Do you want to ditch your day job and turn your side hustle
into a productive career, where you can work from home and make massive profits
from passive revenue streams?
If you answered yes, you need to visit another site. This
article is not for you.
Look, if we’re honest, authors know all too well that the
publishing business is hard. One must be heavily invested in the cathartic art
of telling stories and the vexing discipline of turning banal words into
poetry. The act of creating a book, especially when that tome is fictional, requires
a near-insane amount of time, commitment, technology, skill, and confidence.
When it comes time to actually reveal that book to real people, it’s…hard.
Harder than a frozen two-week-old candy. Harder than Dwayne Johnson’s abs.
Harder than… well, you get the picture.
It takes a lot just to get to the point where an author
feels ready enough (we’re never really fully ready) to release a book. What if I
fail? What if I get bad reviews? What if no one likes it? What if the ending
isn’t good? What if… Every writer I’ve ever known, no matter how they are
published or how many sales they’ve had, they had experienced this whirlwind of
emotions and self-doubt. It’s natural.
When those releases result in a few sales in the beginning,
there is elation. Then, gradually, reality begins to set in. A launch happens,
people actually buy and even sometimes review your book, and… the world goes
on. Sales begin to fall, and for many of us, become non-existent for
interminable stretches of time. We try to think of what we could have done
better. We blame ourselves, our friends, our family, and even readers. And
then, once all the ice cream in the house is gone and Impractical Jokers reruns
aren’t funny anymore, we go back to the drawing board. We buy ads. Because we’re
adults, and we realize of the 6 or so billion people on the Earth, almost none
of them have heard of us. The only way to reach them is to go where they are.
The opening sentence may be a bit misleading. You and I, we
can become highly successful, rich authors. It’s unlikely, but it can happen,
and we need this hope to help drive us forward. Nonetheless, there is nothing
passive or easy about being an author. It requires a lot of work. In fact, it
may require considerably more work than whatever job it is you hate. As your
own boss, you have your own worst critic with you every day to revel in your
mistakes. You have to do your own taxes, your own planning, and…your own
marketing.
Even one novel, in my
opinion, is a success, no matter the sales. Let me be clear on that. Writers
are part of my tribe. Sometimes we need to redefine terms to help us navigate
our own paths, and this may be true in publishing. Writing just one book is
productive. However, it may not be productive enough for one to leverage that
towards a profitable career.
Now that all of that is out of the way, let’s get to the
good stuff: ads. In this post, we’ll be exploring BookBub ads. Specifically,
BookBub Pay-per-click and CPM (Cost per thousand) ads. Before moving on, I’m
going to offer a short refresher for those unfamiliar with some of the jargon.
PPC: Pay-per-click. You pay for every click.
CPM: Cost per thousand. This is a major metric with most
advertising venues. This metric is based wholly on impressions. This is the
cost to make 1000 impressions.
CTR: Click-through rate. This is the amount of people who
click your ad in relation to the number of impressions. If you see a small
number of clicks, that’s okay. That’s normal. Experts don’t fully agree, but
the consensus is that a CTR range from 3-5% is considered good.
Conversion: These are the clickers we referred to above, except,
they’ve done exactly what we wanted, and downloaded our book. These are the
people we want. This is what the entire game was about, is converting readers
into YOUR readers.
CPS: Cost per sale. Some places calculate this a bit
differently, and have different names for it. Amazon Marketing Services has a
metric they call Acos. Either way, no matter the acronym or term, this looks at
what you paid and what you earned. If you spent $12 and got 2 sales, that’s $6
a sale. Considering the fact that many authors set their price point at 99
cents, and net a mere 35 cents of that, $6 is quite high.
Whew. That was a lot, right?
But, wait…there’s more.
Bookbub ads work in two main ways: featured and CPM/PPC.
Again, with this post, I’ll be dealing with the latter. It is essentially
undisputed that BookBub’s featured promotions, when one can get them, are one
of the best things in the business. Everyone, try to get a featured promo. What
is considerably less clear is whether or not their PPC ads are worth it. Much
of the research I came across was published on BookBub’s website or was in way
sponsored by the company. While I love businesses working hard to establish
themselves, and love BookBub for striving to assist authors, I avoided using
much of this data. It’s hard to maintain the appearance of objectivity when you
cite the company’s own statistics.
So, then. Are they worth it?
The full answer is: I don’t know. BookBub is a large
business that consistently attracts big pools of dedicated readers. That alone
is worth something. No other existing advertising platform boasts this level of
brand loyalty and recognition within a narrow niche. Readers are hard enough to
find. Bona fide bibliophiles who read multiple books a month… One of the
drawbacks of other popular advertising media for authors is that they are too
general. Facebook allows you to target based on certain things, but authors,
and even Uncle Zuck have no way to independently verify that someone who “liked,”
a page actually likes it. Amazon gives you even more flexibility, allowing you
to select up to 1000 keywords. Nonetheless, if someone searches booksbooks (I
always get that in their recommendations, for some reason), they may not be
searching for post-apocalyptic YA romance werewolf Nazi alien mystery steampunk
books. If someone is searching for Jim Butcher, they probably want to find him
in their search results. Is BookBub’s niche audience enough to justify ads on
that basis alone?
According to a January 2017 blog post [1], one author had a 4%
conversion rate with BookBub’s CPM ads. It is worth noting that the PPC feature
is a recent addition to a program that is, in and of itself, fairly new. It’s
still a nascent program, and that can only mean the price is lower now and
readers haven’t been inundated to the point of avoidance. The author reported a
number of sales, though he ended up paying a stated $12 for each reader. He claimed
a CTR of .4%. The CPM was 2.30, and the CPC figured out to around a half dollar
each.
$12 for a single sale is bad. A CTR of less than a percent
is also bad. Nonetheless, it must be noted that, at the time this author ran
their experiment, PPC ads were not available. When BookBub sends out these ads,
they place them in the bottom of emails. When someone opens the email, BookBub
considers this an impression, even if the recipient did not scroll all the way
down to where the ad sat. Under those conditions, it would be inordinately
difficult to even get your ad in front of people. I do not recommend using the
CPM version of BookBub’s ads for this reason. The goal of advertising is to get
more eyeballs on your book page. Impressions of an ad, even if that ad does include
your book cover, are relatively meaningless.
In August 2018, I
used the PPC ads from BookBub for the pre-order of my latest novel, A Killer’s
Secret. I set a budget of $35 over 7 days. I set my bid one penny higher than
the highest bid they showed in their average range. My effective CPC was around
70 cents. During the first few hours of the campaign, I had almost 1000
impressions, 2 clicks, and one sale. I had only spent $1.40 during that time.
BookBub made it easy for me- someone inept at graphic design- to make an ad creative,
though they limited the text to 60 characters.
One important note is that BookBub does not allow you to use
keywords with these ads. They only allow you to pick comparable authors, books,
and/or genres. I picked five authors and 3 genres for my own ads. BookBub
allows you to advertise on the three main Amazon sites, which are in Canada,
the U.S., and the U.K. Since I have had a number of readers in the EU and UK
with my first release, Traits of Darkness, it was convenient to have this
functionality.
Overall, I felt satisfied with my experience, and will
likely use BookBub ads in the future. The CTR was not great, but I did only pay
per click, so all those people who may have seen my book cover were free. It wasn’t
terribly expensive, and resulted in almost immediate sales- something I can’t
say I ever derived from Facebook ads. They also were easy to set up, and took
less time than making coffee.
Some links are included below for your convenience.
Hopefully ya’ll enjoyed this post. Please leave your thoughts or comments
below. I’d love to hear of your experiences. Please also bookmark this website
if you liked this post or found it informative.
Thanks for reading.
As a quick final note, if you enjoy fast-paced science-fiction
novels with compelling characters and visceral plots, A Killer’s Secret
releases on August 18. https://www.amazon.com/Killers-Secret-Sci-fi-Thriller-Tales-ebook/dp/B07DWR4H2P
I’ll be publishing excerpts of it on this site.
Links:
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