Advertising on BookBub

I've had good luck running short ad campaigns on BookBub recently for my book, "Still Breathing." I have often tried to secure a Featured Deal with BookBub but have been unsuccessful so far. However, I recently began to explore paid ads on the site.

The positive reason to advertise on BookBub (as opposed to many other sites, such as Amazon or Instagram, etc.) is that BookBub offers a collection of prescreened people (I'm a member of BookBub--it's free) who are actually looking to buy a book. The prescreening offered by BookBub is that members answer a series of questions about their preferred genres, authors, topics, etc. BookBub sends the identified members an email each day with a curated list of books (maybe 10 or so) that perfectly match your tastes and are always at a reduced price from whatever their standard costs normally are. A significant number of the suggested books are even free.

These lists of books, tastefully presented with a summary of their storylines beside them, are what a Featured Deal is all about. At the bottom of this curated list is a space for a single book ad. The point is that the book ad takes advantage of BookBub's screening so the ad space on that page matches the genre and desires of the people receiving that email. In other words, your ad is only presented to people likely attracted to just that type of book. It's a win/win.

So, I've started to play in their arena and have seen positive results. There are many ways to skin the cat in BookBub ads and I'm still learning to fine tune my ads so they find the best audience. Still I'm selling more books this way than I have any other way I've tried. I'm running two-week campaigns and am averaging 15 books a campaign. That's not going to impress anybody but at least it's positive. I just checked on my most recent ad and saw that I sold five books yesterday alone! That's the most I've sold in one day in an ad.

BookBub helps you creat ads within their Partner Dashboard section on their website. You can also create ads of your own and upload them, as long as you follow their image restrictions. I've done both. Here is what my latest self created ad looks like:

The other benefit of any sales of books is that it ramps up your position on Amazon. When your book has no sales, you plummet in their tracking numbers. My book is often in the one million something in their Best Seller list and low in their subcategories as well. This affects how often your book appears on Amazon. The better your sales numbers the more often you are presented in various ways inside Amazon to prosepctive readers. Thanks to my recent BookBub experiments my book had climbed to # 120,281 on the Best Seller list. It is also at # 886 on Contemporary Literary Fiction, # 916 in Women's Literary Fiction and # 1944 in Women's Friendship Fiction. Those are excellent numbers compared to where the book has often ended up when I'm not actively marketing it.

I'll keep plugging away.