David Gaughran - BookBub Ads Expert: A Marketing Guide to Author Discovery

BOOKBUB ADS EXPERT

A Marketing Guide to Author Discovery

David Gaughran

Editor: Tammi Labrecque

Cover: Alexios Saskalidis, 187Designz

Updated EPUB edition published August 2020

Copyright 2019, 2020 David Gaughran

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to others. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

BookBub Ads Expert

From the author of Lets Get Digital, Strangers to Superfans, And Amazon Decoded comes a guide to the worlds hottest book marketing platform: BookBub Ads.

David Gaughran knows more about book marketing than anyone on the planet. Hes always on the cutting edge of whats working in a market that is constantly changing. Skip his wisdom at your peril.USA Today bestselling author Ernest Dempsey.

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Introduction

BookBub launched in 2012 and quickly set about transforming the book discovery landscape. Multiple options already existed for authors and publishers to promote discounts, but BookBub took things to the next level in terms of presentation, execution, andmost importantlyresults; soon the power of one BookBub Featured Deals promotion exceeded all other such discount sites. Combined.

Its easy to see why BookBub exploded in popularity. Several years ago, I signed up to BookBubs daily Featured Deals email, the first Id seen where you could indicate specific genre preferencesand in quite a granular sense too. Prefer Dark Romance over something lighter or sweeter? Want Advice/How To books but have little interest in Business or Cooking? BookBub allowed readers that granularity of choice. It also helped that the offers themselves were genuinely noteworthya nice mix of generous discounts from familiar names and price drops encouraging you to try undiscovered gems, in each of the genres you chose, at free or 99. (Although the prices of these discounted books have been creeping up recently: in many genres, $1.99 is more common now than 99 or free, and even $2.99 is making an appearance for the biggest titles from large publishers.)

Getting a BookBub Featured Deal used to involve simply applying for one; with professional presentation and some nice reviews, your chances of acceptance were pretty good, and then you could look forward to hundreds of sales on the day of your promotion. Its now significantly harder to get a Featured Deal. While subscriber numbers have grown spectacularly, there is still only one Featured Deals email a day, meaning that demand now far outstrips supply. But the flipside is this: if youre selected, that incredible audience growth means you can sell thousands of books on promo day, enjoy increased sales and visibility for a sustained period afterwards, and experience ancillary benefits toolike more robust sell-through and mailing list sign-ups.

BookBub has millions of readers on its various genre-specific mailing lists now, a passionate and diverse community of book buyersand that last word, buyers, is crucial. Goodreads, for example, has an even bigger community of book lovers but has singularly failed to build a way for advertisers (i.e. gatecrashers like you and me) to monetize that passion effectively.

I suppose the second-to-last word back therebookis pretty crucial too. Facebook is a massive advertising platform thats incredibly effective at reaching people; it feels like half the world is a regular Facebook user because they are. But its a generalized audience and we must pan for readers in that fast-flowing stream. Same goes for Google Adsexcept there is no reader-gold!

With the benefit of hindsight, I guess it was inevitable that BookBub would set up an ad platform. BookBub invested more aggressively than anyone else in that space, allowing it to execute its offer in a much slicker way. Social media, graphic design, branding, content marketingthat investment gave it a real edge, but also created a very valuable audience that could be served (and monetized) in other ways. The exponential growth in its audience was matched by demand from authors and publishers to reach those readers, and BookBub met that demand by expanding its services.

Featured Deals are still remarkably effective, and remain extremely popular with readers, but they have now been augmented by several other products. Some are freelike New Release Alerts, which are very effective and dont cost a penny. Others are paid services, like Pre-Order Alerts and the focus of this book: BookBub Ads.

In addition, BookBub has been gradually pivoting for some time now from being an email-focused company to also having a strong emphasis on its website, building an online destination for readers with social aspects, kind of like a more modern, retailer-agnostic version of Goodreads. BookBub is encouraging users to leave reviews on its site and follow their favorite authors, who are encouraged in turn to recommend books to their reader-followers.

BookBub wants its site to be a place where readers hang out. Where this becomes particularly relevant is that all this site-based activityand the email alerts it generatesgreatly increase the potential exposure of BookBub Ads. Remember, these arent just delivered underneath Featured Deal emails, but also in emails like New Release Alerts and recommendations from authors you follow. The number of notifications being sent out every day has risen dramatically over the last year, which in turn has greatly expanded the reach of the ad platform, seemingly without any drag on performance either. And thats before we get into the new placement of BookBub Ads on the site itself.

What all this means is that BookBub Ads is about to explode.

In one sense, its such a simple system. However, embracing the quirks of the platform will lead you to truly master it. That dimension is crucial because BookBub can be one of the most unforgiving environments around for novices. The ad interface is considerably less intimidating than Facebook or Amazon, but this leads many to underestimate the level of complexity under the hood and make critical mis-steps. The margins between success and failure are wafer-thin, leading many to walk away very frustrated indeed.

But they are quitting too soon. Because if you take the time to perfect your images and targeting, you will nail down the quickest and most effective way to reach millions of passionate readers that has ever existed. And the time to become a BookBub Ads Expert is now.

Ive managed major BookBub Ads campaigns across a number of genres. Aside from my own books, Ive run ads for a string of New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors and have watched the platform explode, over the last twelve months in particular. BookBub Ads used to be a nice bolt-on to any launch or promotion, but they have now become one of the main drivers. To my amazement, BookBub Ads can be just as effective at reaching readers at scale as Facebook Ads, beats the pants off Amazon Ads in every metric, and convert far better than either of them.

Many authors try the platform half-heartedly, and invariably failso if