Advertise Smarter

Advertise Smarter Successful independent authors advertise. Its as simple as that. You cant publish a book and expect the world to notice. You must get the word out. However, not all types of advertising produce the same results, and its easy to waste an awful lot of money without seeing substantial return. Trust me, Ive wasted plenty, and I want to help you avoid some of the same mistakes. I only advertise books that are on sale, or free, and I look for sites with a substantial mailing list. I avoid sites that boast huge Twitter followings as their claim to fame, because its easy to artificially inflate social media stats. I also avoid doing banner advertisements on sites, because the click-through rate on those are a Bookbub Lets address the behemoth first. I havent encountered a site thats more consistently worth the investment than Bookbub. At first glance, its expensive, but an ad with them is worth every penny. On average, for a free book in the horror genre, I see around 8,000–20,000 downloads on the day my ad hits, and the effect continues for several days until gradually coming back down to average. Bookbub can be awfully picky about which titles they advertise, which might be discouraging if they decline your novel. Dont be disheartened. Acquire more reviews on your book (which is part of their selection criteria), and give them another try in a month. For tips on finding more reviews, see my article in last weeks FundsforWriters newsletter: How to Get Reviews – Without Cheating! Freebooksy/Bargainbooksy This is another pricey option thats had consistent, positive results, although with nowhere near the same success as Bookbub. Their prices run between $40 and $200 depending on the genre of your book, and I usually see an uptick of about 1,000 downloads (for a free horror novel). Advertising with Bargainbooksy is considerably cheaper, but Ive never seen an impressive result from them. In my opinion, you should only use this site when your book is being offered for free. Kindle Nation Daily / Bookgorilla Its daunting to look at the pricing structure of this sites advertisement packages. Ive participated in several different options (including some of the frighteningly expensive ones) and surprisingly discovered that the best one is also the cheapest. If youre offering a free book, then its worth your time to invest in the $29.99 Free Book Highlighter option. OHFB Another free book advertising opportunity. This one competes closely with Freebooksy in terms of price and results, although I only utilize it when Im putting a slew of ads out all at once. Bookbasset Heres one thats still relatively cheap (get them while you can), but still manages to drum up impressive downloads. One of its options makes you the featured author for the day and can be used to advertise all of your books. This one runs $21.99 and is a good option if youre hoping to advertise books that arent available for free. If youre marketing a free book, then theres an option that runs a meager $7.99, but will usually land you a few hundred downloads. Good luck advertising your book! If you find a different site thats worth advertising with, please reply with   a comment.