 sales on a new book, it’s far better to concentrate those sales during launch week than to have them spread over six months. A surge of sales pushes you higher in the Amazon charts, makes you more visible there, and Amazon starts selling the book for you.
Those sales generate more sales. If the same number trickles in over months, you never get that visibility boost and fewer new readers discover you.
You can’t control when everyone buys your book, but you can control when some of your readership buys it. By having them on your mailing list and emailing them during launch week, you put your finger on the scale and concentrate sales in the window when they matter most.
Thomas: The more sales you get early on, the more reviews you accumulate.
All of these things impact your advertising. If you’re advertising your book on Amazon and it has three ratings, those three ratings will act as an anchor on the effectiveness of your ads, even if they’re all 5-star ratings.
But if your book has 300 ratings of 4.5 stars, readers will see it as a popular book. Most readers would trust a 4.5-star rating from 300 people more than a 5-star rating from three.
When I see only three 5-star ratings, my first thought is that those came from the author’s two parents and their spouse. I’m not convinced they’ve found a single real reader. A few hundred reviews convince me they’ve found a readership.
How does Amazon use review count in its algorithms?
David: Amazon monitors what people click on and what they buy, and one of the key signals they look at is review count, not review average.
In terms of the popularity list algorithms, the number of reviews you have helps your visibility in the store. A book with 100,000 reviews and a 3.2-star average is more valuable in their system than a book with 1,000 reviews and a 4.9-star average.
Next time you get a 1-star review, remember that in terms of the Amazon algorithms, that reader has actually helped you, not hurt you.
Thomas: A 1-star review is more valuable than 2-star and 3-star reviews because a 1-star is almost always a problem with reader fit.
Sometimes those reviews genuinely help. If your book is really violent and someone leaves a 1-star review complaining about the violence, the readers who want a violent book see that and get excited.
There’s a barbecue place here in Austin that sells shirts featuring one-star reviews from vegans who couldn’t find anything to eat. It’s a badge of honor. A snowboarding mountain gets one-star reviews from people complaining the slopes are too tough. For someone looking for a difficult slope, that review is a feature, not a bug.
How should authors weigh varying advertising advice?
Thomas: A lot of people ask me for permission. “Can I do this? Is it a good idea?” A common phrase I use is, “You’re an adult and it’s a free country,” because I’m trying to encourage people to make their own decisions.
There’s a journey authors take. Early in their career, they have to take a lot of advice from gurus and podcasters because they just don’t know very much. The goal is to start measuring and learning so you can figure out when to follow the general advice and when to do something different because you know your target reader.
I’ll often have somebody say, “I know you normally recommend X, but I found that Y really works for my reader.” They’ll list reasons why their genre or situation is different, almost defensively. My response is to say, “You’ve learned! That’s the goal!” I want people to get to the point where they’re looking at their data and saying, “I should do more of this,” or “I need to never go to a Christmas market again.”
David: All we can do when giving advice is try to shortcut the process. I always tell people that they need to follow their own data, especially when starting Facebook ads. The problem is that when you’re starting out, you don’t have any data, and you can’t test everything.
So, we shortcut things. I’ll say, “In your ad image, it’s usually best to use a book cover.” If I don’t put a book cover in my ad image, I’ll get a higher click-through rate and cheaper clicks, but the number of people who actually complete the purchase on Amazon will tank. Overall, the cost per acquisition increases. I’ve found this to hold true most of the time across a number of genres.
Anytime I say, “Always put in the book cover,” someone will say, “I’ve tested this and I get better results without the book cover.” To that I say, “Great. You’ve tested it, you’ve followed your own data, and that’s what you should do.” When someone gives out a rule, they’re saying, “In my experience, this is what my data says.” If your data says otherwise, follow your own data.
Thomas: At the same time, be very careful about making that a rule for other authors.
I’ll see an author in an idiosyncratic genre or with a special situation find that some general advice doesn’t work. Then they’ll go on Facebook groups and say, “This doesn’t work for anyone because it didn’t work for me.”
You don’t know that. You don’t have the general’s view of the battlefield. You’re seeing what’s around you, and sometimes that isn’t the whole picture. Be cautious telling other authors what not to try just because you weren’t able to make it work.
Is there anyone left on Facebook to advertise to?
David: The biggest objection, and surprisingly common, is people saying “Mark Zuckerberg can go jump in a volcano,” or “It’s only old people on Facebook,” or “Facebook is only bots.”
Those things might be true to a certain extent, but there are still 3 billion unique monthly users on Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. YouTube is almost 3 billion. TikTok is 2 billion or more. All the social media platforms collectively reach something like 5.5 billion people at least once a month. Out of 8.2 billion people, that’s a big percentage.
Even if you hate Facebook, TikTok, social media, or the internet, it’s still a very effective way to reach readers.
I’m genuinely surprised every year that Facebook ads still work. When I log in and look at my feed, there’s a lot of AI slop, bots, and dodgy-looking ads. I keep thinking the next campaign is the one that’s not going to work. I’ve felt that way for three or four years, but the campaigns keep performing very well. I follow the results rather than my own inclinations, and I’d recommend other authors do the same.
Thomas: The “hot” ad platform is whichever platform the authors around you are complaining the most about. The best time to get into Facebook is when everyone is quitting and saying it doesn’t work.
I’ve been doing Facebook ads since they were called Campus Flyers, and I’ve seen Facebook ads “stop working” probably half a dozen times.
It’s true that the algorithm changes and the way people use Facebook changes. Today, the majority of content consumption is short videos rather than posts from friends. In fact, Meta’s defense in their antitrust case was that they weren’t even a social network anymore. They said, “We’re a video streaming site.” The judge agreed and dismissed the case.
Are static image ads or video ads more effective on Facebook?
David: Static image ads are still the workhorse for me. I’ve played around with video, but I don’t use it as much now as I did a few years ago.
I used to run an advanced strategy where I’d take a 30- or 60-second video teaser for a book and show it to a very broad genre audience of several million people. Whoever watched beyond 15 seconds, I’d put into a custom audience.
There was no hard selling. It was about piquing interest and seeing who stops the scroll, then filtering them out of the larger audience. This was often done while the book was on pre-order or leading up to a launch.
When the launch or the 99-cent sale came around, I’d hit that custom audience hard with much more aggressive ads, a big price tag, and salesy ad text. The earlier phase was more informational or plot-based, depending on the book and genre.
With the way the algorithms have changed, I don’t feel the need for that two-step process anymore. Targeting big audiences is now much more effective in a straightforward way. A lot of the retargeting is done automatically now, so there’s no point spending money doing what Facebook is going to do with some of my budget anyway.
Thomas: Facebook is one of the biggest AI companies in Silicon Valley. People are surprised to hear that because they think of Llama, which trails other large language models. But all the good AI people at Meta are working on the ad engine, which uses machine learning and AI techniques.
For certain kinds of authors, that broad-targeting-to-custom-audience technique could work particularly well. Christian authors really struggle on Facebook. Facebook has had longstanding limitations around targeting Christians. I can target a romance book, but I can’t target a Christian romance book.
With this video approach, if you’re writing Christian romance, you make a really Christian, really romantic video, target a broad audience, and find the people who stop the scroll. Now you’ve found your audience, and you can hit them with specific messaging about your specific book.
Why did Facebook remove so many ad targeting options?
David: Facebook got hit with a bunch of privacy lawsuits. There was discrimination in housing ads and employment ads where people were targeting or excluding certain racial groups, religious beliefs, or sexual orientations. The way it shook out was that Facebook removed targeting for any group or topic you might broadly term sensitive.
That had all sorts of unintended side effects. Someone writing an LGBTQ novel can’t target LGBTQ people. Someone writing a Christian novel can’t target Christian people. Someone writing inspirational fiction couldn’t target authors in that space, or Christian music artists.
I don’t think that was the intention. It was more about managing liability risk around privacy lawsuits. But regardless, those targets have gone away.
Basically any author targeting is gone now. Of all the authors I used to target, there’s only a handful left, and I imagine they’ll be removed eventually as well.
I always felt like this was coming. If you have a challenger brand like Pepsi trying to take over Coke’s market share, Pepsi spends millions building up a huge platform and getting millions of likes on their page. Then someone at Coke says, “Let’s just target Pepsi followers.” Pepsi did all the hard work to build that audience, and Coke can come along and target it instantly.
There was uneasiness among long-time advertisers that this easy way of targeting someone else’s audience would eventually be limited.
Thomas: All of that targeting is still there. It’s just covered up with an AI black box.
If you’re scrolling reels and you’re a Christian, you’re going to see a lot of Christian content. It’s absolutely targeting you based on what videos you’ve stopped to watch in the past. But because it’s on the other side of a machine learning algorithm where the machine is programming itself, it’s presumably giving them liability protection. They can say, “It’s not us doing it, it’s our algorithm,” and nobody understands how the algorithm works.
David: The system is basically doing the same thing as before, just inside a black box.
Thomas: People complain that Facebook advertising is broken because you can’t target authors anymore. That doesn’t mean you can’t reach readers.
Good product-market fit, a good cover, and a good landing page matter more than targeting. Almost everyone whose ads aren’t working has a cover problem, not a targeting problem.
The better your cover signals your genre, the more likely it is for the algorithm to find your readers. If your book looks like a romance but it’s really suspense with a flavor of romance, the cover will attract the wrong audience. They won’t click, the algorithm gets confused, and your click rate tanks. That’s not a Facebook problem. That’s a cover problem.
David: I’d push back on a tiny bit of that. Yes, product-market fit and the cover especially are the big factors. If you’re attracting clicks from the wrong people, that will confuse the algorithms. But the system is simultaneously more complex and also dumber than people think.
We sometimes attribute great powers to the algorithm. In reality, there are lots and lots of tiny little sets of instructions that interlock with each other. They all do small, dumb things, but collectively they do something quite smart. It’s not like the algorithm looks at your cover and thinks, “That doesn’t feel very romancy.” It’s simply seeing that romance readers are not clicking on it, so it stops showing it to them.
Where the system is more complicated than people realize is in the ad creation process.
I did a new tutorial recently and tried to boil it down to the very basics, and it was an hour long. The system has gotten so complicated, and I blame the AI features quite a lot. They were brought in to try and simplify the ad creation process, and they do for a generic advertiser like Coke or Pepsi.
But for authors, we’re advertising niche products and trying to reach a very specific subset of readers. We usually want to send them directly to Amazon. The system isn’t really built for what we want to do with it. We have to be very careful with the settings we enable and disable. If we’re not careful, the system can go haywire.
If you’re a company like Coke or a hardware store, you’re usually sending people to your own site with the pixel installed. If the wrong people click, Facebook sees that they went to your site, didn’t purchase, abandoned their cart and left. Facebook knows that’s the wrong subset of clickers and stops showing your ad to that demographic.
We don’t have that advantage because we can’t install the pixel on Amazon. The system is flying blind to a certain extent. We have to be very careful about what parts of the AI we switch on and off, where we give the system power, and where we take back control.
Should authors send ad traffic to a landing page or straight to Amazon?
Thomas: I interviewed an author who is spending $10 million a year on Facebook ads (Connor Boyack, the author of the Tuttle Twins books). One of the things that gave him a competitive advantage was that he wasn’t sending people to Amazon. He was selling on his website, which enabled the pixel to train the Facebook algorithm all the way through point of sale.
Instead of sending people straight to Amazon, what about sending them to a landing page on your site that has the pixel and setting the success criteria as the “buy on Amazon” button click that then sends them away? It’s more friction as it ads one more step in the customer journey, but it’s also better data for the Facebook algorithm.
Have you tested which way works better?
David: In an ideal world, I would say send people to your own site and feed the pixel with as much data as possible. But there are a number of problems.
The level of complexity increases greatly. You’ve got to have a site that is fast and loads well. There’s a whole science behind landing pages, buttons, ad text, and sales copy.
Even if you absolutely nail all of that, you’re not going to be as good at e-commerce as Amazon is. Even if you are, you still won’t have the customer trust that Amazon has.
Even if you’re just using an interstitial landing page and sending people on to the retailers, that extra step can be a killer. The problem with conversion is friction. Anything that introduces friction has a hugely corrosive effect on your conversion rate.
For example, if you have an ad image that doesn’t line up with your landing page, people will pause when they get to Amazon. That pause is death because there can be dozens of other books being advertised on your Amazon page. If you lose people’s attention for a second on Amazon, they could be gone somewhere else.
You might be able to drive down your cost per click or increase your click-through rate because the pixel will dial in your ad a little better. But I think the hit on conversion is going to be too big.
Feel free to test it if you’re confident you can build a webpage that gets a lot of people clicking through to Amazon. But test it against a straight campaign where you’re sending people directly to Amazon and pay attention to conversion rate.
One of my big bugbears about conversations about Facebook ads is that people just talk about cost per click. “I got my cost per click down to 8 cents. I got my cost per click down to 6 cents.”
I can run a campaign and get my cost per click down to 1 cent, and my conversion rate will be zero. It’s not about cost per click; it’s about the cost per acquisition. It’s ultimately about how many sales you’ve generated for your advertising spend.
If you haven’t yet created profitable ads on Facebook, I wouldn’t go in the landing page direction. Learn the ropes of generating profit with regular Facebook campaigns before you start testing something like this, because it’s way more complicated and you need to be better at a lot more things to make it work.
Thomas: Adding complexity will not add success if you’re not already successful. If there are five links in the chain and the chain is broken, adding more links will not fix the broken chain. Plus, it’s going to make identifying the weak link even harder.
But if you do have it working and you’re making 50 cents of net profit on every reader and you want to experiment, once you’ve mastered the basics, you have a good foundation to add complexity.
Another advantage of an interstitial landing page is that you can make affiliate commission through an affiliate link to Amazon, which you can’t do from the ads directly.
On the other hand, you have to understand the environment people are experiencing these ads in. In our minds, somebody is on Facebook giving their entire attention to Facebook on their computer.
But that’s not how people use Facebook.
They’re on their couch scrolling while Netflix plays on the TV and their kids are in the house. The amount of noise on screen, on the other screen, and in their environment is enormous. The requirement for you to keep things simple is really high.
David: Amazon is a trusted brand. You are not yet.
When a new-to-you reader clicks on your ad, they’re probably assuming they’re going to Amazon. They won’t pay attention to every detail, so they might not see the little website link at the bottom showing they’re going to your site rather than Amazon. When they end up on your site, which is unfamiliar to them, you’re starting to lose them.
The margins on advertising are tight enough that if you lose a certain percentage of people clicking through, that’s going to make your campaign unprofitable.
I understand the instinct. Authors want to be independent, they don’t want to put money in Jeff Bezos’s pocket, they want to keep more royalties and build a sustainable direct sales business. Those are great goals, but take it in stages. Get good at selling on Amazon first, both in terms of organic sales and advertising.
Learn the ropes with the simplest ad possible. Just send people to the US Kindle store. I know you want to get your sales going on Apple and Kobo and everywhere else, and that’s fine. But you want to reduce the variables as much as possible when you’re learning so that when something goes wrong in your first campaigns, you have fewer things to check.
If you’re jumping straight into selling direct, running campaigns with multiple retailers and different countries, and something isn’t working, you have a hundred variables to check instead of three. That’s a difficult, expensive, and slow way to learn.
Start with a very simple ad campaign. One ad in one ad set, in one campaign, targeting one retailer in one country, selling one book. You’ve minimized the variables, and when the ad works or doesn’t work, you have something to build on.
Can’t a new author just copy what successful authors are doing?
Thomas: This is one of the risks of listening to super successful authors talk about their challenges. The game really changes at scale.
Connor Boyack is doing $10 million in sales. He’s got a team, a whole company. He’s an independent publisher with people in different roles. If you hear me summarize where he ended up, you’d think you could jump straight there. There’s a long path to get there.
I have a whole episode on the Shopify trap where authors hear a successful author talk about how great Shopify is, so they pay $40 a month to Shopify to sell $30 a month in books. They spent a whole week learning Shopify to lose $10 a month when they could have spent that time moving forward on their work in progress.
You need to always keep in mind the opportunity cost. Early in your career, for novelists especially, working on your next book is almost always the better return on investment than fine-tuning ads.
David: I see this a lot with people starting out. The flashy things will always get our attention more than the grunt work and the basics. People want to jump straight into hardcovers, a Kickstarter, or a Patreon, but those are things you do when you reach a certain level of success, when you grow your audience to a certain point, or when your business is sustainable to a certain level. You can’t jump straight to them without creating problems for yourself.
Thomas: Doing few things well is better than doing a lot of things poorly.
For some people, the complexity is a form of avoidance. They’ll do anything but work on their book. “I should write my book. Oh, I’ll redo my onboarding sequence again.”
No, just write your book. This is particularly true for fiction writers.
How is advertising different for nonfiction authors?
Thomas: The rules for advertising are different for nonfiction, where a single book really has to stand on its own. Novelists end book one on a cliffhanger and people race to buy book two. That’s very different from a nonfiction book that solves a problem.
Nonfiction books don’t sell each other to the same degree that a fiction series will. By the end of the book, you’ve solved the problem, and readers don’t have that problem anymore.
But depending on the problem you’re solving, there may be an almost unlimited number of people who have that problem because new people get it all the time. I’ve had guests on the show who are very profitably advertising a single nonfiction book that sells month after month because it answers a question people continue to have.
I’ve noticed indie authors who come from the fiction world will put their nonfiction books into series, hoping to pull the reader through all the books. Sometimes it works, but it’s a much heavier lift than in fiction, where people fall in love with your characters and will do anything if you’ll just give them another book with those characters.
David: I write nonfiction as well. When you’re advertising nonfiction on Facebook, you’re competing against people with higher-value products and much bigger margins.
If I try to advertise my nonfiction books on Facebook, it’s really difficult to get the cost per click below a dollar. I can work hard and get it down to maybe 60 cents, but the math doesn’t work out. Sometimes the cost per click around certain times of year, depending on who’s launching an expensive course, can go as high as $2. Those course creators can pay it because they’re selling something for $1,000. You’re selling a book for $4.99, maybe $7.99, or maybe 99 cents. You can’t compete against that.
One thing that works well for me, and I think will work for most kinds of nonfiction, is to lean more heavily on content marketing.
Instead of advertising your book directly, you advertise a cornerstone piece of content on your site. That content becomes the gateway to your book, your services, or your mailing list. Because you’re asking for a click rather than a purchase, you can reach a broader audience at a lower cost and avoid competing head-to-head with course creators who have much bigger margins.
The way to go around those course creators is to advertise to a broader audience, which you can do with something like a piece of content where you’re not asking people for money, just asking for a click. That friction disappears because they don’t need to pull out their wallet, they just need to read your free content.
Even fiction authors are finding this difficulty now. Some of us are still able to target our genre, which works pretty well even when the genre audience is five million readers or more. The way Facebook works now with the AI dialing in your ad, broad targeting can still work.
But sometimes we have to find a roundabout way to target readers. You might target a television show and then narrow the audience by the Kindle store. If you’re targeting Game of Thrones and narrowing by Kindle store, you’re getting the TV watchers who also shop at the Kindle store. It can be hit and miss, but it’s worth testing if you’re not able to reach your audience directly.
Why should authors explore the wider world of marketing first?
Thomas: Realize that advertising is a piece of a whole toolbox of approaches and techniques for marketing. Not every approach works for every author. You don’t want to do them all. There’s a lot to be said for doing a few things well and realizing that certain things work better for nonfiction while others work better for fiction.
Blogging is a good example. It’s really hard for novelists to have popular blogs that also sell their fiction. You may love someone as a news commentator but not care about their novel. You may love someone’s fiction but not care about their blog. Those are almost entirely separate audiences.
Nonfiction does not have that problem. If you can answer part of a problem in a single blog post and help someone out, you may have a reader. For example, if you offer a guide on how to stop your toddler’s tantrums at the grocery store, and it works for the reader, they’ll see your whole book on parenting and buy it. It’s a much more natural sales journey with a blog for nonfiction than for fiction.
David: I basically built my nonfiction business on blogging.
There are a couple of different ways to come at it. You could do the bird’s-eye approach. For example, I’ve got a post on my site, “The 10 Steps to Self-Publishing,” and it basically gives away everything in my book. But I’m just giving them a little taste. It might be 2,000 words with a shallow version of the answer. If they like the way you’ve answered the question, they’re going to want to read your book. Don’t worry about giving away the farm.
The other way is to drill into one little topic. You might take one part of a chapter and really go deep on it. That shows your expertise in a different way, demonstrating that you cover topics in depth. A combination of both approaches, the bird’s-eye view and the deep drill-down, is a very effective one-two punch.
Thomas: What I like about David’s approach is that he is an author himself, but he also has that general’s view of the battlefield because he works with lots of authors and gets feedback from lots of them.
Connect with David Gaughran
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