Tag Archives: indie author promotion

Posted on by

Advertising for Indie Authors Part 4: Facebook

Facebook has been successful for me, and from what I have read many other authors enjoy the benefits of advertising there, too. It’s got at least two things going for it, in my opinion. First, it can be relatively cheap. You can set up a daily budget of $5 or $10, and get clicks to your books for a few cents each. Second, Facebook provides a wealth of options when setting up ads, offering to send them to users in very detailed demographics then showing the results from those demographics.

Besides running ads, Facebook also offers options to boost specific posts, making sure more people read it and achieve different objectives such as clicking on your book’s page or your webpage, gaining more “likes” for your Facebook page, etc. Here’s the list of ad campaign objectives available:

  • Boost your posts
  • Promote your Page
  • Send people to your website
  • Increase conversions on your website
  • Get installs of your app
  • Increase engagement in your app
  • Reach people near your business
  • Raise attendance at your event
  • Get people to claim your offer
  • Get video views
  • Collect leads for your business

All told, ads on Facebook are well worth looking into. There are several tutorials online that go into much better details about how to be effective with Facebook ads, and quite a few blog posts like this one that are worth your time.

One of the most well known set of tutorials is by Mark Dawson. At the very least, check out his free offerings.

Posted on by

Advertising for Indie Authors – Part 2: Amazon Marketing Services

You sell books on Amazon. It makes sense to advertise on Amazon as well. Amazon Marketing Services lets you create ads that run on Amazon pages. While people are looking for books similar to yours, an ad will display on the page which hopefully entices them to click over to your book.

For an ad campaign I created for Redwood: Servant of the State, I chose to run the ad based on interests. My targeted interests were Teen and Young Adult, and Science Fiction and Fantasy.

I budgeted $125, and limited the time for a month total, running from about mid-May to mid-June. Here’s the stats for the run:

amazon marketing 1

Over 45,000 impressions looks impressive, but out of all those page views you’ll note only 39 people clicked on the ad, and of those only one person bought a book which was selling for $1.35 at the time. While the run didn’t go over the budget by a long shot, ultimately it did cost $23.50 to sell the one book. Here’s what the ad looked like:

amazon marketing 2While it was fun to have an ad for my book running alongside some other great books on Amazon, the return on investment proved weak. Things that could possibly improve the return might be a better ad. The basic ad only allows two lines of copy above an image of the cover. Perhaps different verbiage would lead to more clicks, and thus more sales.

Posted on by

Advertising for Indie Authors – Part 1

As an indie author, I have the dilemma shared by others as to how to get the word out about my books. Naturally, I feel I’ve produced good works of fiction, but since I’m starting a “brand” or “business” from scratch featuring my name on these books, I have no ready or apparent avenues with which to support getting the word out.

I know I’m not alone. In my circle of friends, people have dutifully downloaded my books and offered encouragement, support, and advice. A friend of a friend self published a few years ago, and his book has languished online. Our mutual friend put us in contact with one another. His questions: How do you get sales? How do you advertise your books? How do you get the word out about what you’ve written?

In thinking about these questions, I thought it might be useful to record my advertising efforts on this site, for better or worse. Perhaps this might help other new indies facing similar questions about spreading the word regarding their books.

I certainly haven’t found the magic bullet yet, but perhaps my experiences can lead authors toward productive advertising avenues, and maybe help them avoid ones that are not so useful.

So stay tuned, and I’ll share what I’ve discovered so far.