Creating Book Ads for Twitter

As of August 17, my new book has performed its Cover Reveal. At the suggestion of my publishing company, I hired a blog tour business to help me get the cover noticed on a series of book blog sites through a paid service called a Cover Reveal Blast. I'm not sure how successful that was, but it made me feel good. There's little way to gauge results but I did verify that the info and the beautiful cover did actually appear on 28 different book blog sites. I think the idea is to simply raise a general internet awareness of the existence of a new book named STILL BREATHING and with a certain cover design. Well, for whatever it's worth, I've done it.

In the next few months, as I finalize and format my manuscript, and prepare for a November 17 go live book launch, I am attempting to do some ads through my Twitter account. I had to do a lot of research to try and discover the right image sizes to use in order to maximize the way Twitter handles photos, etc. I discovered that it's critical to keep in mind the fact that people's computer screens vary in size and resolution, and that most people are viewing Twitter on their phones. The same image might look great on your computer and horrible on your phone. Whatever you create needs to work well in all those formats and that requires a lot of compromises. In addition, you can't depend on viewers to click on the image to see it full-sized. Whatever you make needs to work both in it's reduced size as a Tweet as well as in the enlarged version if they click on it.

I'll not bore you with the hours spent fooling with all the options and just show you a few of my series of ads for the book.

In each case, I added text notifying viewers that STILL BREATHING will go live in November and that they could right now add it to their Goodreads Want to Read list (and I added a link to take them right to the book on Goodreads).

I have no idea if these ads will be effective. I've made quite a few varieties, some with the book on the left side, some with different questions, etc. I intend to Tweet them often during the next few months. (I'm told you have to repeat, and repeat, and repeat.) Twitter has some capacity to report Tweet activity and, of course, you have the likes button, reply button, and retweet button to measure some response. In truth, advertising seems to be one of those games where you just don't know if you're winning or losing most of the time. I'm hoping I will slowly see a rising number of people adding the book to their Want to Read lists on Goodreads since I can track that. On the other hand, who knows?

Here's what the ad looks like with the book on the left side. I chose the flat version of the cover on the left side rather than the 3D book since I felt it looked better.

We'll see how things go over the next few weeks. If you have any comments, I'd love to hear from you. If you want to follow me on Twitter and watch my efforts there just click the Twitter button at the bottom or top of most of the pages on this site.

I tried Tweet ads for a few weeks recently with my first book (NOW & AGAIN, Science Fiction) to see if I could generate any sales. I had reduced the price from $2.99 to .99 and I wanted to let people know that the book had gotten good reviews. Here are a few of those ads.

In the text with the ads I included easy links to the book on Amazon and assumed that if the ads were at all effective I'd see an uptick in book sales. So far, I haven't noticed any new sales. I'm still new at Twitter and I don't have many followers but the numbers keep growing and if some of my followers retweet my ads to their followers, things can change.

I'm told that I must be patient with all these digital activities of virtual promotion, building platforms, attracting followers, etc. Patience is not one of the virtues that came preloaded in me at my birth.