Newsletter Promotion Sites deliver bang for your buck
By: Ginger | Posted on April 16, 2021
When it comes time to plan for your new release, if book promotion newsletters aren’t a part of your marketing strategy, you’re missing an important trick! Newsletters can blast out the details of your book to thousands of customers looking for their next read, which makes them almost as useful and important as Facebook or Amazon ads. There are plenty of newsletters to choose from, which is good because most authors use more than one per release, stacking them for even greater effect. Today, Ginger is giving the low down on these promotions, as well as some of his own top newsletters to try. In addition to my best-selling romance penname, I recently began publishing books under my real name – which presented me with a unique challenge. After having published 25 books and selling 65,000+ copies in the last few years on that romance penname, I was suddenly… Read More >
Facebook book advertising on a shoestring budget
By: Ginger | Posted on April 9, 2021
Book advertising has become an essential step to success, and when done right and with a desirable product, a bigger budget will lead to higher rewards and a faster path to success. But not everyone can afford to spend large amounts on ads, especially when just getting started. That doesn’t mean they should be ignored completely, though. There is still value in running small budget campaigns, and Ginger is offering up a few suggestions on the best ways to spend those dollars to get the most value in return. I recently blogged about how you need to have courage when you start advertising your book – and I specifically called out the temptation to start a $5 a day advertising campaign as ineffective, and ultimately unprofitable. However, what happens when you’re a brand new author and you don’t have $30 a day to spend promoting your book? How can… Read More >
The right mindset can lead to successful advertising
By: Ginger | Posted on April 2, 2021
Buying all the right courses, reading all the right books, and watching all the right YouTube videos still won’t guarantee a successful advertising campaign strategy for your books – so consider Ginger’s tips for dipping your finger into marketing without losing your mind (or the shirt off your back.) The Advertising Mindset Here’s something I often hear from frustrated authors. “Advertising doesn’t work.” And I know exactly how they feel. After you’ve conquered the initial challenges of self-publishing – namely just getting your book out there – it’s not uncommon to get even more frustrated when your book just won’t sell. With all of the changes Amazon’s made recently, a successful advertising campaign right out of the gate is a more elusive dream than it’s ever been – but even with great book ads, it’s not exactly easy to supercharge your writing career. That’s because writing books and selling… Read More >
BookBub Ads – Part Three: Building an Audience
By: Ginger | Posted on March 19, 2021
So now that you’ve decided that Bookbub advertising is for you, and you have your creative figured out, the final step in the puzzle is targeting the right audience. Bookbub works a bit differently than some of the other ad platforms, which means you may need to alter your current strategy. In this final installment of our Bookbub ad series, Ginger outlines his steps for successfully figuring out who should see your ads. In our last blog post, we wrote about coming up with creative that could be effective on BookBub. Of similar importance is the audience you show this creative to – and that’s where BookBub appears ‘deceptively’ simple in its targeting. One of the incredible things about BookBub is that it allows authors to target their advertising to an incredibly granular level – by selecting specific authors who are included on their platform and targeting the readers… Read More >
BookBub Ads – Part Two: The Creative
By: Ginger | Posted on March 12, 2021
If you’ve been thinking about trying to advertise your book on Bookbub’s relatively new advertising platform but aren’t sure where to start, this is the series for you. In part 1, Ginger discussed what the service offers and how to determine if it’s right for you, and this week he’s diving into what sort of images to use in your bookbub ads. What can, and should, you include? It’s all explained below, with a real example ad Ginger created and used for one of his own books to help illustrate his points. Last week, we pitched the idea of using BookBub to market your books. It’s an incredibly powerful serve-yourself advertising platform that has arguable advantages over both Facebook and Advertising on Amazon – but the interface is deceptively simple and a lot of authors get their fingers burned by jumping in without a strategy in place. Today, we’re… Read More >
BookBub Ads – Part One: Getting Started
By: Ginger | Posted on March 5, 2021
When it comes to advertising, Amazon isn’t the only game in town. Facebook is still a familiar favorite for those trying to drive traffic to their books, and some authors have even ventured into using YouTube and TikTok to promote their work. But have you given Bookbub a try? Once just a hard-to-get newsletter promotion, Bookbub now allows authors to place ads in front of their large readership. In this first installment of a three-part series, Ginger gives you the lowdown on the Bookbub advertising platform and what you need to know to decide if it’s right for you. One often overlooked but surprisingly effective advertising platform is BookBub – with many authors unaware they even run ads. For most self-published authors, getting a BookBub ‘deal’ is the only feature they’re interested in – often considered the Holy Grail of book promotions. But for a fraction of the cost,… Read More >
Increase your book sales by increasing your categories!
By: Ginger | Posted on February 26, 2021
By default, KDP only allows an author to select two categories for their self-published book, from a list that only exposes a limited number of very generic choices. Yet readers have much more varied and specific category options to browse through, with many using those lists as their main source for discovering new authors and titles. The good news is that Ginger is here to tell you how you can get your book into up to 10 of those more specific categories, and why it’s in your best interest to do so! If successful self-published authors have discovered anything by putting their books for sale on Amazon, it’s that readers really do judge a book by its cover. But not just the cover – also other seemingly imperceptible things that make a big difference. In my own experience, I’ve seen that a nice, shiny bit of flair over an… Read More >
Fiction Apps Can Increase Your Income
By: Krista Lakes | Posted on February 19, 2021
Most self-published authors sell their book on one or more of the traditional online eBook stores like Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, etc. Lately, however, a new option has emerged that is worth looking into, at least for those not tied to a long term exclusivity agreement. You may not have heard of Fiction Apps, or if you have, you may have brushed them off believing that they only exist to give books away for free and can’t be used to earn real money from your novels. Times have changed, though, with new apps emerging and gaining popularity among both readers and silicon valley. NY Times and USA Today bestselling author Krista Lakes uses them, and she’s here to let us know why it’s time for authors to start taking these apps seriously, and what some of the options are. I think I’ll be experimenting with one of them in… Read More >
A Market You May Be Missing
By: Deryn Pittar | Posted on January 29, 2021
I noticed that many authors that use our beta reader service leave out the over 50 age group as part of their demographics and it got me to wondering whether that was a mistake or not. I’m sure there are cases where a book really is targeted at a younger age group, but I think that the majority of fiction books probably do not fall into that category. As someone closing in on 50 myself, I have a hard time believing that in a couple of years my opinions of a book will be any less valid than they are now. Deryn Pittar agrees, and as a 50+ avid reader AND author, her opinion on the subject isn’t one any author can afford to ignore. I’m not going to labor the challenges of marketing in today’s publishing world. As an author I’m only too aware of them. However, there is… Read More >
The Importance of a Strong Book Cover: A Case Study
By: D.F. Hart | Posted on January 8, 2021
We’ve published numerous blogs touting the importance of your cover when it comes to selling your book, but it’s often hard to give a concrete apples-to-apples example because the cover is rarely the only difference between two books. That is, if we looked at the great sales of Book A (with a strong cover) compared to the lower sales of Book B (with a weak cover), it would be impossible to argue that the cover was the sole defining factor. Maybe Book A also had a better blurb, or was written by an author with a stronger following, or was in a more popular genre or sub-genre. Any number of factors could be the cause. So when D.F. Hart told me of her recent surge in sales after simply changing the covers on an existing series, I knew it was something that our author community would want to hear about…. Read More >
