2024 is drawing to a close, which means it’s time for us to share our annual roundup of the year’s best BookBub Ads! Every year, we share ads with a variety of genres, price points, book formats, and advertising strategies that exemplify the many ways an ad campaign can be successful. We hope you find something in this list to inspire your book advertising in 2025!
Ginger Quill Press, Wild Heart
This ad invites readers “back to Sawyers Bend” for the sixth book in a military romance series. Ginger Quill Press experimented with both category and author targeting, targeting fans of half a dozen romance authors and readers of the book’s category alone. After a few weeks of testing, they saw the most engagement on a campaign targeting three authors, each with an average of 8,000 BookBub Ads readers. That audience likely took interest in the review highlighting the book’s “nail-biting suspense” and the special new release pricing! Driving a CTR of 4.2%, this continuous campaign drew a steady drip of dozens of clicks per day in the weeks following Wild Heart’s release.
Martina Mars, I AM NELSON
To promote a very short-term discount, this advertiser used our in-form creative builder to design an ad that clearly communicates the urgency of the offer. They used evocative language to highlight the book’s emotional tone — and who can resist that puppy face? Although the author doesn’t have a huge following on BookBub, this campaign is a testament to how effective it is to target highly engaged readers: Targeting only her own existing fans, this advertiser drove 175 clicks at a 10.72% CTR, and paid just $0.08 for each click!
Cordelia Rook, Somewhere in Crime
This advertiser kicked off the launch of their new book with a campaign beginning on release day. The playful font and bold colors catch the eye and, combined with the cover, communicate the genre — leaving the ad copy free to focus on conveying the discount offer. To ensure a good audience fit, the ad combined category and author targeting, targeting Cozy Mystery readers along with two dozen authors. A high CPM bid brought the ad a steady stream of impressions throughout release week, with almost 650 readers clicking through to learn more.
Joffe Books, Warley
More than 3,500 readers clicked on one of these ads for Warley, which Joffe Books ran continuously for three weeks after its release date. They ran one campaign focusing on US readers and one targeting UK readers, with the deal price in the respective region’s currency. For the latter, they added several UK-based authors of historical naval fiction to maximize the ad’s exposure to relevant readers in the smaller UK audience. With the copy promising a thrilling tale on the high seas and a tempting new release discount, it’s no wonder these campaigns collectively drove a CTR of over 5%!
Little, Brown, Eruption
An “explosive thriller” is intriguing on its own, but it’s downright clever for a book titled Eruption. This blockbuster summer book boasted two incredibly well-known authors whose names are boldly featured on the cover, allowing this broadly targeted ad to take advantage of their name recognition while reaching many potentially interested readers. A high CPC bid meant Little, Brown paid only for the (thousands!) of clicks from readers, yet won a whopping 6.2 million impressions for the campaign.
Lynn Morrison, The Cryptic Cold Case
With limited space, this ad relied on visual cues from this historical mystery’s cover to communicate its genre so that the text could focus on calling out the new release. This advertiser used a low CPC bid, which can sometimes make it more difficult for a campaign to win impressions. However, by targeting fans of the book’s author, they ensured that each impression won was well-placed with those readers who were most likely to click: The ad earned a 3.3% CTR, sending nearly 1,000 readers to the book’s retailer page in just under two weeks.
Forever, This Could Be Us
If the bright colors in this ad didn’t catch readers’ attention, the New York Times bestselling status in the copy did! Forever used a moderate CPC bid to win impressions at an affordable rate, even among a highly competitive audience: The author targets for this ad included almost a dozen of today’s biggest names in romance, honing in on those readers who were explicitly interested in contemporary romance or women’s fiction. This strategy paid off with more than 125,000 impressions served to those relevant readers!
Miquel Reina, Lights on the Sea
This traditionally published author ran BookBub Ads to promote a short-term discount for their debut novel Lights on the Sea. Having already run ads for the same book in the past, they used copy that had performed well in previous campaigns and tested different versions of the ad’s background image and price banner. Thanks to the learnings from earlier experimentation and honing in on effective author targets, this set of campaigns drove over 4,000 clicks at a CTR of just over 1%.
Lily Seabrooke, Every Little Thing
Simplicity can be effective! For this last-in-series book, the advertiser used the in-form creative builder to construct a minimalistic ad that conveys the important details — genre and trope — in just a few words, quickly setting expectations for interested readers. By combining a handful of sapphic romance authors with LGBTQ+ category targeting, the ad honed in on a very specific audience for this book. This tactic was incredibly effective: Over the two weeks the campaign was live, it achieved a 10.6% CTR with an eCPC of $0.26!
Hanover Square Press, I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This
This ad makes great use of bold, contrasting colors to make author-comedian Jon Stewart’s name pop. Using a quote from an author or public figure in your genre is a great way to signal the type of book you’re advertising to interested readers. Hanover Square Press also targeted the fans of 12 other comedic authors and used a high CPC bid to win as many impressions as possible. The combination of focused targeting and engaging marketing copy paid off: More than 1,500 readers clicked on this ad in the weeks after the book’s release at a CTR of over 1.23%.
T.R. Magnus, Kataklysm
If there’s one thing BookBub readers love, it’s great value — and this ad for a new box set showing off all six books proves it! The advertiser created multiple campaigns using extremely narrow targeting: most campaigns targeted the fans of just one author with a small audience on BookBub, but in cases where a single author’s audience was too narrow to use alone, up to three targets were included in a campaign. This ultra-focused targeting kept costs low despite a high bid, and collectively, these campaigns drove thousands of clicks to this book on Amazon.
Elizabeth Bell, Necessary Sins
This advertiser discounted all four books in their historical fiction family saga, pricing the entire series under $10 for a full month on Chirp. During that time, they set up over 60 BookBub Ads campaigns, experimenting with different targets, marketing copy, and formats. The winning campaign, which highlighted the deal prices and covers of all four discounted books, ran for two weeks, driving over 230 clicks at a 1.45% CTR and an average of $0.20 per click. This ad linked directly to the book page for book 1, Necessary Sins, but while the ads were live, the advertiser saw over 30 purchases of the complete 4-book bundle in addition to sales of individual books.
Bryan Devore, The Paris Protection
This month-long campaign for a standalone political thriller targeted the fans of some of the most popular action and thriller writers around — a great strategy if the goal of your campaign is to drive exposure for a book. A CPC bid well above the suggested bid range helped this ad win more than 1.5 million impressions, and the combination of its succinct hook, glowing review, and discounted offer drove over 1,700 readers to click.
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