When Should You Start Ads and Bigger Marketing Campaigns for Your Books?

(You're probably not going to like my answer)

“As a fairly new author, when should I start ads and bigger marketing campaigns?”

When you can afford it.

It also depends on what you mean by bigger marketing campaigns.

A lot of people confusing advertising with marketing, but advertising is just part of marketing.

The first marketing I would start with is free (financially) marketing. There is a time trade-off here, but there’s also a time trade-off to learning advertising as well as a financial trade-off.

So I always recommend starting with free marketing, especially for newer authors. Books are not high cost items, which means you can very easily spend all your profit trying to market them - and very quickly end up in the hole.

But let’s say you’ve started making money with your books and you want to re-invest some of it into marketing.

At that point, I still don’t recommend ads (CPC ads like Facebook, Bookbub, or Amazon ads) as a starting point unless you already have that skill. They have learning curves and just investing money in the learning and the initial ads while you’re learning is pretty big.

I recommend starting paid marketing on something with more proven ROI and no learning curve: paid newsletters.

Examples being the Bookbub Feature Deal, Free Booksy, Bargain Booksy, Redfeather, Fussy Librarian, Book Doggy, Book Raid, Book Barbarian, etc. etc. There’s a ton out there and some of them will have better return for you than others so you’ll want to test them. But as long as you have an on-genre cover and blurb, you should see a return from the majority of them.

You can find long lists of paid newsletters to test out from David Gaughran, Reedsy, and Kindlepreneur.

My personal favorites are BookBub, Free Booksy, and Fussy Librarian. Those have had the best return on my investment.

With cost-per-click ads like Facebook ads and BookBub ads and Amazon ads, you have to learn how to do it. There's an initial investment of money, both usually in a class or figuring out yourself, and I usually recommend taking a class.

Paid newsletters are you paying to get in front of that newsletter’s audience. They’ve built up their subscriber list from eager readers who are looking for more books and new-to-them authors. These lists thrive on free books and 99c deals, so it’s still something where (like ads) you want to make sure you have several books on your backlist because that’s where you get the return on your investment.

Think of it as giving away free samples at the grocery story - but you’re giving away samples of ice cream and every single person in the store is looking for ice cream. They’re even looking for the general flavor of ice cream that you’re giving them! Because the newsletter has curated them that way.

However, it’s not a done deal because - of course - everyone’s tastes are a little different. Let’s say you’re giving away chocolate ice cream. Everyone coming in is looking for chocolate ice cream but one person’s favorite is actually chocolate brownie, another is chocolate swirl, another is chocolate with nuts, etc. etc. It’s not a guarantee that they’ll try your ice cream and then go buy a few cartons, but you’ve significantly increased the chances of that happening just by getting in front of people who are specifically looking for chocolate ice cream.

This is also why it’s important that your cover and blurb match the others in your genre, because if people come in looking for chocolate ice cream and that’s what you have but for some reason your container says “Strawberry” or it says chocolate ice cream on the container but the picture is of vanilla ice cream, you’re not going to get as many people sampling much less buying a container.

But if someone tries your ice cream and they love it, they’ll go and buy a container, and some of them will go and buy every other flavor you have too because they loved your ice cream so much.

Except we’re really talking about books, obviously. But I think sometimes it helps to think of our books as a different product, because it’s hard to think of our book babies as a product in the first place.

When it comes to eventually moving into ads, I would already have done a lot of marketing to make sure that it’s worth spending the money on the ads. Do readers actually want this book / this series right now? Is the series making enough money to justify spending money on it?

Absolutely, you need to market your books to get them in front of people right now, but throwing a bunch of money at ads is usually not the answer.

Especially because of that learning curve I mentioned. There are classes. The good ones usually cost a few hundred dollars, if not more, and they will flat out tell you that you need at least $200-$300 in addition to the class price to run the ads that you’re going to be using while taking the course. If your book income is not already several hundred dollars a month, I can’t recommend running ads yet.

The best recommendation I would make, in that case, is to write more books and keep marketing at a lower level using your time rather than your money and some money on things like paid newsletters until you start to see a return that allows you to scale up to more expensive tactics like ads.

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