Facebook and Google Ads for Authors

Please find the intro of this series on Marketing for Authors here.

Whenever I mention that I work in Marketing to an author, usually the first question I’m asked is “how do I run ads for my book?”

I am happy to give advice on setting these up, because I know that’s the answer to the question they’ve asked. But there’s an unasked question, one that I try to answer as well by providing as much context and information around the world of digital advertising as I can.

That question is: Should I run ads for my book?

The answer, if you’re a traditionally published author, is very like No. No, you should not. (Update Oct 2022: I’ve changed my answer to “Maybe”. You can read more on why here)

To understand why, let’s start with how online advertising works and the strategies employed by companies that use it successfully, then we should think of that in the context of being an author who receives a royalty via a publishing contract.

How does digital advertising work?

The benefit of digital advertising is that you can see direct causation. I ran an ad, I can see the number of clicks it got, and then the number of purchases that occurred as a result. This is something that TV and radio ads always tried to achieve (quote “SALE2021 when you purchase today!”), but digital ads mastered. It means that people can see exactly how much money they earned for the amount that they spent.

Facebook and Google then take that purchase data, analyse aggregated metrics about the people who purchased (what other things have they expressed an interest in? Do they follow any similar pages or click on other ads?), then update the targeting of the campaign based on those similarities. This means the longer a campaign runs and the more people who purchase, the more it learns how to show ads only to the people who are most likely to find your ad of interest. This is what it means when you hear the phrase “Interest-Based Targeting”.

[Something I’m not going to delve into in-depth in this post is the ethics around said interest-based targeted ads. This is another reason why I caution people away from digital ads, because there is so much legislation, policy, and personal comfort levels at play here that it becomes extremely complex. The short answer is that there are ways to do this ethically, and there are ways to do this unethically. Interest-based targeting, when done anonymously, in aggregate, targeting adults who have given permission, can be done ethically. For the most part, following the prompts in the advertising dashboard will help you from straying into running ads in a problematic way, because more parameters and regulations have been put in place in recent years. In the end you have to decide for yourself whether you’re comfortable with using advertising platforms that have been used for unethical behaviours. This paragraph has been edited based on feedback in the hopes of making it clearer to read.]

The thing is though: when you’re traditionally published, the ads don’t work that way, because you don’t get purchase data. You can see clicks, but unless you are selling the book yourself, you have no way of seeing whether your ad successfully led to someone purchasing a book. So already you are working with less data, and the campaigns themselves are unable to optimise. I could optimise my campaign to get more clicks by using some click-bait headline, but that doesn’t mean people will purchase. Or maybe it does? Who knows, without the ability to see that?

Imagine a company that is successfully running digital ads…

A company that is successfully running digital ads will have a budget purely for running those ads. Let’s say this budget is $10,000 per month (sorry, I know you probably just fainted. Bear with me, as it’s easier to explain things using larger numbers).

For that $10,000 per month, we will get a certain number of impressions. Meaning, the number of times your ad is seen (not the number of people who have seen it!). A percentage of those impressions turn into clicks, and then a percentage of those clicks turn into purchases.

NUMBERS STUFF

For those who get overwhelmed by numbers, jargon, and formulas, feel free to skip this section.

The number of impressions you get for your $10,000 monthly spend is calculated based on what’s called an eCPM (estimated cost per mille). An average eCPM might be $10 for 1000 impressions. This means for your $10K per month, you are getting 1,000,000 impressions per month based on this formula:

A million impressions sounds great, right?

Not so fast.

Because the percentage of people who click on that ad is around 1%. This is known as a Click Through Rate, or CTR. Now your 1,000,000 impressions has become 10,000 clicks.

Still sounds pretty good though! Surely people wouldn’t click on an ad unless they intend to buy the book. If those 10,000 people each spend $10 on a book, that’s $100,000 on a $10,000 investment. Amazing! No wonder everyone’s talking about running ads!

Except that your click to purchase rate is also around 1%.

In this scenario, that is 100 books. Multiply that by the $10 purchase price, and you’ve now earned $1000 when you’ve spent $10,000.

Except… you haven’t actually earned $1000. If you’re a traditionally published author, you’ve only earned a 10% royalty on that $1000, meaning you’ve earned $100 for the $10,000 you spent.

Hang on. This all sounds very gloom and doom. If the numbers were this bad, no one would ever run ads!

You’re right! I’ll admit, I did tweak the numbers to keep the percentages clean (1% instead of 1.5%, for example, or a $10 eCPM instead of a $4.50 eCPM). If you mush those numbers around, you will find variations where they work out. Those numbers are averages only.

Here are some reasons why people are able to run ads profitably:

1. They earn the majority of the revenue. This is where self-published authors can find success running ads, because they’re earning a higher percentage than a 10% royalty.
2. Their click rates are much higher than average, due to especially appealing images/videos and good audience targeting. This is where having an appealing cover becomes incredibly valuable.
3. Their click to purchase rate is above average. Maybe the book is on sale for a limited time and the person feels compelled to purchase right away. Maybe the topic of the book is trendy. Maybe it just has a great hook. [This part can be difficult to shift, and would be almost impossible for someone traditionally published as it will depend a lot on things determined by the publisher such as the description, the review quotes, and the cover].
4. Their campaigns optimise better due to more data. If the campaigns can track the % of purchasers, they can target more effectively and that 1% purchase rate might shoot up to more like 10%.
5. They have greater volume, which means… even more data. Some companies will spend upwards of $100,000, even $1,000,000 on ads per month. More volume means the algorithms are optimising based on 10,000 purchases instead of 100. The ads are less likely to find patterns that might make the campaigns do weird things. 4 people in that group of 100 loving welding is much easier for a computer to assume a pattern than 4 people in a group of 10,000. By spending more, campaigns get more data and the campaigns don’t suddenly start accidentally targeting welders for your unicorn picture book. [NOTE: I am not saying you should spend thousands of dollars on ads. I’m just using this example to illustrate how those ad platforms interpret data]

END OF NUMBERS STUFF

The summary of all of the above is that when you combine earning a royalty percentage of a sale, not being able to see purchase data, and running on smaller budgets, it is impossible for your advertising campaign to earn you back what you’ve spent on it.

This is a problem, because “breaking even” is how these tools are built to run. A company selling t-shirts isn’t just pouring $10,000 per month into ads for the fun of it. They will have $10,000 set aside every month, and then optimise those ads to earn back $10,000 every month.

But why only earn back $10,000? Shouldn’t they want to earn back more? Where is the profit?

Well, yes. Ideally. But the reason it’s done this way is that more copies sold benefits word of mouth. So there’s an assumption that if you get 10,000 tracked sales, you might see another 1000 that aren’t tracked from your campaigns. And those 1000 are your profit. So instead of spending $8000 and earning $9000, they decide that it’s better to continue investing that additional money into ads because it results in more sales and profit in the long run. For those companies it’s better to keep the volume higher, as it works out better for them. This is, of course, out of reach for a single self-employed author trying to earn a living.

In the end though, whether spending $20 per month or $1,000 per month, the point is that as a traditionally published author you are not going to earn your money back.

I get it. Don’t run ads. What if I still want to run ads anyway?

If the above didn’t deter you, that’s fine. I’ve actually run ads for my own book. I wrote out all the above so that you are going into this with your eyes open. But don’t say I didn’t warn you, and don’t try to lay at my feet that you didn’t earn back the money you poured into ads. Proceed at your own risk.

One final thing I would like to mention is that these websites and dashboards are constantly changing (like, seriously, one of the challenges of the digital advertising industry is that just when you get used to doing something a certain way it changes completely). For that reason I’ve kept my guidance below slightly more general, rather than giving specific step-by-step instructions with screenshots. If that causes challenges, please leave a comment and I can try to update this to make the information more useful.

Here are some key things to know and think about:

1. If you know you’re going to lose money, then strategize and budget accordingly. Don’t plunge $500 into this that you can’t afford to lose entirely.
2. Keep the steps that it requires for someone to buy your book as minimal as possible. Don’t send them to your author home page where they then need to scroll around or navigate to find your book, then they have to click through to a different site before they’re able to purchase. Send them somewhere that enables them to purchase directly and immediately, like your Bookshop.org product page. The harder you make it for people to figure out what to do next, the more likely it is that they’ll just close the page and leave.
3. Keep in mind that the percentages I mention above (click through rate and purchase/conversion rate) mean that spending $100 on ads likely means you won’t see a single purchase, or if you do it will be limited to 1 or 2, which is very difficult to measure. What this means is you should run ads without any expectation of observable results. Any sales that come from ads will be indistinguishable from your usual sales.
4. Consider where your audience congregates. If you’re writing for a 20-something audience, choose a social media platform that is used by 20-something people. If you write books for children though, your audience is actually their parents and grandparents, so keep that in mind. Do not target ads at people under 18. This isn’t just an ethics thing, it’s a keeping-you-out-of-a-legal-quagmire thing.
5. As of 2021, Amazon doesn’t let traditionally published authors run ads (I still find this a baffling choice on their part, but whatever)[Update Dec 2022: You can now run ads via Amazon if you’re a traditionally published author. Read about my experience here]. Facebook and Google, for worse or for worse, are the kings of this industry and tend to have the best results. Instagram ads are run via Facebook. As of 2021, TikTok only lets you run ads if you’re a registered business, and being self-employed isn’t sufficient (I tried). Pinterest ads have an interesting benefit in that the images from the ads remain on the website even after you turn the ads off (they just don’t get promoted). So you might see a residual click here and there months after you’ve stopped spending money.
6. On Facebook, videos do better than static images. The carousel of images does better than a single image.
7. Keep text very short and to-the-point. People spend a fraction of a second skimming past an ad; they are not going to read a giant wall of text. Research how to write effective ad copy. (Summary: keep it short and have a single clear call-to-action like “Buy now!”)

Setting up ads on Google

Running ads on Google is simple compared to Facebook because it’s more straightforward to set up and you have less granularity in what you can target and tweak, so I usually recommend this as a starting place.

• Go to ads.google.com, go through any sign-up stuff that you need to do until you get to the point where you can click “Create New Campaign”.
• Select that you want to direct people to a website since you most likely aren’t wanting to direct people to a physical location or get phone calls.
• The website you direct them to should be a store page where people can purchase your book directly, like your Bookshop.org product page.
• From here you can write your copy, which you want to keep short and clear. Practice flicking your eyes over the words for a fraction of a second to gauge how difficult it might be for someone to absorb what you’ve written.
• Images are super important and have a huge impact, so make sure you upload some! Use websites like Canva and BookBrush, which have attractive templates that you can use.
• The main targeting that Google offers is keywords. This can get tricky, knowing what to select, so I recommend experimenting and seeing what makes your click-through rates go up or down. By tweaking my keywords and also my text and images, I managed to increase my click-through rate from 1% to 4%.
• Think about what it is that people might be searching for and try to address that in your keywords and your copy. Maybe they’re looking for “Best books with dragons” or “Books about mountain climbing”. Maybe it’s “Books with boy characters” or “Queer fairy tale retellings”. Put yourself in the shoes of a person who is looking for the exact type of book that you’ve written.
• If your book might have more appeal in a certain region, consider restricting the ads to show only in that region.

Setting up ads on Facebook:

• You will need a Page (not a Profile) to run the ads. Consider whether you want that page to be your author name or a more generalised brand around books. Think about what would prompt you to click on an ad, and what image you’re comfortable having show up in random people’s news feeds. Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not.
• Choose your campaign type. Things like “awareness” are going to maximise views/impressions based on your budget, but this means you might see reduced click through rates. Things like Conversions aren’t an option unless you are sending them to your own store. “Traffic” optimises towards a Click, so this is what I usually do.
• You can click through the part where it tells you to name the Ad Set and stuff and edit this later. The name doesn’t matter too much — it’s more so that people who run lots of campaigns can keep things organised.
• A/B test means that Facebook will show two different images that you upload to a portion of the audience and then tell you which image results in more people clicking. You can do this with your ad copy/text also.
• The Ad Set is where you define your audience, ie: the list of people who will see your ads. If you have an audience already, via newsletter subscribers, content that has had a lot of engagement, a page that people follow, or an Instagram, Facebook can create an audience that resembles those people if you click “Create new” in the “Custom Audiences” section and then click “Lookalike Audience”. Note that you will not be able to see any personal info about the people Facebook finds to include in your new audience. If you don’t have those things, you can target your ad based on certain interests under the “Detailed Targeting” section. You can select people within a certain age range, people who like a movie that is comparable to your book, and people who are frequent online shoppers. Browse through and select anything that seems relevant. Again, you won’t be able to see any specific information around who the people are who will be seeing your ads.
• Since you are presumably working with a limited budget, keep an eye on the Audience Definition gauge at the top, and try to keep it leaning towards “Specific” rather than “Broad”.

Once you have set your ads live, keep an eye on them in the coming days. Running ads is all about experimentation, so try different images, different text, and different audiences. Try to tailor the images/text to the audience that you’ve selected.

To wrap up…

Marketing yourself as an author is challenging and often scary. Digital ads provide a certain level of comfort, because they don’t require you to pitch or email strangers or beg people to follow you. Despite all their complexities, there’s something straightforward about turning on a campaign and watching numbers tick up.

But running ads is still a complex beast that is constantly evolving, and as I’ve outlined above, with limited odds of you being able to measure any increase in sales from running them. But if this is an experiment that you are interested in trying, I hope the advice above is helpful.

Best of luck!

Read my follow-up article on running ads on Amazon here.

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If you find any of this useful, please consider sharing, or check out my book A Wolf for a Spell.