When author Phillip Drayer Duncan was preparing to release the fourth book in his urban fantasy series The Blade Mage, he knew it was time to kick his advertising into gear.
Book one in The Blade Mage series was released in 2020, with books two and three following in quick succession in the following months. But over time, sales for the series started to fade. By 2023, when he was wrapping up book five and preparing to launch book four, Phillip was attending a few live conventions and direct sales events, but found that nothing helped the series gain traction. But he loved writing The Blade Mage and didn’t want to give up on it.
To revive his series, Phillip decided to choose an ad platform to focus on, learn it well, and start driving some sales — and that’s where BookBub Ads came in.
When I started running campaigns, I was hoping for anything. I just wanted to see if I could move a few copies. Things have worked out a little better than that at this point, as I’ve transitioned to writing full-time. And that’s exclusively based on the current success of The Blade Mage series.
Since 2020, he’s seen a 1,400% increase in sales volume, and revenue from The Blade Mage has increased over 27x. Below, we break down Phillip’s strategy — and the incredible results for his series.
Here’s what you can learn from Phillip:
- Build an evergreen list of author targets you can rotate through for your campaigns, and never stop adding new authors to that list.
- Periodically revisit and test strategies and targets you thought weren’t working — market conditions change, and your ads’ performance will too.
- Don’t rely on just clicks and sales to determine success: Readthrough and newsletter subscribers are sure indicators that readers are loving your books.
Finding an audience
A key part of successful advertising — and driving sales — is reaching the right readers. One common strategy advertisers use to identify authors to use as ad targets is to look at their book’s also-bought authors on retailers. But for Phillip, this wasn’t working:
When I first started looking at ads, my also-boughts were a disaster. They were predominantly sci-fi and fantasy, sure, but little to no urban fantasy.
This meant finding inspiration for strong targets for his ads was a challenge. And, more importantly, he was missing out on organic visibility on retailers from readers for whom his books may have been a great fit! So to find targets, Phillip started doing his own research.
I got myself a Kindle Unlimited subscription and started reading. I didn’t even need to read entire books to know if they’d make a good comp. Usually, just a few chapters, and I would have the answer. Of course, I went ahead and finished the ones I liked the most and made those my primary targets.
Once he found an author that was a good fit, he’d go to their Amazon profile, scroll to the bottom, and find more similar authors there:
Using this strategy, Phillip compiled a master list of author targets and started testing those targets’ performance. At BookBub, we’ve found that ads targeting authors with fewer than 25,000 readers in their audience tend to drive the highest click-through rates, and Phillip has had the same experience. He sees authors with between 10,000 and 30,000 readers typically drive the strongest results. However, he doesn’t discount authors whose audiences are outside that range; he’s found success with authors across audience sizes. He still regularly revises and adds to this list — it currently has 62 targets!
Having this master list means that Phillip has a ready-made target list to start running tests quickly, a sizable audience to reach when he’s running bigger campaigns, and enough of a varied audience that he can swap in new targets when performance starts to decline.
The performers change from campaign to campaign. I might have one that I’ve tried several times but never won enough bids for because the price point was too high. But the next time I try them, I might hit at a time when the competition isn’t so fierce. So, sure, some authors typically work better than others, but that’s relative and changes over time. Which is why I try to have a BIG list.
Advertising strategy
After the initial stage of identifying an audience to target for his series, Phillip started running campaigns. He found the process involved a lot of trial and error: experimenting with different combinations of audience, ad images, bidding strategies, and campaign setups to determine what helped him sell more books, and what didn’t.
Image
Phillip experimented with lots of ad images, but quickly narrowed in on the design elements that worked best for him:
- A zoomed-in shot from his cover image
- A Kindle Unlimited logo
- A discount price if he was running a Countdown Deal
I started making ad images in Canva and running them against each other to the same author targets. It was quickly obvious which ones were the most effective. And no surprise, the ones that performed best were the ones I thought looked the best. I’m not a visual artist or graphic designer, but it was apparent which looked the most professional.
Here’s how Phillip’s images have evolved since he started promoting The Blade Mage:
Bid and budget
Phillip found that most experts recommended using cost-per-thousand-impressions (CPM) bidding for BookBub Ads, but he decided to try both CPM and cost-per-click (CPC) to see which would be more effective for him.
Ultimately, he found that CPC bidding allowed him to better control his spend by capping his cost per click at the maximum amount he was willing to pay.
When it comes to the bid, I typically start lower and see what happens. If I’m not getting enough impressions, I’ll increase it, usually once a day, until I start seeing the desired results. But I usually set a break point that I won’t cross.
Phillip also started with low budgets for each of his campaigns to prevent overspending (a good tip for any new advertiser!). As he got more comfortable with running ads, he settled on a standard of $20 per campaign.
Since he generally starts his bid on the low end of the average winning range in the ad setup form, he finds that this budget isn’t typically spent too quickly. If it is, he generally sees corresponding spikes in sales and KU reads that balance out his spend. And since Phillip bids CPC, all of his budget is spent on readers who actually click on his campaigns.
Campaign set up
BookBub Ads allows advertisers to track campaign performance across author targets, regions, and retailers. But Phillip prefers to target only one author, region, or retailer per campaign — whether to get more granular data, or to have control over how much budget goes to each of those audiences.
I learned pretty quickly to always target a single author in a campaign, and only for one country at a time. That keeps the data super clean. You might have a target that crushes in the US, but you get outbid in the UK. It happens.
Measuring performance
When assessing his campaigns’ performance, Phillip first checks his BookBub Ads dashboard, where he confirms whether his ad is getting clicks. If he’s seeing a low click-through rate (CTR), he goes back to the drawing board to revise his ad image or targeting.
Once an ad starts generating clicks, his focus is on book sales and page reads, which he tracks in his KDP dashboard. He also monitors his series readthrough, noting that’s where the profit is — the return on investment for advertising a low-priced book one comes from sales on books two and beyond.
Beyond those key metrics, Phillip also keeps an eye on his books’ sales rank, noting there are times — particularly when he’s running a Kindle Countdown Deal and advertising aggressively — when he’ll see the sales rank rise days before the page reads start coming in. The sales rank is a leading indicator for him that his ads are working, since it shows that readers are downloading the book, even if they haven’t started reading it yet.
And finally, Phillip’s holy grail is seeing new subscribers on his mailing list or Amazon profile.
If someone follows me on Amazon and/or signs up for my newsletter, that means they liked my stuff enough to want more. And THAT is the mark of a truly successful campaign.
Results
It didn’t take long for Phillip to start seeing positive results. In just a couple of days, his also-boughts on Amazon began to shift towards the urban fantasy authors whose audiences he was focusing on in his campaigns, and within a few weeks, all of his books were showing more appropriate also-boughts.
Since he started advertising in 2023, his series has seen great success: Total sales volume of The Blade Mage series has increased by 1,400% since Phillip began advertising, and his KU page reads have risen by 1,600%. Last year, he hit a major milestone of 1,000,000 pages read — and in 2025, he’s already crossed 6,000,000 total pages. His daily page reads now typically eclipse his annual total from 2022.
More than 90% of Phillip’s revenue in 2023 came after he started BookBub Ads in December, and since then, his sales have increased by double-digit percentages each year, with 2025 revenue already 27x what he earned in his launch year (and still five months to go!).
With six books currently published, book 7 coming soon, and book 8 in progress, The Blade Mage series has officially been revived!
The Blade Mage has come back to life and has soared beyond its original release. In fact, it’s done better than I had any right to hope for. Enough so that it’s currently paying the bills. And I was able to sell the audio rights to Blackstone Publishing, who have been amazing, found a killer narrator, and just recently released the first book on Audible!
For authors who are starting (or re-starting!) a venture into display advertising, Phillip’s advice is to start small and keep careful track of results so you can know what’s working, drive incremental progress, and understand what that progress can be attributed to.
And finally, stay focused:
I started my ads education with BookBub because it seemed the most straightforward to learn. That was accurate. BookBub Ads are a heck of a lot easier to figure out than Amazon or Facebook. But the thing that helped me the most was when I started learning BookBub Ads, I focused on just that. So that would be my biggest piece of advice. Focus on learning one thing at a time. Give it your full attention. Well, except when you’re writing. That comes first, of course.
