Releasing a new book is a key moment to find and hook new readers while pulling existing fans back into your world. BookBub Ads is a great tool for supporting these efforts, and here we’re going to cover three distinct strategies you can use to advertise your new book based on your primary goal for the launch: driving exposure for a book, increasing engagement with a book, and earning profits from your book promotions.
For each strategy, we’ll break down the goal, campaign setup, and what metrics to focus on, and we’ll look at an example new release campaign from a successful advertiser.
A couple of things to keep in mind, no matter what strategy you use:
- Testing your ads is the best way to ensure your campaigns deliver the results you want. If you’re new to BookBub Ads, know that it might take some time to refine your ad images or targeting. Schedule your first ad campaigns ahead of your launch period so you can experiment and find a setup that works for you in time for release day.
- Keep your overall marketing budget in mind — including what you might be spending on other marketing channels — and make sure to account for testing in your budget.
Strategy 1: Drive exposure
An exposure-focused campaign is designed to maximize the volume of readers who see your ad or book cover. This is a good strategy for getting a book in front of new readers, making your existing fans aware that you have a new book out, and overall increasing the visibility of the book.
What’s the strategy?
When running a campaign focused on exposure, you’re trying to increase the reach of your ad. This means you should focus on ensuring you’re targeting a big enough audience to get the reach you’re aiming for, and that your bidding strategy will allow you to get your ad in front of those readers.
Campaign setup
- Creative image: The key here is recognizability; you want readers to remember the book. Prominently feature your cover and include a hook to make the book stand out.
- Targeting: Go broad, but reasonably so — a large audience means more potential readers to see the book, but you still want to reach the right readers. This is a good opportunity to target the audience of authors in your genre who have a lot of readers on BookBub, or you can stack several large authors into one campaign. Category targeting can also be an option for gaining wide exposure. Remember to include readers in all regions and who read on all retailers where the book is available.
- Bid: Bid high to ensure you can win as many impressions as possible in your target audience. If you want to guarantee you’ll win impressions quickly, use CPM (cost per thousand impressions) bidding. For a more cost-effective approach, try a high CPC (cost per click) bid. Learn more about the benefits and trade-offs of each bidding strategy here.
Key metrics
- In your dashboard: Total impressions, total clicks. Total impressions is the count of instances of your ad appearing in a BookBub email, Chirp email, or BookBub website page. This is the best way to assess whether your ad is achieving its goal of getting in front of a lot of readers. Clicks will tell you how many readers have engaged with your ads — in other words, whether you’re reaching the right audience.
- Outside your dashboard: Retailer rankings. If enough of the readers who see your ad also purchase your book, you may see a boost in retailer rankings, which can help further expand your reach to readers who shop on that retailer.
How does this work for a new release?
Marketing service AuthorBuzz Co., created by author and advertising expert M.J. Rose, ran the launch campaign for What Is Mine by Lyn Liao Butler in February of 2024. For this series of ad campaigns, AuthorBuzz focused specifically on increasing the visibility of the new book, a release from an author who has published several successful books.
Generally, when running new release campaigns, AuthorBuzz is working to increase sales volume and raise the advertised book’s ranking at retailers to maximize the “halo effect” of their campaigns: “Our goal is always to get those increased rankings in order to reach the audience browsing at retailers via top 100 lists as opposed to the audience who are seeing ads on BookBub and other sites.”
To set up this launch, AuthorBuzz created three ad campaigns. Each one used the same set of author targets. For this book, AuthorBuzz chose authors with large audiences on BookBub — each targeted author’s ad audience ranged from 10,000 to 900,000 readers. By using authors with such large audiences, AuthorBuzz ensured that each campaign had a huge pool of potential readers to reach — an important element of maximizing exposure!
While all three campaigns used the same author targeting, each used a unique ad image, two of which AuthorBuzz created using the BookBub Ads in-form creative builder. Each image included an intriguing hook to capture readers’ attention and prominently featured the cover to boost the book’s visibility and recognition.
AuthorBuzz ran these campaigns for two weeks starting on the day What Is Mine launched to get a big boost of exposure right when the book first hit the market. To reach as many of the readers in the target audience as possible, they used a high CPC bid, which allowed them to outbid other advertisers in the market for those same readers. Winning ads cost the rate of the next-highest bid for that audience, and AuthorBuzz paid an average cost per click of only about half their bid.
These three campaigns combined drove nearly 700,000 impressions for What Is Mine over the first three weeks the book was on sale. AuthorBuzz monitored the climbing rankings over the life of the campaigns, but noted that wasn’t the full story: Smart advertising for early exposure has a long tail and increases sales over the book’s lifetime. The author’s weekly sales jumped by 7x during release week, and have consistently remained 4x higher than they were pre-release.
Strategy 2: Increase engagement
An engagement-driven campaign is designed to maximize the number of people who interact with your ad or book. This is a good strategy to use if you’re trying to gauge interest in a book or increase sales, but you aren’t necessarily focused on earning back the money you spend on your campaign (for that, see strategy 3!).
What’s the strategy?
Because the goal here is getting readers to click, it’s crucial to ensure you’re reaching the right readers with the right message. Pay extra attention to the ad copy you’re using with each segment of readers you’re targeting to make sure they fit.
Campaign setup
- Creative image: Messaging is key — tailor your ad to your audience based on what’s most likely to get them to click. For example, target fans of an author who’s blurbed the book with an image that includes that author’s quote. If you’re running a discount, prominently feature the deal price, especially if the book is under $1!
- Targeting: You’re looking to reach the Goldilocks of targeting: not so broad that you reach a bunch of unengaged readers, and not so narrow that you can’t generate the volume of engagement you want. Use author targeting or a combination of author and category targeting for higher engagement, and research and test comparable authors whose readers are likely to click. Avoid the biggest authors in the genre; while great for exposure, their audiences are generally too broad to deliver a lot of clicks.
- Bid: You can try bidding either CPM or CPC for this strategy. If you want to take your costs into account, CPC bidding may be the best choice, but CPM can also be a cost-effective option for a campaign with a high click-through rate (CTR) — since you’re only paying per impression, each additional click you receive drives down the cost per click.
Key metrics
- In your dashboard: Total clicks, CTR. Your total clicks will tell you how many people actually engaged with your ad on the BookBub platform. Your CTR is valuable for comparing the rate of engagement between ads, but remember it’s important to look at CTR in context: a campaign with a high CTR may be driving few total clicks if it’s a smaller or very tightly targeted audience, while a campaign with a relatively lower CTR may be delivering the click volume you’re aiming for.
- Outside your dashboard: Sales. Monitor sales via your retailer dashboards. If your conversion rate (the percentage of clicks converting to sales) is lower than expected, try troubleshooting your campaigns. You could change your ad targeting to ensure you’re reaching the right readers, or revisit your ad messaging and book page to ensure there’s a match between your marketing and your product.
How does this work for a new release?
When releasing her debut novel The Cruel Dark in November 2023, Bea Northwick ran a series of BookBub Ads campaigns to drive readers to her book. The ultimate goal of her campaign was to drive sales, and she wasn’t concerned with driving a positive ROI: “Anyone who sees the book and clicks through to give it a look is a win marketing-wise.”
Over several weeks after her book was released, Bea ran 12 campaigns to drive clicks to her book’s retailer pages. Each campaign tested a different element: Her targeting strategy, creative image, bid type, and bid amount each shifted while she experimented to find her ideal campaign setup.
For targeting, Bea selected authors she felt represented the different “personalities” of her book — she considered genre, aesthetic, and themes as she searched for authors whose audiences she felt would appreciate those facets of The Cruel Dark. Each author she selected had between 10,000 and 100,000 BookBub readers. Bea also included category targeting to home in on the most relevant readers in each author’s audience (a useful tactic when targeting authors who write across genres!).
Bea knew she wanted her ad images to reflect the dark, romantic intrigue of her book. All images she created looked visually similar, but she experimented with different blurbs, calls-to-action, and placement of a “New Release” button. Her blurbs helped convey the tone of her book to give prospective readers a good idea of what to expect from clicking on her ad.
After experimenting with CPM bidding in her early ads to find the right campaign setup quickly, Bea landed on using CPC bidding for more control over her costs. Referencing the average winning bids in the ad setup form, she chose a moderately high CPC bid to drive consistent impressions and started with a low budget. Once she discovered a setup that worked well, she added to that campaign’s budget to keep it serving to those readers.
Bea’s campaigns drove nearly 3,000 clicks over seven weeks after The Cruel Dark released. Her most-clicked campaign garnered 2,100 clicks and a 1.54% CTR. And she hit Amazon Bestseller status! Next time, Bea plans to increase her spend during the very early weeks after release day to compress her testing into a shorter time frame. This will mean she can both take advantage of the new release buzz and more quickly discover the audiences she should target in subsequent weeks to drive those clicks.
Strategy 3: Achieve a positive ROI
A campaign focused on driving a positive ROI (return on investment) is designed to earn back the money you’ve spent on it — or more! This is a good strategy to use if you’re aiming to increase profits from a book.
What’s the strategy?
Unlike campaigns optimized for exposure or engagement, your primary focus won’t be maximizing the number of impressions or clicks, but minimizing what you’re paying for impressions or clicks while ensuring a strong conversion rate. You’ll do this by homing in on narrow segments of readers who are most likely to buy your book, and by being laser-focused on controlling your costs.
Campaign setup
- Creative image: The first step of driving ROI is driving engagement with your ad. So, similar to the strategy above, you’ll want to craft compelling hooks tailored to your audiences. Also ensure that your messaging is well-aligned with the book description to boost the chances of conversions from readers who do click on your ad. Use these tips for optimizing your book description for conversion!
- Targeting: Use author targeting (or a combination of author and category targeting) to reach narrow, relevant audiences. Our analysis has shown that smaller ad audiences tend to click at higher rates, so don’t be afraid to target authors with small audiences on BookBub. Those readers may be more engaged, as they’re already actively interacting with those authors on BookBub.
- Bid: CPC bidding is the most reliable way to control your costs, since you know you’ll only ever pay for the readers who actually click on your ad. Balance your bid amount between how carefully you’re managing your budget and how competitive you want your ad to be in the auction — you can always increase your bid to reach more readers, and remember, you’ll almost always pay less than your bid.
Key metrics
- In your dashboard: eCPC. Your eCPC (effective cost per click) is the actual rate you’re paying for each click on your ad. A good strategy here is to calculate the maximum amount you want to pay per click so that you can monitor your eCPC (or set your bid) accordingly. Check out our bid calculator to learn how to do this.
- Outside your dashboard: Sales, read-through rate. There’s no ROI without sales, so watch your retailer dashboards to figure out your conversion rate. This is an imperfect science, but you can estimate your conversion rate by using affiliate tracking or pausing all other marketing activities to attribute an increase in sales to your ads. Also look at read-through if you’re promoting a book in a series — this is a great strategy for maximizing ROI, because you can expect additional revenue from follow-on sales! Learn more about how to measure ROI here.
How does this work for a new release?
Laura A. Barnes used BookBub Ads to promote the release of her Scottish historical romance The Wishful Governess in December 2023. Laura distributes her books to all major ebook retailers, and her goal was to reach readers across platforms. She started advertising her preorder in the week before its release, then continued to advertise for two more weeks after launch to keep driving sales. The Wishful Governess was $4.99 throughout the time she advertised.
Having run BookBub Ads campaigns before, Laura had some experience she could draw from when choosing which audiences to target. She keeps a spreadsheet with each author she’s targeted and their performance per book she’s promoted. When selecting targets for these campaigns, she looked for authors whose audiences had delivered CTRs over 2% for books similar to The Wishful Governess. Each of the authors she chose for these campaigns had between 1,000 and 150,000 BookBub readers.
For her prelaunch ads, Laura made it clear in the ad copy that The Wishful Governess was available for preorder. She chose to use CPC bidding for these campaigns. Combined with the clear preorder message in the ad copy, this ensured that she only paid for clicks from readers who indicated an interest in her book knowing it wasn’t available to read yet. The two campaigns averaged a CTR of 0.55% and an eCPC of just $0.38. Laura estimates that the preorders resulting from this campaign account for 30% of her total sales on release day.
Upon release, Laura changed the copy in her ads from “preorder” to “new release,” while keeping the blurb the same and continuing to use CPC bidding to control her costs. She consulted the average winning bids in the ad setup form and started with a bid on the lower end of that range. She checked in on her ads daily, and when she saw one driving a strong click-through rate, she ramped up the bid on that campaign to reach more readers in that engaged audience. After The Wishful Governess was released, Laura’s average eCPC dropped to $0.32, and her most-clicked campaign reached a 1.7% CTR.
Laura also reviewed her retailer dashboards each day to monitor her sales activity. Over the two weeks after release day, her campaigns drove 372 clicks, and Laura estimates her ads drove a 23% conversion rate. Next time, she plans to do more copy testing to see how much she can influence reader engagement based on the blurb she uses to promote her book.
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