For part-time authors who fit writing, marketing, and the business of being an author alongside a full-time career, every moment counts. So when YA fantasy author Kika Emers set out to promote a five-day free period for her contemporary fantasy novel Remember Pompeii, she knew she had to spend her limited time effectively. To maximize the results of her discount, she paired a free Featured Deal with a BookBub Ads campaign.
The result: She drove over 4,700 downloads on Amazon, reached #38 in the free Kindle store, and ranked in top spots in her book’s categories. Read on to see how she did it!
What you can learn from Kika:
- Run some ads before your discount. Having some data from earlier campaigns sets you up for a stronger start when your promotion goes live — whether it’s a Featured Deal or any other limited-time discount.
- Spend time finding the right author targets. Narrow targeting means your ad can reach readers who are already likely to be interested in your book, and a simple image with a good hook will be enough to get them to click.
- Start with a limited budget and scale up when you see strong signals. You always have the option to increase your budget — so start small, and then invest more into your ads once you home in on your best-performing targets.
Laying the groundwork: Preorder period
Kika published Remember Pompeii in 2024 as the first book under this pen name, after having already self-published five other books across various YA fantasy subgenres. Her first foray into BookBub Ads to promote this brand started when Remember Pompeii was available for a preorder-special $0.99 discount, which she ran for six months leading up to launch. These ads helped drive more than 800 preorders for her book before its publication, and Kika also used this time to learn how to build effective ad campaigns.
She started by identifying authors whose audiences she could target. These were authors with whom she’d run group promotions leading up to release, and authors she’d read or found in her Amazon categories who had comparable titles. She experimented with authors with varying audience sizes to see which delivered higher click-through rates (CTRs).
Kika found that being flexible with her targeting was key to running successful campaigns — not only in the authors she used, but when she added and removed targets from her ad. Adding and deleting authors over the course of a campaign meant she was continuously feeding her ad a new audience, and allowed her to maintain stronger results.
Make sure you use fresh comparative authors. You can exhaust authors if you already used them in previous campaigns. So check how many impressions you got in previous campaigns.
She also tested a variety of ad images that each included her book cover art and a reference to its $0.99 sale, varying the backgrounds and ad copy. Her key takeaway here was that the time she invested in creating an image didn’t always translate to a stronger CTR from readers:
I learned that the ad I spent hours designing might perform terribly, and the ad I whipped together with the BookBub template in three minutes could perform really well. To other authors, I’d say don’t spend hours on ad design unless you really want to.
This early testing was key to setting Kika up for a successful free discount period for Remember Pompeii.
Free push: Featured Deal & BookBub Ads
Two years later, Kika had a goal to drive new reviews for Remember Pompeii. In order to accomplish this goal, she set out to get her book into the hands of as many new readers as possible.
Discounting a book to free and promoting it broadly is an effective tactic for widening the top of the sales funnel and reaching a high volume of new readers. Kika submitted her book for a free Featured Deal, and Remember Pompeii was selected for a promotion in the Teen & Young Adult category. Once she confirmed her feature date, she set up her discount to run for five days, starting the day before the promotion’s mailing date.
To support the Featured Deal and maximize the number of downloads she could drive while Remember Pompeii was free, Kika also set up a BookBub Ads campaign. She prepared the ad a week ahead of time, reviewing best practices from case studies on the BookBub Partners Blog and giving herself time to tinker and adjust her settings so the ad was ready to go the moment her discount went live.
I start the freebie timeline a day before so I’m already rising in rank and sales before the Featured Deal happens. I think of it as greasing the wheels to move the ranking.
Creative
Kika leaned into the deal and created an ad using the BookBub creative template that focused on the free price point rather than creating a custom image. She reviewed the data from her preorder campaigns and used the ad copy that had driven the highest engagement in her earlier ads.
It was very quick to put together the ad image as opposed to hours spent on a Canva design.
Targeting
Kika used three strategies to build her target list: she selected authors she’d targeted in earlier ads that had earned her the best click-through rates; she identified comparable authors in her book’s categories on Amazon; and she selected a few authors comparable to her other YA fantasy pen names, interested to see if there was crossover between the subgenre audiences.
She also deliberately kept her targets small, focusing primarily on authors with roughly 20,000 readers in their BookBub audience. Setting her ad up early gave her time to check each author’s audience size.
Bid and budget
Originally, Kika set a $250 budget to spend across the five days of her discount period — knowing that if she found her ad was working effectively, she could increase the budget later to maximize her results.
CPC bidding had historically allowed Kika to run cost-effective campaigns, and she kept her strategy for this promotional push. She bid $1.11 per click, which was above the average range displayed in the setup form; however, she knew her actual cost per click was likely to be far less. The more aggressive bid allowed her ad to be more competitive when reaching her audience.
Optimization
Rather than using a set-and-forget style, Kika actively managed her campaign over the five days it was live. After the first day of ads, she reviewed her campaign stats to find the click-through rates for each author target she used. She removed the authors who were underperforming and increased her total budget, allowing her ad to reach more of the audiences it was performing best with.
When an ad is performing well, I tend to put more budget behind it. One thing I love about BookBub is that if an ad is performing badly, it shows it less and less. BookBub doesn’t just run through your budget on those ads like other ad platforms do.
She checked on her ad performance daily, continuing to cull and add to her author target list and add budget as needed, ultimately landing on a $500 budget for the five-day campaign.
Results
Over the course of its free run, Remember Pompeii drove 4,759 free downloads, climbed to #38 in the overall free Kindle store, and reached top spots in its core categories. As its rank climbed, it also landed at #1 or #2 on several Teen & Young Adult bestseller lists.
During her five-day BookBub Ads campaign, Kika drove more than 29,000 impressions and 900 clicks to Remember Pompeii. She used Amazon attribution links to track her ad performance in addition to the stats in her BookBub Ads dashboard, and estimated a click-to-download rate of 30–40% (noting that she found the BookBub Ads dashboard reported lower clicks than Amazon attributed).
Following her free promotion, Kika also saw 15 new ratings for Remember Pompeii on Amazon.
Next time, Kika says she’ll plan to layer in additional free promotion services alongside her Featured Deal and BookBub Ads in order to maximize her book’s visibility while it’s on sale. When asked what advice she has for other authors running ads to support a discount, she recommended not treating an ad as static:
Consider your ad campaign an iterative process. You can tweak the author comps daily. That helped increase my CTR over the whole campaign. The budget can be increased if the ad is performing well to get more impressions and clicks.
