As an independent author, learning effective (especially cost-effective) marketing has been a crash course of trial and error. For years, one of my greatest sources of consternation was BookBub Ads. This platform offers authors a unique opportunity to reach voracious readers specifically looking for books, but poorly executed ads can be costly.
Thanks to the insights on this blog, I’ve been able to avoid those advertising land mines and lean on a few key strategies. The most important thing I’ve learned is that running successful BookBub Ads doesn’t require a big budget.
Here’s my playbook for running affordable BookBub Ads.
1. Bid CPC to protect your budget
Authors trying to find a readership on a tight budget should always use CPC (cost per click), not CPM (cost per thousand impressions).
CPC is the best way to keep a leash on your spending. With CPC, an ad that isn’t generating clicks may still be generating impressions — and I’m not paying for those impressions. That makes it useful for inexpensively gathering data on what works. I use small CPC campaigns to test authors, targeting, and creative. The winners tell me where to spend my money. The losers can still give me thousands of free impressions and useful feedback.
If you’re not sure what to bid, you can use BookBub Ads’ suggested bid range. But don’t feel pressure to bid within this range. I always enter a much lower bid: It purposefully slows down my ad spend, which is key because a campaign that races through my budget gives me less time to watch and learn from it.
For example, when I advertised my mystery thriller The Architect of Deception, I set a budget of $50. The bid recommendation started at around $0.65; I bid $0.61. It took five days for the clicks to exhaust my $50 budget, which bought 90,000+ impressions — plenty of data to learn from.
If an ad isn’t working, I’ve spent very little to discover that. If it is working, I can let it run or take what I learned and build the next experiment around it.
2. Use small budgets to take big creative risks
This may be my favorite part of the strategy: Because I pay per click, I can afford to experiment with the ad copy.
I’ve found in past ads that generic lines like “Heart-Stopping Romantic Suspense” don’t drive as many clicks as lines designed to arouse curiosity. So for my The Architect of Deception ads, I tried:
“Read it so you can say the book was better.”
The idea was to imply that the book would be a movie one day. I targeted readers of authors whose books are regularly adapted into films: Harlan Coben, Freida McFadden, and Colleen Hoover.
For $50, I had my answer. Readers responded to the unusual headline.
Last week, I tried the headline “Champagne, Caviar, and Murder.” I targeted readers of authors who wrote classic society mysteries: Anthony Horowitz, Louise Penny, and Lucy Foley.
It was a big flop. The “read it so you can say the book was better” ad saw three times more engagement than this one. And that was useful to know. It cost me almost nothing to discover readers did not respond to this kind of tagline.
I’m going to continue trying headlines that pique readers’ curiosity. Some will work and some won’t, but the point is to structure the campaign with a low CPC bid so I can afford to find out.
3. Don’t guess at author targeting
How do I choose the authors I target?
One of the biggest early mistakes I made was selecting every author with a huge audience and any conceivable connection to my books: Nora Roberts, John Grisham, Dan Brown. I thought, They’re wildly popular, so tons of readers will see my ad!
Huge mistake. Targeting so many massive audiences diluted my ads’ performance and also made it harder to learn anything from the campaign. I learned I needed to test one author at a time, and only authors who are as close as possible to my books, to concentrate my ads where I’m most likely to gain readers.
I write romantic suspense, and the first book in my Bishop Security series, False Front, is permanently free. I wanted my ads to tap into fans of similar authors to find new readers for my series, but who? Kendra Elliot, or would Lori Foster be better?
Rather than guess, I tested them against each other.
I created five versions of the same ad referencing a popular author in the genre, changing the author’s name to the one whose fans I wanted to reach for each ad. The headline teased the genre, and I added an author-specific hook.
Five ads, a $20 budget per ad (that I knew wouldn’t all be spent), and a low CPC bid. The ads were exactly the same except for the referenced author, and each ad targeted only that author — no genre targeting. That meant when one ad outperformed another, I knew which author target made the difference.
The difference was dramatic. Sandra Brown garnered three times as many clicks as the other authors I tested. I wasn’t looking for a high CTR (click-through rate) because her audience is so large, but I consider the dozens of low-cost clicks from this ad very valuable because BookBub readers intend to buy and read. My BookBub ads not only outperform all my social media advertising in terms of clicks to downloads but I also see a bigger improvement in sales of subsequent books in the series.
My takeaway was that the best author target isn’t always the most obvious one, and using CPC is an affordable way to test bigger authors.
Three of the authors I tested were no-gos, almost no clicks at all. However, each ad served over 40,000 impressions. Because I was paying for clicks rather than impressions, those unsuccessful tests barely touched my budget, yet loads of readers still saw my book cover.
Conclusion
The biggest thing five years of BookBub advertising has taught me is that I won’t know straight away which author, headline, or targeting strategy will work. I need an affordable way to find out.
For me, that means using CPC, bidding low, setting small budgets, isolating variables, and being willing to experiment. Every campaign gives me another piece of information about my readers, and the good experiments pay for themselves, while even the bad ones can deliver valuable exposure.
To all the authors with growing readerships and wonderful books to share, I wish you the best of luck. I hope these tips help you create affordable ads and achieve brilliant success!
The views and opinions expressed in this guest post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of BookBub.
