5 Quick Tips for FaceBook Ads for Authors That Hit Home with Readers

So many of us authors attempt to market our books to the public through running ads on large social media platforms like FaceBook. While there are some authors that absolutely drive a lot of profitable book buys and views from FaceBook, there are many more that end up just spending a lot of money and seeing minimal results. Of course, there are many reasons why this would be the case and some of those include our actual books, book covers, the genres we are in and things like that. Let’s assume for a minute that all books are equal and that we are just trying to market them. No, actually let’s assume that we are authors of children’s picture books and we want to get our FaceBook ads to the right audience. Here are some tips that should help us be successful:

• Target Your Audience - This may be the most important area to focus on as an author. What types of readers should be interested in your book? That varies by genre but you want to be as specific as possible with your ad campaign. If you are writing children’s books you probably want to target parents of young children. There are various ways you can accomplish that goal but in general you probably want to start with Mothers that are in their 30’s. That’s a broad brush and not the only market for our books but it is definitely a likely market for buyers and potentially a source of users that will share our ads and get it in front of their circle of friends if they like what they are seeing.
• Use Appropriate Images - I think many times authors just rely heavily on their book cover for these ads and that is likely not going to be enough to grab the attention of our target audience. What is much more likely to be effective is to use a tool like canva and have a mother reading a book to a young child sitting on their lap (ideally that book is your book). Canva offers several templates to make it pretty easy to slide your book into the picture. If you cannot find a good template there you could use a tool like BookBrush to generate various images for your book and/or to create that image. The important aspect there is images of kids. People are much more likely to look at an ad if it has a child doing something they want their kids to be able to do.
• Study Competitive Ads - It’s a great idea to spend time looking at the ads of competitors. You can do this by just searching in FaceBook for “Children’s Picture Book” or just Google “Children’s Picture Book FaceBook Ads.” Once you feed that into FaceBook as you might have guessed you are now tagged as someone potentially interested in Children’s Picture Books so you will start seeing ads. You can also search for authors of picture books and/or popular picture books and before long, you will start to see ads. Basically, if your behavior identifies you as someone that is interested in “Children’s Picture Books” you will eventually trigger their algorithm. If all else fails you can search ads on Meta (still not used to Meta) using this link https://www.facebook.com/ads/library.
• Ad Copy - When you are targeting readers for your book, it’s best to test your ads with different ad copy. Depending on your genre different things might catch the eyes of your readers like “Looking for a book for your kiddos?” or other phrases that might hit home with your target audience is a good idea. It most likely isn’t ad copy super specific to the topic of your book but more thinking about what activities and thoughts might be going through the mind of your target audience. It’s less about you and less about your story and more about how it could be useful to them and their needs.
• Watch FB Ad Analytics - It’s really important no matter what you do to target your audience or how you craft your ad copy, to watch the analytics after the first hours or day of your ad. Are people engaging with your ad? If not, then stop the campaign and adjust it. You might need a different image or to change the language of the ad to really hit home. In our experience, you can pretty quickly judge whether or not a specific ad is going to work after at most a day. If you have low engagement with your ad you should either adjust your audience or change the ad. Save your money. In our campaigns we typically want to see double digit engagement rates. If you aren’t there, stop the campaign and adjust.

Don’t get too easily discouraged with your marketing efforts, it’s just part of the business. The best way to approach this is to keep iterating on your ads until you find a template and type of ad copy that works well for you to get the results you want. In order to do that you have to be pretty disciplined and let the numbers guide you to the right decisions. Whatever you do though don’t just slap a picture of your book or of you holding your book into an ad and expect massive amounts of success. Please try to focus on why your audience might be interested and engage with them on those terms. Good FaceBook marketing and good marketing in general is achieved only when we marry what we are selling with the value it can provide to others.