How to market your new book with Facebook paid ads

With 2.2 billion monthly active users, Facebook is prime real estate not just for spying on your friends, but for advertising your book.

Facebook Ads Manager is an extraordinarily powerful tool for comedy authors and non-comedy authors alike. It lets you drill into teensy weensy details about your audience,  set all sorts of configuration options to target only those who matter, and press buttons of myriad other manners to get the most reach out of the least spend.

Now to be fair,  Facebook ads are easy enough to figure out that you could just hit buttons and probably get some kind of result. But if you want to do it right … maybe just look at some of my tips below.

We’ll cover:

1. How to write the right ad copy
2. What kind of images to use
3. How to find and target your audience
4. How to manage your budget

Ad copy

Strong Facebook ad copy doesn’t feel like an ad. It feels like a normal post that just so happens to be Sponsored. You can’t scream “BUY NOW” because nobody will click. But you can ask questions, plug into trends, start a conversation, and then link back to your book in the process.

What should my ad copy say?

People don’t go to Facebook to buy products.

People don’t go on Facebook to buy products. Keep this in mind throughout your advertising experience. You aren’t talking to customers with their wallets open, you’re talking to people who just wanted to engage with their social community, or read some cool articles, or more than likely, look at dank memes. So if you suddenly appear in their timeline as “BUY THIS RN” then you’re going to be ignored.

If your ad drives a conversation, it’ll perform better. You must engage people by talking with them, by offering more than just a product, or by building a curiosity gap. Buying should be their idea, not yours.

Consider:

“This new comedy book from author Duncan P. Pacey is only $2.99! Buy now!”

vs

“Feeling cold this winter? This new comedy book is perfect to hide under a blanket with. And 70% off until Feb 12, too! :O”

Which would you click? The latter plugs into a trend (in this case, the weather), and doesn’t say “Buy now” but compels someone to think that themselves. It also uses the long-held advertising trick of setting a time limit. The emoji, too, makes it more post-like and less ad-like.

Pro ad copy tips for book marketing

1. Some experts recommend mentioning price or discounts if that’s relevant. E.g. if you’re running a Kindle Countdown Deal, you could mention the percentage off, and the new price (like the e.g. post above).
2. Recycle existing posts where possible. One trick I use for “Smack-dab” is recycling the same boosted post, because it already has likes and comments on it. So when somebody sees the ad, they see that it has already been liked – which encourages trust.
3. Put your hyperlink, CTA and price in the ad’s description, not the post ad copy. In every ad, there’s the ad copy at the top, and a post description and CTA button at the bottom. Spur conversation at the top, and drive clicks with “Shop now” or similar at the bottom. You’ll see better engagement that way.
4. Don’t spam hashtags. One or two is fine, but don’t use more.
5. Test alternatives. Create two of the same ad with different copy and see which performs better – then run with the one that does best! Testing is always a good thing.

https://twitter.com/castlefordmedia/status/961429119689883648

Ad imagery

Ad images should be eye-catching, interesting, unique and relevant to the copy.  BUT, they shouldn’t be clogged up with text. In fact, Facebook will reject your ad submission if the picture contains more than 20 percent text.

Facebook will reject your ad submission if the picture contains more than 20 percent text.

Pro ad imagery tips for book marketing

1. Use your book cover art. Book covers are meant to help sell a book and make it stand out, so use it for Facebook, too! Crop it down to the correct size (1,200×628 pixels) and let it speak for itself.
2. Don’t use obviously stock photos. Everyone has seen stock images before. They’re the cringe-worthy cliches of the images world. Use unique images only, whether that’s art, photos you took yourself, or images you have modified.
3. If you use video instead of photos, remember that FB will play it without sound – so make captions.

Audience targeting

Facebook’s audience targeting settings are wonderful. Glorious, even. And it pays dividends to use them.

When you’re setting up your ad (whether on your Facebook Page or in Ads Manager), take time to go through the audience settings. Create a new audience and answer these questions:

1. What age range is most appropriate for your novel? Set this wider to start – you can make changes in real-time, so if you find that 35-45 isn’t engaging as much as you thought but 18-29 is selling like wildfire, you can update your ad to target only the latter.
2. Where in the world do you want to target? Targeting the whole world at once isn’t always best because you increase your competition starkly. But if you’re running a Countdown Deal on Amazon.com, you could focus mostly on a US audience. Or if your book is home-grown Kiwi goodness, try targeting only New Zealand and leveraging local patriotism. If you really just don’t know who to target specifically, target all the countries that speak your book’s language then drill down over time like your age ranges.
3. What is your book about? You can target specific interests with Facebook, which means you can talk only to people who have a genuine interest in your genre/theme/world (or whatever). Pick as many as is relevant – you can always update it as you go, whether to increase or decrease the list. For ultimate targeting, choose “Narrow audience” and add further interests to this list. For example, my “Smack-dab” ads target a broad range of relevant interests, but I narrowed it to “Apocalypse and Post-apocalypse” so I only talk to people who have an interest in my genre AND one or more of my general interests. This increases the chance that the people who see your ad are the people who are actually interested in your book.
4. Bonus tip: A good audience size is 1 million, so expand your interests until you reach that many people.

In Ads Manager, you can change a raft of other settings. But for now, that’s the simplest place to start for beginners.

Managing budget

I cannot stress this enough so I’m going to repeat it three times:

You need sales, not just likes.

You need sales, not just likes.

You need sales, not just likes.

It’s easy to get carried away when checking the results of your book ad. You’ll see “X thousand” impressions and “Y clicks” and be like, “Holy balls, I’m going to be a best-seller by tomorrow!”. But impressions and clicks are costing you money, not making it. You need those clicks to turn into buyers (that’s called a ‘conversion’).

Now, engagements are very important – they can spread your ad to others users, build trust and spark conversation, but they aren’t revenue. So if you’re getting thousands of hits but no sales, something is horribly wrong.

I’m getting impressions but not clicks – what do I do?

People are seeing your ad but not engaging with it. Follow these troubleshooting instructions:

1. Does your ad image follow best practice listed above?
2. Does your ad copy follow best practice listed above?
3. Do you have an appropriate CTA and ad description? (i.e. “Send message” is not appropriate for selling a book, but “Learn more” or “Shop now” would be more commanding).

I’m getting clicks but not sales – what do I do?

This could be an issue with the landing page users are clicking through to. Your book description might need revamping, you might need to accrue more reviews (Hint: If you have only one or two, try get more before spending ad money), your price could be too high for your genre niche, or the mechanics of buying the book could be too difficult – this wouldn’t be an issue on the Kindle store, but might be so if you’ve hosted your book on your own website or an unfamiliar platform.

Other ways to keep your budget down

1. This is slightly more advanced, but set a Rule in Ads Manager to limit “Frequency” to two or less. Frequency refers to the amount Facebook will show one individual your promotion. An AdEspresso study showed that the higher above two your Frequency, the less likely folks are to click (it’s called ‘ad fatigue’). Considering you’re still paying for those users to view the ad, limiting your Frequency can help cut those wasted impressions.
2. If you aren’t converting in certain ‘Placements’ (e.g. Messenger, Instagram), cut out your low performers and focus on your best. This could, again, slice away wasted impressions.

Got your own Facebook advertising tips that will work for new authors? Leave a comment below and be sure to share this article with your new-writer friends.