my opinion of advertising sites

I do a lot of advertising for my books. So needless to say, I’ve developed strong opinions on the efficacy of the various sites. 🙂

Here are my opinions of the advertising sites for books, ranked from most effective to least effective.

1.) Bookbub Featured Deals. The best of the best. If you get one of those (and it took me two years to get one for FROSTBORN OMNIBUS ONE) they are almost always effective.

2.) Bargain Booksy/Freebooksy. These aren’t quite as powerful as a Bookbub Featured Deals, but they’re a lot easier to get, and very powerful in conjunction with other ad campaigns.

3.) BookBarbarian. I have this listed as third, but I think it’s actually tied with Bargain Booksy/Freebooksy in terms of effectiveness. You do have to schedule several months in advance, though.

4.) Booksends/BookGorilla. They work best with free books, but they’re worthwhile to use in conjunction with a promotion on the other sites.

5.) Bookbub CPM Ads. These are the ads at the bottom of the Bookbub emails. They mostly work like a typical CPM ad, where you bid for space in the ad, and then get charged per-clickthrough. There’s a bit of a learning curve, and you can lose a lot of money if you’re not careful, but they work well in conjunction with other campaigns.

6.) Amazon ads. Too expensive and too complicated. Amazon ads are the kind of thing where you can spend $1,000 to make $1,007.47, or more likely, $745.83. Additionally, they’re wildly unpredictable and keeping up with them requires an enormous amount of time. I’ve cut waaaaaay back on using them and might eliminate them entirely.

7.) Facebook ads. Weird, creepy, and off-putting. (Note my heroic restraint in not comparing that to Facebook’s leadership.) I tried to set up a Facebook ad once, and it demanded a scan of my driver’s license before I did anything. Since Facebook leaks user data like a bucket made out of Swiss cheese, that seemed like a bad idea. So, to employ modern slang, I noped right the heck out of that. That said, I researched Facebook ads thoroughly, and they’re even more unpredictable and take as much time to manage as Amazon ads (people sell courses on learning to use Facebook ads), so I doubt I’ll make any effort to use them.

All that said, paid advertising is only really useful once you’re up to a certain number of books. In my opinion, I think the best overall long-term advertising strategy is 1.) write a series, 2.) make the 1st book free after you’ve written three of four, 3.) have a newsletter sign-up at the end of your books, and 4.) email your newsletter list when you have a new book out.

And, of course, to thank your readers for reading! 🙂

-JM