When most advertisers use BookBub Ads to promote their ebooks, they include a link to purchase on Amazon. But after getting started with BookBub Ads late in 2025, cozy mystery author Kitty Graham realized her books were continuing to gain organic traction on Amazon without dedicated ad spend. So instead, she began advertising only to readers who buy from Kobo, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble — and by doing so, she increased her royalties from those retailers by 180%.
Read on to see how she did it!
Here’s what you can learn from Kitty:
- Focus your budget on where it can make the biggest impact. Kitty was seeing organic growth on Amazon, but running ads helped her grow her audience with readers buying from other retailers.
- Track sales, even if it’s not perfect. Even if you don’t have attribution links to rely on, correlating increases in sales with increases in ad spend can help you figure out if your strategy is working.
- Don’t be afraid to bid low. The bid range in the ad creation form shows averages, not requirements — as long as you’re winning impressions, bidding low can protect your budget.
Publishing background
Kitty started publishing her cozy mystery series, The Maeve Lynch Knitting Mysteries, in August of 2025. As a reader, she was used to discovering most of her books through Kindle Unlimited, and she felt comfortable there. So when it came time to publish her own books, she started by enrolling them in the program. As an author, she was excited that going indie gave her the freedom to fully control how her book was presented to readers.
I chose to self-publish as I am a doer and don’t like waiting around, and it also gave me the opportunity to decide how I wanted to frame and market the series.
But as she continued to publish additional books in the series, she realized that there was a sizable audience of cozy mystery readers buying books on non-Amazon retailers — and that with her books in KU, she wasn’t able to tap into that market. When the third book in the series, Twists and Twinkle, released in December of 2025, she decided to publish it wide across all retailers.
Getting started with ads
For her first experience with BookBub Ads, Kitty had a simple goal: find out if readers outside of Amazon would be interested in — and buy! — her book.
Her first campaign in December was for the Christmas-themed Twists and Twinkle, at the time the only one of her books not enrolled in KU. She started with a small list of authors she’d heard of and created a simple image using the BookBub Ads creative builder. This ad ran for a week, cost under $15, and decisively answered Kitty’s question: Readers on wide retailers were definitely clicking on her book!
After her first campaign, Kitty experimented with smaller ads targeting individual retailers, allowing her a more granular level of control over how much of her budget was spent on reaching readers on each retailer. The results of her first campaign panned out, and after seeing Twists and Twinkle’s wide success, she made the decision to move the rest of the series out of KU exclusivity early in 2026. She then started advertising the rest of her books wide.
Campaign refinements
With her books newly available to readers on all retailers, Kitty started further refining her campaign strategy. When assessing her ads’ performance, she focused on their CTRs (click-through rates) to identify which were most engaging to the readers in her target audience:
By the time I was taking my other books wide, I had developed some simple guidelines. I stopped ads that weren’t delivering a CTR over 0.7% fairly quickly and focused my spend on what had worked before… I’m quite strict about stopping ads that don’t perform. I typically only let them run for a few days, and if the CTR isn’t approaching my target, I cut them quickly. In my experience, if an ad is going to work, it usually shows signs within the first day or two.
Despite seeing early success with the ads she designed using the BookBub Ads creative builder, Kitty began to develop a consistent brand for her series that she used across advertising platforms, which she was better able to express by designing her own images. When creating her ads, she draws inspiration from what has worked well for her on other advertising platforms, like Meta.
I’ve found that clarity and consistency matter more than complexity. Images that clearly show the book, reflect the tone of the series, and align with my broader branding tend to perform best. I try to build a consistent visual identity across all my marketing so readers immediately recognize my books wherever they discover them.
After starting with an initial list of author targets who wrote in her genre and niche, she took the learnings from that group’s performance and began testing other individual authors to identify audiences who were a good fit for her book. She now has a core group of consistent targets she can rely on, and regularly tests new combinations of authors to find ways to improve her ads’ performance.
I’ve experimented with different numbers of authors per campaign over time and haven’t landed on a single ‘right’ number. At the moment, I’m running a mix: one campaign with a single author who consistently performs well, one with a small group of five authors that have worked well together, and one broader campaign with around 14 authors as more of a scattershot test.
Throughout all of her campaigns, Kitty used CPC bidding to ensure she never paid more than she was willing to for engagement from readers. For her, this means referencing the average bids in the BookBub Ad creation form and bidding below the low end of the range — but continuously monitoring ad performance, and increasing the bid if she’s finding that her campaigns aren’t consistently winning impressions. This strategy allows Kitty to stick to her planned budget while ensuring she’s continuing to reach new readers.
Focusing wide
Shifting the focus of her BookBub Ads entirely to wide retailers wasn’t an initial goal of Kitty’s, but a strategy that evolved naturally from watching her ads’ performance over time.
I realized I was seeing organic growth on Amazon without using BookBub Ads. That led me to focus my ad spend on wide platforms instead. Since I was seeing results on those platforms, I chose to leave Amazon out of my campaigns. For me, BookBub Ads are less about driving Amazon sales and more about expanding my reach beyond Amazon’s ecosystem.
As she began to notice this trend, Kitty stopped including Amazon links in her campaigns, which allowed 100% of her ad budget to be focused on readers purchasing from wide retailers. She continued with her existing strategies for consistent ad refinements, regularly updating her ad images and targeting to continue to improve her campaigns’ appeal to non-Amazon readers.
By doing so, Kitty found that she’s been able to regularly find new readers who aren’t reached by Amazon’s discovery algorithms.
By focusing my spend more intentionally, I know my ads are reaching readers who may not be browsing on Amazon or seeing my books through its recommendation system. Instead, I’m using BookBub Ads to reach those readers directly on other platforms.
Results
Since beginning BookBub Ads in December, Kitty has driven more than 4,000 clicks to her books on non-Amazon retailers, and has reported an improved return on her ad spend to reach those readers. In that time frame, her unit sales on wide retailers increased by over 150%, and her royalties by over 180%.
The key result for me has been more intentional, targeted spend leading to stronger performance outside Amazon. The biggest impact has been improved return on investment across my non-Amazon platforms.
Kitty now regularly runs campaigns that meet — and exceed! — her 0.7% CTR target with an average cost per click of $0.35 (though she frequently spends even less). One thing she notes is the importance of being able to attribute sales, at least directionally:
Tracking performance across multiple platforms is definitely a challenge. I distribute wide through Draft2Digital and Kobo, so I don’t have a single unified view.
What I focus on is the correlation between where I’m spending and where I’m seeing sales. If I increase spend in a particular market or on a specific retailer, I look to see whether there’s a corresponding lift in sales there. I try not to overcorrect too quickly. Sales can fluctuate day to day, and it’s easy to react to noise rather than real trends.
And for any other authors who are looking for ways to increase book sales beyond Amazon, she encourages trying BookBub Ads with a willingness to experiment!
BookBub gives you a lot of flexibility in your creatives, author targeting, and genre selection. At the same time, it’s important to have clear guardrails. Know how much you’re willing to spend, monitor your campaigns closely, and cut ads that aren’t performing. Being able to attribute sales to your spend, even at a high level, is key.
For me, the balance is simple: Set rules for yourself, experiment within those rules, and adjust based on what the data is telling you. That’s how you can make the most of the platform while still enjoying the process.
Kitty Graham writes the Maeve Lynch Knitting Mysteries and documents the experiments behind her author business at The Practical Indie Author, sharing what’s worked, what definitely hasn’t, and the lessons she’s learning while building an indie publishing business in real time.
