While newer social platforms like TikTok often steal the spotlight, Facebook remains the king of the hill when it comes to author engagement and audience connection. With its unique ability to foster deep, meaningful interactions and its unparalleled reach, Facebook is still a critical tool in an author’s marketing arsenal. But how can you make this platform work for you, especially when organic growth feels like an uphill battle?

In today’s blog, Ginger offers actionable strategies to transform your Facebook presence from a stagnant page into a thriving community of engaged readers. Plus, he shares a treasure trove of relevant hashtags to use in your posts, helping you draw in future fans, not just the ones who have already discovered you. So read on for a quick guide on how to use your Author Page to supercharge your social game.

Recently, I was asked why most of the articles I write about advertising focus on Facebook and the answer is simple: It’s the biggest game in town. Currently, no other platform offers quite the same sophistication as Facebook, or reaches a more appropriate audience.

But Facebook isn’t limited to just paid advertising. You can build quite a substantial presence there organically, especially if you’re willing to put in the work required. In fact, there are many authors who rely on Facebook as one of their primary platforms for engaging with fans – choosing it over Twitter, Instagram and even TikTok. 

This is because Facebook tends to be where your readers are, and when you encounter them on Facebook it’s a different experience to interactions on Instagram or Twitter. You can engage in longer conversations that are easier for other readers to discover and weigh-in on, and when your posts and engagements get shared, they tend to reach a new audience in a much more seamless and organic way than TikTok – almost as if you’re stumbling over a new friend’s profile in your feed.

But generating a following on Facebook isn’t as easy or intuitive as on TikTok or Twitter, and this is compounded by the fact that Meta actively limits your organic reach to just 15% of your total followers – making the task of gaining new fans much more difficult. 

But when you start building traction, it quickly snowballs – and if you’re already advertising on Facebook, having a robust calendar of content on your author page helps amplify the reach and impact of those ads. It’s really a no-brainer, and the biggest obstacle is normally just trying to learn what works on the platform, and what doesn’t.

That’s why I’ve decided to provide a quick guide to organically growing your author platform on Facebook – and it all starts with your Author Page.

Why You Need an Author Page, Not a Personal Profile

One of the biggest mistakes authors make on Facebook is trying to engage with fans and build a following using their personal Facebook account, or one they’ve specially created for their penname (which violates Facebook’s TOS, by the way, and can get your account banned from the platform.)

While it might be tempting to use your personal Facebook profile to promote your books, it’s highly recommended to create a separate Author Page instead. A Page on Facebook is a static landing page used by celebrities, businesses, and brands and it offers a lot more usability than a regular old Facebook account. Here’s why:

• Professionalism: An Author Page establishes a clear distinction between your personal life and your author brand. It gives your readers a dedicated space to engage with your work – and means you don’t need to worry about strangers seeing pictures of your kids or being privvy to other aspects of your personal life you only share with friends and family.
• Reach: Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes content from Pages over personal profiles, increasing the visibility of your posts. You’re also limited in the number of “friends” you can have on a personal Facebook account, but you can have as many fans and followers as you want on a Page.
• Analytics: Author Pages provide valuable insights into your audience, helping you tailor your content effectively and figure out what works and what doesn’t.
• Monetization: If you decide to explore advertising options in the future, you’ll need a Page to run ads. Since you have to have one, you might as well make proper use of it.

Growing Your Facebook Page Organically

Once you’ve created an Author Page, it’s time to start reaching out to people. Growing your Facebook page organically requires a strategic approach that focuses on creating valuable content, engaging with an appropriate audience, and finding ways to engage with them.

Here are two key strategies to always keep in mind:

Key #1 – Create High-Quality Content

• Know Your Audience: Understand their interests, preferences, and pain points. This part is generally easy, since as an author you’ll probably share many of these things with your readers!
• Diverse Content: Mix it up with text, images, videos, and live streams. Experiment and have fun with Facebook, trying out new types of posts and content. You’ll never know what will impact your audience, so experimentation is key when you’re just starting out.
• Visual Appeal: Use eye-catching visuals and engaging captions to attract new followers. Look at your post through their eyes. Would this make you stop scrolling if you saw it in your feed?   
• Value Proposition: Provide content that is informative, entertaining, or inspiring. This doesn’t mean all your posts have to be about your books – in fact, most of them shouldn’t be. Just create and share things that you find interesting and engaging, and you’ll find many of your future followers will appreciate them.

Key #2 – Engage with Your Audience

• Respond to Comments: Show you care by actively engaging in conversations. Even just tapping the Like button can reward somebody for leaving a comment. 
• Ask Questions: Encourage interaction and gather feedback in your posts – but just remember, if you invite opinions, you’re going to get them! 
• Join Groups: Participate in relevant Facebook groups to expand your reach. 
• Collaborate: Partner with other authors or influencers. Blog tours and Page takeovers are the bread-and-butter of many successful authors on Facebook, and many are eager for new authors to come and join them and help make an even bigger impact.
• User-Generated Content: Share posts from your followers! This rewards fans who take the time to engage with you, and helps provide social proof about you as an author.

How Can You Create Engaging Posts?

Once you’ve set up your Author Page, it’s time to start posting. Remember, the goal is to create content that people will want to share, like, and comment on. Here are some post ideas specific to authors – you’ve probably seen your favorite writers on Facebook create something similar:

• Behind-the-scenes glimpses: Offer exclusive looks into your writing process, such as sharing your favorite writing spots or discussing your research.
• Author Q&As: Interact with your audience by answering questions about your books, writing journey, or even personal interests.
• Book excerpts: Share tantalizing snippets from your latest or upcoming book to generate interest.
• Writing tips: Position yourself as an authority by sharing helpful advice for aspiring writers.
• Author challenges: Encourage interaction by creating fun challenges related to your book or genre.
• Share your passions: Demonstrate your personality by posting about your hobbies or interests outside of writing.

How Can You Reach More People?

Creating engaging content is invaluable – but there’s no point unless you’re going to be able to share it with new people. The best method for reaching a new audience organically on Facebook is to have fans of your Author Page share your post – letting your work be seen by all their friends.

However, you can also make it easier for readers to find your content on Facebook by using hashtags. These are something more familiar to Twitter or Instagram users, but hashtags on Facebook work in exactly the same way, and can help your content show up organically in searches for that tag.

Hashtags on Facebook are clickable links that categorize content. When you add a hashtag to your post (e.g., #bookworm, #amreading), it becomes a clickable link that leads to a feed of all other posts using that same hashtag.

Here’s a mix of general, genre-specific, and engagement-focused hashtags to get you started:

General Author Hashtags

• #author
• #bookworm
• #booklover
• #bookaddict
• #reader
• #bookstagram
• #bookish
• #amreading
• #currentlyreading
• #bookrecommendations
• #bookreview
• #writerslife
• #writingcommunity
• #indieauthor
• #selfpublished
• #supportindieauthor

Genre-Specific Hashtags

• Use specific hashtags related to your book’s genre, such as:
  • #romance
  • #fantasy
  • #mystery
  • #sciencefiction
  • #youngadult
  • #historicalfiction
  • #nonfiction
  • #memoir
  • #childrensbooks
  • #middlegrade

You can even make it more granular than that, by focusing on the tropes of your chosen genre, rather than the genre itself. For example, romance authors love using hashtags like these: 

General Romance Tropes

• #LoveStory
• #HappilyEverAfter
• #RomanceNovel
• #BookLover
• #BookWorm
• #ReadersOfInstagram
• #Bookstagram

Specific Romance Tropes

Enemies to Lovers

• #EnemiesToLovers
• #HateToRead
• #OppositesAttract
• #SlowBurnRomance
• #ForbiddenLove

Alpha Male/Strong Female

• #AlphaMale
• #StrongFemaleLead
• #BossyHero
• #IndependentHeroine
• #PowerCouple

Second Chance Romance

• #SecondChanceRomance
• #LostLove
• #RekindledLove
• #WeWereOnABreak

Small Town Romance

• #SmallTownRomance
• #CountryLove
• #HometownHeartthrob
• #CozyRomance

Historical Romance

• #HistoricalRomance
• #RegencyRomance
• #VictorianRomance
• #TimeTravelRomance

Fantasy Romance

• #FantasyRomance
• #ParanormalRomance
• #WerewolfRomance
• #VampireRomance
• #MagicAndLove

Contemporary Romance

• #ContemporaryRomance
• #OfficeRomance
• #BestFriendRomance
• #SingleMomRomance
• #MillionaireRomance

Finally, you can also engage with readers on Facebook another way – by going to the places where they’re talking about books. Try some of these hashtags:

• #bookclub
• #bookblogger
• #bookishlove
• #bookstagrammer
• #readersofinstagram
• #bookgiveaway
• #bookpromo
• #supportlocalauthors
• #readingchallenge
• #bookishlife

Remember:

• Relevance: Use hashtags that are relevant to your post’s topic.  
• Discoverability: Choose hashtags that are popular but not overly broad.
• Consistency: Use a mix of popular and niche hashtags. 
• Experimentation: Try different hashtags to see what works best for your audience.  
• Placement: You can use hashtags anywhere in your post, but many people prefer to place them at the end.

Benefits of Using Hashtags:

• Increased Visibility: Hashtags help your content reach a wider audience who are interested in the same topic. 
• Engagement: Hashtags can encourage interaction and participation in online conversations.
• Discoverability: People can find your content by searching for specific hashtags.

Now you’ve got #hashtags down, you’ll hopefully start to see more and more strangers find your posts – and remember what your grandmother said: A stranger is just a friend (or fan) you haven’t met yet.

Boosting Engagement

To maximize the impact of your posts, focus on building a community around your Author Page. Here are some ways to do that:.

• Respond to comments: Show your audience that you value their input by responding to every comment, no matter how small.
• Encourage sharing: Ask readers to share your posts with their friends if they enjoyed them.
• Invite fans to like your Page: When people interact with your content, invite them to like your Author Page for more updates.
• Use relevant hashtags: Help people discover your content by using popular and relevant hashtags.
• Post consistently: Regular posting keeps your Author Page active and fresh in people’s minds.
• Experiment with post formats: Mix up your content with images, videos, and text-based posts to see what resonates best with your audience.

Promoting Your Books

Now, all this advice is great, and will hopefully help boost your reach on Facebook – but as much as I recommended not making all your posts be about your books, you obviously want to make sure some of them are. After all, that’s why you’re doing this in the first place!

So, don’t be afraid to regularly insert some posts about your books – and here’s how to do it effectively:

• Direct links: When sharing book covers or excerpts, include a clear and clickable link to purchase the book. If you’re directing readers to Amazon, be sure to use an Attribution Tag to track their behavior once they get there.
• Create book-specific posts: Dedicated posts about your books can generate excitement and drive sales, and you should always ask people to share them.
• Offer exclusive content: Provide bonus content, such as short stories or character interviews, as incentives for purchasing your books or sharing your posts.
• Run contests and giveaways: Encourage engagement by offering free copies of your books or other prizes. I’d shy away from offering gift cards or any specific cash prizes, as Amazon can sometimes confuse these as “payment” for reviews (a major no-no.) However, prizes don’t only have to be books – and if they are, they don’t always have to be your books. 

Conclusion

Growing your author platform organically on Facebook takes time and effort, but the rewards can be substantial. By creating engaging content, building a community, and effectively promoting your books, you can significantly increase your reach and connect with readers on a deeper level – and on one of the best platforms for authors.

Just remember that hard work and consistency is key. Keep posting, keep interacting, and you’ll slowly watch your author platform flourish. With dedication and a strategic approach, you can harness the power of Facebook to build a thriving author career without breaking the bank on advertising – and when you do start advertising, it will make every dollar you spend work that much harder for you.

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This month we’ve been discussing the Direct Sales model of book selling, as many authors look at alternatives to the downsides that come with using the big online retailers. As we’ve mentioned, selling direct isn’t for everyone, but there is a lot of potential for those that can make it work and are willing to put in the effort at getting it all running.

Ginger has been our guide throughout this journey, and in today’s blog he is wrapping up this series by sharing and analyzing the results he’s seen after his first month of experimentation. Not only does he provide some raw numbers, but he also notes a surprising result and discusses whether or not he is going to continue forward with the Direct Sales model in the future.  

As this is the final installment of a four-part series, I would urge you to start at the beginning (if you haven’t already done so). Part One is where I discuss the Direct Sales model in general, Part Two gives you some of my personal reasons for wanting to give this a try along with some of my historical sales numbers for comparison, and then in Part Three I went over what it takes to put it all together.

Today, I’ll be going through the results, and how it all turned out.

It took me nearly a month to set up my direct sales “funnel.” It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my self-publishing career – calling more on the skills I’d learned working for New York advertising agencies than any I’d developed in my career as a writer. Eventually, though, I was in a position to switch it on and see if all the hard work paid off.

I set my initial budget at $50 a day, which is far more than most self-published authors would be comfortable spending on a brand new advertising campaign. However, I felt confident in doing this because I knew that if I made any sales, I’d be receiving the money within a few days, instead of having to wait for 60-days-after-months-end. I gave myself a buffer, keeping $350 in my account to cover a full week of advertising, and then started the most difficult part of this process.

Waiting.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to wait long.

Direct Sales Results

The first day I started running my direct sales advertising, I got my first order. In fact, I got four orders that first day – more than enough to cover my advertising budget and bring in nearly double that amount in profit. Here’s what that looked like:

As you can imagine, I was beyond excited. After riding the emotional roller coaster of Amazon self-publishing for years, I finally thought I might be back in the saddle and ready to bring my writing career back to its former heights.

That was until the day after, of course – during which I kept checking my phone every few minutes, but didn’t see any new sales coming in. Eventually, I received a single order for a bundle of books – barely covering half my advertising budget for the day.

Elation turned to despondency. Despite the fact that I was overall still in the black, I began to despair – thinking that this whole project was a waste of time, and my plans to dominate self-publishing through direct sales were a fool’s errand.

But what is a fool other than somebody who perseveres in the face of adversity?

I’d given myself a week of advertising budget to burn through, so I decided to ride out the entire seven days and just see what happened. The next day, as if to torment me, I received two sales of book bundles that almost exactly covered the cost of my advertising for the day.

And that’s how things continued. Each day I’d wake up and listen for the app on my phone to make a little “cha-ching” noise to confirm that I’d just made a sale. It was so much more anxiety-inducing than selling my books on Amazon – but also pretty exciting. My kids noticed that my eyes would light up every time my phone went “cha-ching” and started celebrating every time I sold some books.

I mentioned above that the hardest part of the process was waiting, and that remained true. I’d set up my ads, my landing page, and my checkout – so all I could do was wait for Facebook to bring customers to me. Whether or not they decided to buy my books was the deciding factor.

On my best day, I received seven orders for book bundles – making nearly four times what I’d spent in advertising for the day. On my worst days, I got just a single order – barely covering half what I’d spent. However, there wasn’t a single day that didn’t see at least one sale come in, and over the course of the month a pattern clearly began to emerge.

I was breaking even.

Before my $350 buffer ran out, I received payment for the books I’d sold – and that allowed me to keep on advertising. The good days and the bad days balanced each other out, until I found myself making a slight profit over the course of each week. It was just enough profit to pay for my email services, website hosting, and all the other components of my direct sales funnel – plus a couple of six-packs of Stella Artois to bolster my courage to keep on going.

In speaking with other authors who’d turned to direct sales, I discovered that I was actually doing a lot better than most people. It’s practically unheard of to make a profit in your first month of advertising. Normally, you have to tweak different parts of your funnel to dial in the process – and if I ever wanted to make some real profit, that was definitely a project I was going to have to invest some time and effort into.

However, direct sales worked. In my first month of advertising, I spent $1,362.77 on Facebook advertising $352 on website hosting and other services – yet brought in a total of $1,922.46 in sales. That covered all my expenses and provided $207.69 in pure profit.

So, that’s not a lot. The lakeside cabin in upstate New York would have to wait for a while. However, it did show that the direct sales model had promise – and I had potential to improve my funnel and increase that profit margin.

This month, I’ve continued advertising. The only difference? My daily budget is now $100 instead of $50. Thanks to continued sales of my books, I’m currently able to sustain this level of advertising without having to reach into my own pockets – but I’m not going to lie. Things get pretty close to the wire depending on how good each day turns out.

Lessons I’ve Learned

Here are the biggest lessons I’ve learned from running direct sales for a month:

It’s not easy.

You’re going to have to build landing pages, configure delivery systems, plug in a checkout system, and automate email flows if you want your funnel to work correctly. This is beyond the comfort zone of many self-published authors, so be aware of that before you start. You can certainly hire experts to build this funnel for you, but that involves a lot of initial expense with no promise of an immediate return on that investment. You have been warned!

Your books have to be good – and you have to have a lot of them!

Back when I sold radio advertising, one customer warned me: “It doesn’t matter how much money you spend on advertising. If somebody doesn’t want to buy your product, they won’t.” That’s the same in self-publishing, whether you do it on Amazon, or sell directly to your readers. You have to have books with great covers, killer blurbs, and compelling stories to make this profitable – and the authors with bigger back-catalogs normally make a lot more money. I embarked on this adventure knowing that I was selling good books. I had 12 novels in my series, and I’d already sold 70,000 copies of them through Amazon, so I was pretty confident I could make direct sales profitable. However, if your books aren’t ready for prime-time, it doesn’t matter what sales system you use. You’re going to lose money. Only embark on direct sales when you know that you’re selling books people want to buy.

You’re probably going to lose money at first.

Many other authors have told me that my experience with direct sales is pretty exceptional. Most authors lose money when they start trying to sell their books directly, and don’t become profitable until they’ve tweaked their “sales funnel” a number of times.

But you’re not “losing” money. You’re spending it.

If your ads initially run in the red, however, don’t despair. Even money you “lose” gives you a return on investment, as long as your advertising is driving traffic to your landing pages. The advantage direct sales provides is real-time feedback on which part of the sales funnel trips potential customers up. Do they scroll down to your sales button? Do they check out your sample chapter? This information allows you to tweak your sales funnel and hopefully turn a loss into a sustainable profit. Selling books from Amazon doesn’t give you this level of information, even if you use attribution tags, so you’ll be able to reach profitability much faster selling directly.

More Results and Final Thoughts

Right now, I’m still excited about the potential of direct sales to readers. I’ve seen some initial success, and I intend to keep building on it. I think this is the right path back to consistently making $10,000+ a month in book sales, and I’m working hard to get there.

It wouldn’t have been possible if I’d stuck things out with Amazon. The lack of information I got from my advertising makes it a real struggle to know if I was making a profit or not, and having to wait 60 days for my royalties made the level of advertising I wanted to do financially unsustainable. 

But I felt horrible about that. One of my concerns about moving to direct sales was what effect it would have on my books on Amazon. After all, I’d removed them from Kindle Unlimited, and stopped all advertising that sent readers directly to my product pages. I thought my sales on Amazon would tank as a result, and initially that’s what seemed to happen.

The month prior to starting my ads, which I spent building my direct sales funnel, ended up being my worst month of the year in terms of book sales. This made sense, since all my books were out of KU by then, and I wasn’t doing any advertising at all.

However, something really surprising happened the month after: My sales on Amazon actually picked up!

Weirdly enough, after I started advertising my direct sales funnel, I started to sell more books on Amazon!

In fact, the month I spent doing direct sales has ended up being my best month in book sales on Amazon this year, even without my books being in Kindle Unlimited! More so than that – the trend seems to be continuing. Now I’m advertising at $100 a day, I’m seeing a massive increase in sales on Amazon as well.

That doesn’t make much sense to me, but I’m not complaining about it. In fact, it reassures me that advertising in general does work, even if you can’t track a direct link between where your ads show up, and who eventually buys your books. People are seeing my novels on Facebook, and then finding them on Amazon without me even having to provide them with a link.

That’s been my biggest surprise from experimenting with direct book sales – but I’m sure there will be many more along the way. I promise to check back in and let you know what they are as I continue this new chapter in my self-publishing story.

Have you experimented with direct sales to readers? What have your experiences been like? I’d love to hear your perspective. Don’t be shy about letting me know in the comment section below.

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If there’s one thing that the big online eBook stores have going for them, is that they are relatively easy for authors to get started on. Entering product information is straightforward, and things like billing and content delivery are handled automatically. Yet, there are a host of downsides that make authors hungry for alternatives, which is why Ginger has put together this series on Direct Sales.

Today in part three, Ginger goes into detail about what exactly authors are giving up, and taking on, when making the decision to switch to the direct sales model – and it can be significant. Authors that want to follow this path must be prepared for a variety of technical tasks, added expenses, and a setup that can take weeks as opposed to the days or even hours that they’ve grown accustomed to. But for those that follow through, the reward at the end is far more control over their books, faster payouts, and a wealth of customer information that can be invaluable.

A couple of weeks ago, I began this series on Direct Sales, explaining what it is and why I ultimately decided to make the move. Today, I’m going through what it takes to make it all work – and let me tell you, it isn’t easy!

Setting Up Direct Sales

You may recall that in part 2, I mentioned how I’d first started to make the direct sales move back in January – which might lead you to wonder why I’d only just completed my first full month of advertising recently.

Well, that’s because there’s a lot of setup involved. A HUGE amount of setup. Enough setup, in fact, to easily dissuade the casual publisher from ever wanting to open up this can of worms. 

The wonderful thing about publishing on Amazon is that it all happens right there, in the KDP Dashboard. You can upload your books, design your product page, and reach a global audience with just a few clicks. It’s easy, convenient, and Amazon even deposits any royalties you earn straight into your bank account every month (minus their 30% cut, of course.)

And while Amazon might not do much to promote your book these days – thanks to how much advertising they’ve baked into the product pages – they still have a system in which reviews can be posted, sales can be ranked, and you can feel like your book is right there in the heart of a real (virtual) bookstore.

Direct sales is very different. Completely different.

Creating a Funnel

First off, you become less of a book publisher and more of a website developer when you switch to direct sales of your book. You have to create something called a “funnel.” This is a path by which people who click on your ads on Facebook are guided into a “funnel” that narrows their experience step-by-step until they finally find themselves ready to purchase your books. 

Then, you have to design an automated process by which people can pay you for your books, and a process for delivering the books to the reader in a way that makes them easy to read. Amazon normally takes care of all of this for you. When you venture into direct sales, you have to do it all yourself.

Now, there are a lot of tools that can help you with this. I’m not going to get tactical, since you have to research for yourself which services suit your plans better, but the “funnel” normally looks like this:

• Your ads – these are all done through Facebook, just like when you’re advertising books on Amazon. When people click on them, they get directed to…
• Your landing page – this is a website which provides information about one or all of your books. It could be as simple as a store page on Square or Shopify, with all your books listed, or a more sophisticated sales page built using a tool like WordPress. In any event, you’ll need to decide where you want to host your landing page, then design it yourself, and verify the domain with Facebook so that you can send potential customers there. 
• Your checkout – Assuming the people who clicked on your landing page want to buy one or more of your books, you need to provide them with a means to do so! There are a variety of checkout options you can use. Shopify has a robust and versatile version. PayHip is a site that offers transactions cheaply and easily, and Square is an option that many self-published authors love, especially since it also works well when they sell physical paperbacks at conventions or events.
• Delivery System – If you’re lucky enough to sell a book, how does it get to your customer? Book Funnel is probably the best-known book delivery system, and it can send eBooks directly to customers with just a few clicks. Some sales platforms connect automatically with Book Funnel to streamline the process. Other platforms require a third-party tool like Zapier to automate things. In any event, this is a vital part of the process – and it’s equally important that you don’t have to do anything manually. 
• Email Marketing – The final tool is one that will be familiar to most self-published authors who’ve started a subscriber list. Once people have purchased from you, you want them to do so again! So it’s important to use a service like Mailchimp, Mailerlite, or Klaviyo to track your customers and make it easy to nudge them when you have a new book available.

The challenge is: All of these components have to work in conjunction with each other, and that requires a reasonable amount of technical know-how. All of these services also tend to cost money, which is why it’s quite a leap to move to direct sales after Amazon has provided a lot of functionality to you for free in the past.

You’re not just building a business when you move to direct sales – you’re actually building a machine. It’s an automated process that leads customers to your eventual (ideal) destination – a book sale! The goal is to make a machine that enables you to sell books more efficiently than you can through Amazon.

Make Sure You’re Ready Before You Begin!

But before you can even start that, you have to set your house in order back on the world’s largest digital bookstore. For me, the reason I began this process in January but didn’t start making sales until May is that I had to take all my books out of Kindle Unlimited first.

Kindle Unlimited is really valuable if you’re trying to advertise books on Facebook, because Google and Apple have transpired to make it impossible to buy books directly from the Amazon app. I found I got 80% of my revenue from KENP page reads – but to be eligible for KU, there’s a price to be paid. Your book has to be exclusive to Amazon. 

Therefore, you can’t create a direct sales funnel if your books are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. It violates Amazon’s terms of service and can get you kicked off the program if they find out you’re circumventing the rules. Given that your books will be for sale on a public website, it’s more than likely that Amazon WILL eventually discover you selling your books directly, so it’s not worth risking your account just to “double dip.” Before you begin direct sales, you have to unenroll your books and in my case, many of those enrollment periods weren’t over until the end of March or April. 

It was a MAJOR step outside my comfort zone to do this. Ever since I published my first best-seller in 2018, Kindle Unlimited has provided the bulk of my royalties. I realized I’d be taking a huge hit by doing this, and all on the promise of making more through direct sales than I would through KU. Nevertheless, risk is our business – so I bit the bullet and pulled my books.

The advantage, of course, is that I can finally go “wide for the win” on other platforms, including iBooks – but I didn’t have the bandwidth to even consider that when I first unchecked the renewal box. I think it’s a decision I can leverage in the future, but Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither was my sales funnel.

And that brings me to the second reason this all took so long – I literally had to build EVERYTHING. I had to upload all my books to Book Funnel. I had to enter all my products into my shopping platform. I had to design a landing page, and customize my email lists, and basically go through the whole process of designing a website and marketing platform.

It took less than a month, but it’s still something I had to work on each and every day. I learned a huge amount – I’m practically a developer now! (Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration.) In any event, a lot of sleepless nights and busy days were spent designing my “funnel” before I could even think about switching it on.

Where the Magic Finally Happens

But once that happened, so did the magic. One massive advantage direct sales offers over sending people to your Amazon product page is that you can take advantage of a lot of ecommerce tools that Amazon doesn’t like. One of the most important is the Meta (Facebook) Pixel.

A Pixel is a special bit of code you can plug into your homepage and checkout page which tracks the behavior of the people who visit through your Facebook ads. This code can then report back to Facebook on each person’s behavior. If a customer buys a product, for example, Facebook recognizes that as a “conversion” and will try to send more similar customers to your store.

Previously, we’d been forced to rely on Traffic ads, which simply send a Facebook user to Amazon never to be seen again. Traffic ads are cheap (I was getting Cost-per-Click rates as low as $0.08 on some days) but you also get what you pay for. Using Conversion ads instead of Traffic ads delivers a much higher quality of customer, and while you pay more upfront for your ads (paying for conversions, rather than clicks) you’ll theoretically make that back by selling more products.

Likewise, selling through a third-party platform instead of Amazon allowed me to collect the email addresses of all new customers, and that was information I could use to generate a lookalike audience for my ads. 

As those of you who’ve advertised on Facebook will know, a good audience can make or break your campaign – and one of the challenges for self-published authors was the fact that the customer lists we often generated were from giving away free books. People who like free books rarely turn into customers, so it was always challenging to build a hard-hitting (and hard-buying) audience based on your subscribers.

By selling directly, you’re building a list of subscribers who ONLY purchase your books. This means lookalike audiences are FAR more likely to be filled with book-buyers, and that ultimately has a great impact on the cost and effectiveness of your ads.

But finally, and most importantly, using a different checkout system allows you to collect the money you make from selling books instantly, or within a few days. This can be the game changer, as far as I’m concerned.

If I sell a bundle of books using PayPal as a method-of-payment, I’ll get the money for that sale deposited instantly in my Paypal account, ready to be spent immediately. Through Shopify or Payhip it takes a few more days – but still two months or more quicker than getting paid through Amazon. 

This is what really made direct sales exciting for me. I’d previously struggled to scale up my advertising and now I didn’t have to. Advertising my books on Amazon at $30 a day required me to have $2,700 on hand to cover my advertising before Amazon finally paid me. With direct sales, I got that money in just a few days.

Therefore, as long as I was making a profit, I could sustain a much higher level of ad spend with a much smaller budget; and that’s where I started to realize that I could get my book sales back to what they once were without putting my family’s finances in jeopardy.

There are other advantages, too – like being able to track every click from every single potential customer. Even with Attribution Tags, you’re kind of in the dark when you send traffic to your product page on Amazon. With direct sales, I’m able to use tools to record each individual visit to my landing page – and figure out which sections might be putting potential customers off, so I can optimize them better.

This information makes it much quicker and easier to start running a profitable advertising campaign – and that’s exactly what happened to me. I’ve only been running direct sales for a month, but in that month I’ve already turned a profit.

I mean, okay – I’m not about to retire to the South of France on this profit. Not yet. However, I am motivated to keep on going in a way that I eventually wasn’t when advertising my books directly on Amazon. 

In Part Four, I’ll show you exactly what that profitable advertising looked like – and discuss whether or not I plan to continue selling my books directly to readers. Stay tuned!

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Last week, Ginger began a series on direct sales – the idea of selling a book directly to readers from your own website, instead of through one of the traditional online retailers.

Today we continue this discussion with part two, where Ginger walks us through his personal reasons for wanting to give the direct sales route a try. Through disclosure of some of his actual historical sales numbers, he provides context that may help others decide if selling direct is right for them. These numbers will also be useful to compare against in the future, when he takes us through how well his direct sales experiment actually went. 

Last week, I started a series about how I’ve spent a month selling my books directly to readers on Facebook, rather than sending them to my product page on Amazon. The direct sales model isn’t for everyone though, so it will help to first give some context as to what led to my decision to finally give it a try. My journey may help you decide if selling direct is right for you, as well.

Why did I make the move?

I’ve been writing and publishing on Amazon since 2013, but it wasn’t until 2018 that I had my first best-seller. I went from making up to $50 a day from my books to suddenly making $500+ between royalties and Kindle Unlimited page reads. On my best day, I made $615 dollars.

This was a game-changer for me. I’d never realized it was possible to make this much money from writing before, and I definitely wanted more. I threw myself into writing and publishing following that initial success and was initially more than rewarded. I consistently made $10,000+ a month from my book sales on Amazon simply from publishing a new book every 60-90 days – with my best month exceeding $14,000 in royalties!

And the remarkable thing was all this was organic. Back in 2018, advertising on Amazon wasn’t an option, so all the recommendations and suggestions Amazon made were organic, based on the success of individual books. My books were successful, and therefore Amazon suggested them more often – meaning the better my books did, the better my other books did!

But in 2019 Amazon introduced advertising onto their platform. Now, instead of seeing purely organic suggestions from Amazon’s algorithm, customers would see paid-for ads sprinkled into their search results. As more and more of the real estate of each product page was allocated towards paid advertising, the impact of organic suggestions lessened. As a result, simply publishing new books every few months wasn’t enough to sustain an income that I could use to support my family.

And that’s been the struggle ever since. These days, the only way to make money through self-publishing is to market and advertise your books. However, as I explained last week, that isn’t always easy or sustainable. I was at an advantage because I’d worked in advertising for 20+ years, and I had a big series of romance books that people clearly wanted to read – but even then, it took a while to make any advertising profitable.

The biggest challenge was that Attribution Tags don’t necessarily track all of the sales or page reads that come from your advertising. One month when I was starting out, for example, my Attribution Tags tracked $252.82 in book royalties based on an advertising spend of $252.98. By that metric, I was a few cents short of breaking even.

However, I’d actually made $505.80 more in book sales and royalties than I had in the months that I hadn’t been advertising – and there had to be a correlation, since I’d never seen a random jump that high. So while the Attribution Tags told me I was making a loss, I was actually making nearly 100% profit on my advertising, according to the increase in actual sales. 

And that’s the dream, right? To invest $1 in advertising and get $2 back? Most advertisers would be thrilled to be doubling their money every month.

But the problem is, it’s not possible to sustain a family on $505.80 every month (at least where I live) – so I needed to spend more; and that’s exactly what I did. The following month I spent $937.01 on advertising and saw an increase in sales of $1,117.27. Great, right? 

Except that meant I’d only made $180.26 in profit that month – so instead of doubling my money, I’d just fallen short of a 20% profit. I mean, sure that was profit – but it’s frustrating to spend double the money and make half the return that you had the month before.

However, I continued to tweak and change things until the situation improved. Over the course of the next year, I spent $4,744.58 on advertising on Facebook. After paying that bill, I still earned an additional $4,868.25 in profit—money I wouldn’t have earned without any advertising. This meant that over the course of the year, my advertising efforts more than doubled my money. Great, right?

I mean, I certainly wasn’t complaining – but it was frustrating. The most frustrating part was the fact that Amazon didn’t pay me until 60 days after months end – so, for example, I didn’t get the money I’d spent in March back (plus my $180.26 profit) until the end of May. To keep my advertising going through that period, I had to lay down $2,700 in advertising costs right out of my own pocket, with the hope that I’d see all of it back again.

And that just wasn’t working for me.

The biggest problem was that I wasn’t in the financial situation to throw $2,700 around with casual indifference any longer – and when Amazon finally paid me, it only covered one of the months I’d been advertising. In my personal life, I needed to fix my car and pay for my son’s AP College Credit classes, so I ended up having to hustle like crazy to be able to pay my bills and keep advertising. 

And that also meant I didn’t have any hope of scaling up – and that’s really where you either make it or break it as an author. Realistically, I wanted to make a full-time income from writing again, which meant I needed at least ten times more profit every month than I’d been making. 

The challenge? I’d need ten times as much advertising money to make that happen. Stretching the budget to cover $2,700 was (barely) sustainable. Spending $27,000 over the next ninety days was a pipe-dream. 

Of course, I could have made it happen. I could have squirreled away my profits, and waited until I’d finally saved enough to scale things up. The problem was that there was no guarantee things would work out; and losing $27,000 on failed advertising would have probably resulted in losing my wife, as well (she’d be out the door within seconds!)

Now, I don’t necessarily think that would have happened – losing all of that spend with nothing to show for it. My books have always consistently sold well, and I know how to advertise effectively. You need only go to the Top 100 books for your genre on Amazon to see writers who are clearly spending hundreds of dollars (at least) to get their books ranked highly, and when you’ve got that kind of budget, each dollar stretches that much further. You can absolutely make a killing advertising on Amazon…

…but only if it doesn’t kill you first.

Which is why I decided to try Direct Sales instead.

I’d heard various people talking about it for the last year or so, including Steve Pieper and the highly-regarded Joanna Penn. I had many hesitations about it – not to mention a certain amount of fear – but I also couldn’t help but be fascinated at the potential advantages. Eventually, in January of this year, I decided to take the plunge; and it’s been a wild ride since then.

Let me be clear, though. Selling direct is NOT as easy as just putting your books up on Amazon or any of the other online stores. There is significant setup involved, which is what I’ll focus on next week, in part three.

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Welcome to the first part of Ginger’s ongoing series about direct sales. In this series, he’ll explore why self-published authors should consider selling books directly to readers, rather than relying solely on traditional online book platforms.

As we’ve discussed before, authors face significant challenges in gaining visibility on sites dominated by advertising. Even when readers click on an ad, making an immediate purchase isn’t always straightforward, and the delay in receiving payment can be frustrating. Direct sales offer a way to bypass these obstacles, presenting an appealing alternative to traditional eBook stores. However, it’s not for everyone.

Over the next few weeks, Ginger will guide us through the benefits of the direct sales model, his personal reasons for choosing this path, the steps involved in setting it up, and the actual results he has seen since starting.

Back last year, Craig and I were excited to have Steve Pieper as a guest on our Fully Booked podcast, to discuss the potential of selling books directly to readers, rather than going through platforms like Amazon or iBooks.

The appeal is obvious. These days, Amazon has adopted such an advertising-heavy sales model that unless you’re spending money sending potential readers to your books, it’s very difficult to gain any organic visibility. 

However, advertising isn’t easy – especially not when you’re advertising products with a very small profit margin. That’s why a lot of self-published authors are too intimidated to get started, or lose a lot of money trying to figure things out for themselves, and then give up in frustration.

This is compounded by one of the most frustrating roadblocks authors have faced recently – the inability to buy eBooks through the Amazon app on either Google or Apple phones. This is because of an annoying dispute between the companies, with Google and Apple demanding a share of every transaction made on one of their phones. Amazon argues that the profit margin on ebooks is so narrow that it’s not profitable to sell them on their Amazon app if Apple and Google take such a big share; and so they’ve simply removed the buying option completely.

And given that 98.5% of all Facebook users access the platform through their phone, you can see the problem! Readers might be eager to click on your ads and even buy your book – but they’ll have to fire up their laptop computer to actually complete the purchase. Even the most enthusiastic customers might kid themselves that they’ll do so later, but they never actually go back to complete the purchase.

Now, that’s not to say that advertising your books on Facebook isn’t worthwhile. I managed to run profitable advertising for several months thanks to the fact that my books were enrolled in Kindle Unlimited. Readers might not have been able to buy the books using the Amazon app, but they could download them and start reading them with Kindle Unlimited, and that’s where I saw 80% of my revenue come from during my time advertising on that platform.

Likewise, Amazon remembers when a user visits a book on the Amazon app, and will often display that book front-and-center when the same user logs in on their computer. For readers who’d promised themselves “I’ll buy this book later” the opportunity is now right in front of them. It’s just that there isn’t a direct route between ad-and-purchase. You’re paying to put your book into their sales algorithm with no guarantee that it will pop back in front of them when they’re in a book-buying mood.

Another traditional problem with advertising your books on Facebook was that there was no way to tell how many of the people who clicked on your ad eventually bought your book. The best you could do is send traffic to your product page and hope some of it resulted in book sales.

Amazon mitigated that recently with the development of Attribution Tags. These are uniquely generated URLS that you can use instead of a direct link to your book’s product page. They track whether or not a user clicked on Read More or Look Inside when they’re on your page, whether or not they bought your book, and how many pages they’d read through Kindle Unlimited.

It was something, at least – a way to gauge the success of an advertising campaign. However, the attribution system is far from perfect. It only tracks visits for 14 days, and only purchases made during that visit. It also doesn’t track purchases of that product made through a different sales route – for example, if somebody returns to Amazon and buys the book because of one of Amazon’s recommendation systems. 

The whole reason your book was even shown to them in the first place was because they visited it by clicking on one of your ads. However, the Attribution Tag won’t recognize that sale; so according to the figures, your advertising “failed” even though the sale would never have happened without it! 

I’ve seen this first hand. I struggled to break even according to the data about my Attribution Tags. However, every time I advertised, I also saw a massive spike in sales and page reads. I ended up calculating whether or not I was profitable based on the overall increase in sales, because I didn’t believe Attribution Tags were telling the whole story. Thanks to knowing what my “baseline” was without advertising, I think I did a pretty good job at figuring out my profit margin. However, part of the equation was definitely guesswork, and that’s a killer when it comes to ecommerce.

All I can tell you is that I did see an increase in sales when I was advertising on Facebook – enough to pay for my advertising and give me some profit. That might have been enough to keep me going, if it wasn’t for the final problem that advertising your books on Amazon presents you with: Actually getting paid.

Amazon pays its writers 60 days after the end of the month – so if you made $1,000 in book sales during January, that money wouldn’t actually land in your bank account until the end of March. This means that you need to have the money to sustain up to 90 days of advertising before Amazon actually gives you what you HOPE will be enough to cover your expenses.

So, if you’re spending $20 a day on advertising, you’d need access to $1,800 to be able to sustain your advertising long enough to get paid. That’s more money than a lot of writers easily have access to. Likewise, advertising isn’t easy. There’s no guarantee that you’ll make a profit – especially at first. This is an obstacle that many self-published authors find insurmountable. 

Advertising profitably is certainly possible. I’ve done it. It just requires a really great product, the ability to make decisions even without all the data you need, and 90 days of capital to burn through with no guarantee of getting any of it back. That is a HUGE barrier for entry for most self-published authors.

Which is where the appeal of direct sales comes in.

Imagine being able to send potential readers directly to a platform in which they could buy your books right on their phone? Imagine being able to get data from that sales channel that could help you build a better buying experience, or create a better audience to advertise to. And, finally, imagine getting paid instantly, or within days of making a sale, instead of having to wait for 60-days-after-the-end-of-the-month?

I finally took the plunge in May of this year, and now I’ve got enough data to share my experiences. In the next few blog posts, I’m going to cover what that looked like, share my results, explain how to set it all up, and give some insight into whether or not I plan to continue with direct sales. 

So, if you’re interested in whether or not direct sales are right for you, check out part 2!

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Maintaining a robust marketing and advertising strategy has become as crucial as writing a great book, and for many authors, Facebook remains the go-to platform for advertising. However, the complexity of Facebook’s ad interface can baffle even those who understand the basics of setting up an ad, especially when they find their ad in the “Learning” or “Learning Limited” state.

Knowing how to optimize ads and take action when campaigns underperform is essential for campaign success. The “Learning” and “Learning Limited” phases indicate your ad’s performance and optimization stages, sometimes requiring action. Today, Ginger will explain what those terms mean, what actions to take when you encounter them, and how to optimize your ad campaigns to enhance visibility and achieve better results.

Over the course of the last few years, the path to successful self-publishing has changed. Many authors used to find success simply by writing great books with a compelling concept, or by publishing books on a regular schedule.

Today, however, authors need to use advertising to get their books seen by potential new readers. In fact, it’s become almost impossible to be successful as a self-published author without some sort of marketing and advertising plan, and for most successful authors, Facebook is where they spend most of their money.

But while Facebook makes it extremely easy to spend money advertising your books, they don’t necessarily make it easy to do so profitably – and there’s a steep learning curve when it comes to understanding how the process works!

Navigating the platform’s terminology can be particularly daunting, especially when you encounter terms like “Learning” and “Learning Limited” when monitoring your ads. 

In this week’s blog post, I wanted to break down those two particular terms and explain what they mean – and how you can respond to them appropriately while optimizing your Facebook Ads for your self-published books.

Understanding the Learning Phase

There are many ways authors can use Facebook advertising, but the simplest approach is generally the best place to start. This normally takes the form of a “Traffic Ad” which displays an attractive image inviting Facebook users to go and check out your book. The users who are navigated away from Facebook to your book’s product page on Amazon are known as “traffic.”

When you first launch a new Facebook ad campaign, you’ll notice that your Ad Sets and Ads immediately enter the Learning phase. During this crucial period, Facebook’s algorithm gathers data by showing your ads to various audiences across different Placements (that’s what you call the different sections of the Facebook interface – such as your Feed, Stories, and Messages). 

During this stage of advertising, Facebook is training the algorithm to “learn” which combinations of audience demographics, ad creatives (your different images, videos, and text), and Placements generate the best results for your chosen campaign objective.

With a Traffic ad, that would be website clicks – but the same Learning process occurs for Lead Generation ads, and ads intended to drive Conversions.

The Learning Phase typically lasts around seven days, and it’s important to be patient during this stage, as the performance of your ads might be wildly inconsistent at the start. A lot of first-time advertisers are horrified when their campaigns launch with a Cost-Per-Click of $1.50 or higher – especially when they see their peers boasting CPCs that cost less than a quarter!

But this is all part of the plan! As Facebook learns which audiences are more likely to click on your ads, that CPC is (hopefully) driven steadily downward until it balances out at what your real Cost-Per-Click is likely to remain.

You’ll probably notice this after a few days of advertising. Your ads will no longer be marked as Learning and you’ll see them marked as “Active” instead. At this point, your overall Cost-Per-Click is probably where it’s going to remain, so you can begin the process of optimizing your ads for better performance.

However, for some authors, that’s not what happens! Instead, their ads get marked with a different label: Learning Limited. This indicates that Facebook needs a little more help finding your potential readers.

What is Learning Limited?

During the Learning stage, Facebook’s algorithm shows your ad to a bunch of different audiences, and it creates the best audience profile it can by cross-referencing all the people who responded to it.

That response is something Facebook calls an “Optimization Event.” Optimization events are actions you want users to take after seeing your ad – most commonly clicking on a link leading to your book’s landing page.  

Facebook typically aims to see around 50 of these “optimization events” before creating the ideal audience for your ads, and it generally wants to see them within an “attribution window” of 7 days.

An “attribution window” is a period of time in which Facebook tracks a particular user. They might see your ad on a Monday, but not click on it until Friday – yet that would still be considered an “optimization event” by Facebook because the see-to-click occurred within a seven-day period.

However, if your ads fail to generate enough “optimization events” within that seven-day Learning Phase, your ads will transition to Learning Limited rather than “Active.”

This is because too few “Optimization Events” took place for Facebook to be able to generate an effective audience for your advertisements.

There are several reasons why an ad set might become Learning Limited:

• Small Audience Size: A golden rule of advertising is to specifically target the audiences that want to buy your product – but targeting too specific a niche audience can limit the pool of potential viewers that even see your ad, meaning there aren’t enough of them to respond to it during a seven-day period.
• Low Budget: Likewise, nobody wants to spend more money on advertising than they have to – but an extremely limited budget restricts the number of times your ad can be shown. Once again, if not enough people are seeing your ad, too few of them are going to respond to it – hindering the algorithm’s ability to gather data and define your perfect audience.
• Low Bids: Bids are something that are more relevant to big ecommerce companies than self-published authors, but many writers do try to control the costs of their advertising by using this targeting option. The bid you set determines how much you’re willing to pay for each optimization event – such as setting the maximum Cost-Per-Click you’re willing to spend to $0.20 or lower. However, setting bids too low can make it difficult for your ad to compete with others in the auction for ad space, limiting the number of people who see your ad – and just like in the previous two examples, the fewer people who see your ads, the fewer of them can respond to it!
• Cost Control Settings: Once again, this is more likely the territory of ecommerce professionals, but using settings like budget optimization or daily spend limits can also restrict the algorithm’s flexibility in finding an audience for your ads. As always, too small an audience leads to too few Optimization Events, potentially leading to Learning Limited status.
• Running Too Many Ads: Finally, splitting your budget across numerous ad sets targeting similar audiences can dilute your optimization data across all sets. This is why it’s generally better to run multiple ads in the same ad set, rather than have multiple ad sets.

The Impact of Learning Limited

What does it mean when your ads get stuck in Learning Limited? Well, the first thing you’ll notice is that Learning Limited doesn’t actually stop your ads running entirely – it just significantly hinders their performance. You’ll notice that your Cost-Per-Click isn’t going down the way you’d hope it would, and you’re not getting the number of responses that you’d like. Here’s why:

• Limited Optimization: Because it has insufficient data on the types of people who’ll respond to your ads, Learning Limited means that Facebook is struggling to identify the most effective audience segments and placements for your ads – and that means it can’t “Learn” how to reach them more effectively.
• Potential for Higher Costs: Facebook’s inability to optimize your ads effectively due to the lack of that information will generally lead to a higher Cost-Per-Click or a more expensive result if you’re running Lead Generation or Conversion ads.
• Uncertain Results: Just as Facebook lacks enough information to optimize its algorithm, you’re going to find yourself in a difficult position when you’re trying to improve the copy or creative of your advertising. Without a clear picture of what’s working, it’s difficult to refine your campaign and improve future advertising performance.

Optimizing Your Facebook Ads to Avoid Learning Limited

Now that you understand the downsides of being marked Learning Limited, it’s time to explore some strategies to try and get out of it. That way, you can empower Facebook to use its algorithms to help you make the most of your advertising budget.

The only route to get out of Learning Limited is to successfully trigger 50 “Optimization Events” during a seven-day Attribution Window. Here are some ways you can help make that happen.

• Switch Your Campaign Objective: Most self-published authors will use the Traffic objective when running Facebook ads, which are the least expensive and easiest to get out of Learning Limited. When you’re running Lead Generation or Conversion ads, the cost-per-result can be much higher, and some self-published authors might not be able to afford enough advertising over the course of seven days to achieve the 50 Optimization Events needed to escape Learning Limited. In that case, I suggest changing the objective of your ads to Traffic. That way, Facebook will be building their audience based on a more achievable Optimization Event. Admittedly, that’s nowhere near as effective as an optimized Lead Generation or Conversions campaign – but it will certainly yield better results than remaining stuck in Learning Limited.
• Target the Right Audience: You might find yourself stuck in Learning Limited because your audience is too narrow. Try conducting some thorough audience research to identify more potential readers likely to enjoy your genre. Utilize Facebook’s demographic targeting options and consider creating “lookalike audiences” based on existing customer data, like your subscriber list. As long as they’re targeted to the right people, ads going out to a bigger audience make it easier to get out of Learning Limited.
• Craft Compelling Ad Creatives: Sometimes, the problem isn’t Facebook. If your ads or copy simply don’t appeal to enough people in your audience, they simply won’t respond to them – it doesn’t matter how big your budget is! So take an honest look at your advertising and give them a polish if you think you need to. Use high-quality visuals, captivating headlines, and clear calls to action that entice Facebook users to respond.
• Set Appropriate Budgets and Bids: Because most authors use Traffic ads, and Traffic ads are one of the more affordable ways to get to that coveted 50 Optimization Events, it’s not that common to get stuck in Learning Limited. However, if you’re only spending $5 or $10 dollars a day, that can happen. In order to avoid Learning Limited, bite the bullet and allocate a budget that’s big enough to help you give Facebook the information it needs within that seven-day Attribution Window.
• Optimize for Mobile: The majority of Facebook users access the platform on mobile devices, so make sure you’ve got creative that’s optimized for viewing on mobile. For example, make sure you have a 9:16 “Story” image as well as the more common 1:1 square image for Feed.
• Test Different Ad Variations: Gather some information for your own benefit by creating multiple ad variations with different images, headlines, and copy. Facebook’s algorithm will determine which versions perform best through A/B testing, and that information can help you make better ads.
• Monitor Performance: Finally, regularly monitor your campaign performance and make adjustments as needed – or don’t! Sometimes, all it takes is time for a few changes to take effect. That being said, don’t be afraid to pause poorly performing ad sets and reallocate resources to stronger ones. Use your budget as effectively as you can.

Conclusion

Facebook advertising isn’t as intuitive as people assume it might be, and sometimes it’s not easy to figure out what the problems with your advertising are. That’s why understanding what Learning and Learning Limited phases in Facebook Ads mean is important for self-published authors who want to maximize the impact of their campaigns, but also use their limited budgets most effectively.

Hopefully, the strategies and information I provided above is useful if you find yourself stuck in Learning Limited – and is also useful as you continuously refine your approach to advertising.

Advertising has become one of the best ways to reach the target audience for your writing, generate book sales, and establish yourself as a successful author in the competitive world of self-publishing – but success on Facebook Ads takes time, patience, and a willingness to learn and adapt. 

My advice to you is to tackle problems like Learning Limited as a puzzle to be solved, not an obstacle to be overcome. Embrace the process, track your results, and keep optimizing for continuous improvement. There’s something deeply rewarding about tracking how you get better at something – and Facebook’s Learning phase can be a great teacher in that regard.

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If you’ve ever felt like your book ads aren’t converting as quickly as they should, it could simply mean that you need to adjust your expectations rather than your images or taglines. Successful advertising is usually more about building familiarity and trust over time, rather than via instant gratification.

In today’s blog, Ginger discusses how advertising your book in the digital age requires patience, and why the customer journey often requires frequent exposure to your ads before any action is taken. That understanding, combined with some fine tuning and iteration, can lead you to long term success and a loyal fan base. 

Google ruined advertising.

In the late 1990s, during what’s now known as the “Dot-Com Bubble”, the world was introduced to ecommerce. Before then, selling and advertising was a very different racket.

Back before ecommerce, most businesses understood the importance of advertising, but often weren’t able to connect exactly which advertising resulted in sales. Running a billboard in Times Square, a newspaper ad in The Chronicle, and a jingle on the local radio station might lead to an uptick in sales – but if all three were running concurrently, which of these three advertising strategies actually produced the results?

It was nearly impossible to tell – leading to the common expression: “Half my advertising is effective. I just don’t know which half.”

But then Google introduced the concept of ecommerce and that changed the nature of advertising forever. By advertising online, an advertiser was able to track every step of the purchasing process for the first time ever – from the first click on an ad, to the moment a customer clicks “Buy Now” and completes their purchase.

This has led, however, to a very warped view of advertising – especially among people who aren’t familiar with the advertising industry (cough, cough, self-published authors.)

There’s now this idea that you should be able to track every penny you spend on advertising, and if you’re not seeing an immediate, profitable return on that investment, that means your advertising has failed.

However, that’s never been how advertising works! 

While people certainly do sometimes click on an ad the first time they see it, and do sometimes purchase whatever that click leads them to (a nice, impulse-purchase-friendly ebook, for example) that’s certainly not what happens in the majority of cases.

Potential customers often have to see an ad several times before they actually click on it – and sometimes even more times before they’ll actually make a purchase.

That’s not to say your advertising strategy doesn’t work, or it can’t be profitable. However, when it comes to successful advertising of your book on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the key lies in understanding the power of patience.

Advertising is a long game, and only those with the courage to keep at it will end up successful.

The Instant Gratification Myth

In the realm of digital advertising, the myth of instant gratification is a seductive one. Self-published authors, eager to see immediate returns on their investment, often fall into the trap of expecting overnight success. Facebook and Instagram advertising, powerful as they are, require a different mindset—a mindset that embraces the long game.

The Rule of Seven

One of the golden rules in advertising is the “Rule of Seven.” Coined by marketing experts, this rule suggests that a potential customer needs to see your message at least seven times before they take any action – and not always in the same place. In the old days, a “message” could appear as a TV commercial, a billboard, a 30-second radio spot, or a direct mailer in your postbox. In the world of self-published books, it works the same way. Readers may need to encounter your ads multiple times in several different places before finally deciding to make a purchase.

Building Familiarity and Trust

The Rule of Seven works because advertising is not just about selling a product. It’s more about building a relationship with your audience. In the case of book promotion, this involves creating a sense of familiarity and trust. Readers are more likely to invest in a book when they feel a connection with the author and have seen the book featured multiple times in their social media feed.

Facebook and Instagram, with their vast user bases and sophisticated targeting options, provide the perfect platforms to implement the Rule of Seven. By strategically placing your book in front of potential readers through a variety of targeted ads, you can gradually build a sense of familiarity, trust, and a relationship with a reader (one of the four essential elements for selling books, as I discuss in this blog post.) However, it doesn’t happen overnight. 

Understanding the Customer Journey

To fully grasp the impact of the Rule of Seven, it’s essential to understand what advertisers call the Customer Journey. Readers often go through a series of stages before making a purchase, almost like a journey. First there’s Awareness, then Interest, next comes Consideration, Intent, and finally Purchase. If your advertising works right, and your books are good enough, that will lead to a final crucial state: Loyalty. 

However, guiding a reader through each stage of this journey requires a different approach, and the Rule of Seven plays a crucial role in this approach. Here’s a guide to how you can help nudge a reader from first glance to final purchase:

• Awareness: Use eye-catching visuals and engaging ad copy to introduce your book to a broader audience. Experiment with different ad formats to discover what resonates best with your target audience.
• Interest: Share snippets from your book, intriguing quotes, or behind-the-scenes content to capture readers’ interest. Encourage interaction by posing questions or conducting polls related to your book’s themes.
• Consideration: Showcase positive reviews, endorsements, or awards to bolster the credibility of your book. Use carousel ads to highlight different aspects of your book, such as characters, settings, or plot twists.
• Intent: Implement call-to-action buttons like “Learn More” or “Sign Up” to guide potential readers toward the next step. Utilize retargeting ads to remind users of your book after they’ve shown initial interest.
• Purchase: Offer limited-time promotions or discounts to incentivize book purchases. Ensure a seamless transition from consideration to purchase with a clear and user-friendly buying process. Ideally, at this stage, get your new reader to join your subscriber list and officially become a fan.
• Loyalty: Keep engaged readers informed about upcoming releases, events, or exclusive content. Encourage reader reviews and testimonials to create a community around your books.

The Art of Persistence

With the Rule of Seven to start with, and the six stages of the Customer Journey to follow, something should be becoming obvious: The success or failure of your advertising campaign can’t be accurately gauged in the short term. 

Persistence is key. It’s not uncommon for authors to feel discouraged when they don’t witness an immediate surge in book sales when they start advertising. However, the Rule of Seven reminds us that the impact of advertising is cumulative.

Each exposure to your book ads contributes to the overall awareness and perception of your work. Even if the initial results seem underwhelming, the impressions and interactions you’re buying with your advertising are laying the groundwork for future success. Trust the process and have the courage to continue your advertising efforts, even if the return on investment is not immediately apparent.

Fine-Tuning Your Strategy

While patience is crucial, it’s equally important to monitor and adapt your advertising strategy over time. Facebook and Instagram provide robust analytics tools that allow you to track the performance of your ads. Regularly review key metrics such as reach, engagement, and conversion rates to gain insights into what is working and what needs adjustment. A good place to get started can be found in this blog post – and here are some extra tips.

• A/B Testing: If you’re committed to the long game of advertising, you can invest time and effort experimenting with different ad creatives, copy, and targeting options to identify the most effective combinations. This will really help you create successful advertising in the long term. Some good ways to do this include splitting your audience into segments to test variations to understand which elements resonate best.
• Audience Insights: Patience and courage are important, but even when playing the long game, you need to know how effective your advertising actually is. Use the data provided by Facebook and Instagram to refine your target audience. Analyze demographic information, interests, and behaviors to tailor your ads to the preferences of potential readers. Leverage Attribution Tags to make sure you can track just how much money your advertising is earning for you.
• Ad Scheduling: Consider the timing of your ads. Test different days of the week and times of the day to determine when your audience is most active. Use ad scheduling to optimize the delivery of your ads during peak engagement periods. While this kind of granularity isn’t a good strategy to focus on at the beginning of your advertising journey, it can definitely squeeze out better campaign performance in the long run.
• Budget Allocation: Finally, allocate your advertising budget based on the performance of different ads and target audiences. Focus on scaling successful campaigns and reallocating resources away from underperforming ones. One good rule of advertising is to simply spend money on what sells!

Realizing Long-Term Success

I can’t pretend I came up with the concept of digital advertising as a “long game” all by myself. I learned about it the hard way – by spending years and thousands of dollars on advertising I thought was failing, without realizing that the payoff happens further down the line.

For example, when I originally launched a Facebook and Instagram advertising campaign for the first book in my MC Romance series, sales were initially modest, and I tracked that I was actually losing money on my ads. However, I continued the campaign, tweaking a few details but maintaining a consistent presence in the feeds of potential readers. By the third month, the cumulative effect of these weeks of advertising started to be seen by a noticeable uptick in sales. Over the following months, those sales gained momentum, accumulating not just book sales and KU page reads, but also positive reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. My initial patience and persistence finally paid off when the first book in my series finally became a steady, profitable seller.

Iterative Optimization

The other reason playing the long game worked in my favor was that I could use the freedom of not expecting an immediate return on investment in order to experiment. 

I launched a campaign for one of my other books, but my initial ads generated only moderate interest, and the conversion rate was lower than expected. That’s when I experimented with some A/B testing to identify the most effective ad creatives and targeting parameters to see if I could then use those in the future. Armed with the insights from Facebook analytics, I was able to refine my campaign, reallocate my budget to higher-performing ads and audiences, and saw a significant increase in book sales as a result.

Conclusion: Trust the Journey

Even in the dynamic landscape of digital marketing, success rarely happens overnight. For self-published authors navigating the realms of Facebook and Instagram advertising, embracing the Rule of Seven and understanding the long-term nature of the game might be the only thing that leads to eventual success.
When it comes to book sales, patience, persistence, and a willingness to adapt are the cornerstones of successful advertising. Trust the journey, celebrate small victories, and remember that the true impact of your efforts may take time to fully materialize. Just know one thing: By playing the long game with courage and dedication, self-published authors can transform their advertising endeavors into a powerful engine that drives sustained, long-term success.

And also remember that you don’t need to figure all of this out yourself. I regularly work with authors on their advertising strategies, or simply help guide them through initial setup and how it all works. You can book a consult call with me whenever you need some help!

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Whether you’re diving into Facebook ads or navigating Amazon’s advertising platform, understanding, interpreting and optimizing key ad metrics like CPC, CTR, Conversions, RoAS, Frequency and DPV can make all the difference in your marketing efforts.

This week, Ginger is breaking all of these acronyms and confusing terms down as he attempts to lay out the main advertising metrics that authors should be paying attention to – which is in response to a very recent question posed to us via email. Once you have a deeper understanding of how these metrics play a part in the success of your campaign, you’ll be able to fine-tune your ads, maximize your book sales and reach new heights of success.

Recently, we received an email from a reader and thought it would be a great topic for a blog post. The email read:

I’d love to see a story about “minding the statistics”. Like, what metrics we should (or shouldn’t) be paying attention to. I realize there’s a lot of “it depends” in there (it depends on where you’re advertising, how many books you have, etc.). But what metrics do you and Ginger regularly track?

What a great question! And it’s one that’s more relevant than ever – especially considering that Amazon continues to embrace paid advertising, and Google and Apple continue to make it difficult to buy eBooks directly through the Amazon mobile app. These days, self-published authors need all the help they can get to run advertising profitably – and understanding what metrics to keep track of are the key to that!

Which Advertising Platforms are we looking at?

There are lots of different approaches towards advertising that authors can take, so I’m going to focus on the two platforms that tend to be the most popular, and arguably the ones that are easiest to find success with: Facebook and Advertising on Amazon.

Both of these platforms are powerful tools for promoting and selling books – especially in conjunction with each other. In fact, I’d argue that Facebook and Amazon advertising have become indispensable tools in the arsenal of authors looking to boost their book sales.

However, to make the most of them, we self-published authors need to focus on the right ad metrics. Here’s where to start:

Cost per Click (CPC)

Cost per Click (CPC) measures the price you pay each time a user clicks on your Facebook or Advertising on Amazon ad. For self-published authors, understanding CPC is vital for optimizing your advertising budget. Lower CPCs can help you maximize your return on investment (ROI). For example, A CPC of $0.15 compared to a CPC of $0.30 would essentially double your effective budget.

To reduce CPC on Facebook, there are three approaches you should take. The first is to refine your ad targeting to reach readers who are most likely to be interested in your book. On Facebook, I’ve found generating Lookalike Audiences from the most engaged members of my subscriber list to be a very effective way of lowering my CPC. When I’m Advertising on Amazon, I check the “Also Bought” section of my product pages and use that information to target individual books and authors that have been shown to appeal to my readers. 

Where you place your ads is also important. On Facebook, I’ll avoid having my advertisements appear in the Messenger section of the platform, and Facebook Marketplace. These might offer cheap placements, but I find I rarely get clicks from them. By focusing on Feeds and Stories, I find I get a much higher percentage of clicks, and ultimately end up paying less for them.

The final piece of advice is to provide Facebook with a lot of different ads to use, and to populate each of those with different potential taglines, artwork, and copy. The more creative graphics and copy you provide, the harder Facebook will work to show them to people; and this can have a dramatic impact on your CPC.

When it comes to Advertising on Amazon, CPC is largely driven by how much you’re willing to bid, and how “relevant” your book is. Amazon will offer more impressions to books that are more likely to sell – so by experimenting with different books and authors to target, you’ll sometimes find a magical “sweet spot” that lowers your CPC while also increasing the number of people who see your ads!

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

While CPC is the ad metric most authors focus on, it’s arguably not the first one you should address. Click-Through Rate (CTR) is perhaps a more foundational metric, and definitely one that every self-published author advertising on Facebook or Amazon should keep a keen eye on. 

CTR measures the percentage of users who click on your ad after seeing it. A CTR of 1%, for example, means that out of every 100 people who saw your ad, one of them clicked on it.

For authors, a high CTR signifies that your ad is captivating your target audience and compelling them to take action. A low CTR suggests that people are seeing your ad, but simply aren’t interested in clicking on it. When you start out advertising, and before you have a ton of data to examine in terms of sales, CTR often offers a quick “gut check” about the audience you’re advertising to, and how compelling the concept and cover of your book are.

To improve CTR, try crafting more engaging ad copy and using new visuals that better resonate with your readers. I recommend conducting A/B testing to determine which ad elements work better than others. A higher CTR can lead to more traffic on your Amazon book page, potentially increasing your sales – but it can also help you figure out what to refine about your product page, blurb, cover, and everything else about your book.

Conversion Rate

While clicks are essential, what matters most for authors is converting those clicks into book sales. Your “Conversion Rate” is the percentage of users who click on your ad and then subsequently buy your book. If you’re getting a lot of clicks and traffic, but not selling many copies, this is the ad metric you need to focus on.

Advertising on Amazon offers at-a-glance conversion rates, most commonly as ACOS (or the Average Cost of Sale percentage.) If you’re getting a 70% royalty rate from Amazon for your book, an ACOS of 70% or less indicates that you’re making money.

(However, if your book is in Kindle Unlimited, you might also be making money from KENP page-reads. You can have an ACOS higher than 100% and still be making a profit thanks to page reads.)

On Facebook, it’s a little more difficult to work out conversion rates – or, at least, it used to be. Recently Amazon introduced Attribution Tags, which can give you vital information about the behavior of people you send to your product page through advertising. By checking your Attribution Tags, you can track sales and page reads directly – and see how many of those clicks “converted” into paid sales. 

A high conversion rate indicates that your Facebook and Amazon ad campaigns are effective in driving users to buy your book. To enhance your conversion rate, ensure your Amazon book page is optimized with a compelling book blurb, a polished Look Inside, and some good reviews. You’ll have to do some experimentation here – but the success or failure of your self-publishing career will be determined by your conversion rate, so it’s not a step you can afford to miss.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is a crucial ad metric for evaluating the overall effectiveness of your Facebook advertising campaign. It measures the overall revenue generated from your ad spend. For self-published authors, a positive ROAS means that your Facebook ads are more than paying for themselves through increased book sales.

To calculate ROAS, divide the revenue generated from your Facebook ad campaign by the total ad spend. You can do this with your Attribution Tag data, or by checking your sales against a “baseline” period in which you weren’t advertising. I wrote a blog post about how to do that here.

Here’s an example. If I’d spent $4,104.43 on advertising, and Amazon’s Attribution Tags told me that had generated $4,253.44 in royalties, that means my ROAS would be 1.036.

If I calculated a baseline of what I’d be selling with no advertising at all, then subtracted that from overall revenue I generated during that period (so crediting advertising for an increase in sales even if it wasn’t directly tracked by Attribution Tags) my increase in sales over my baseline would be $7,484.70. Using those figures, my ROAS would be a much more impressive 1.82.

Whichever way you choose to calculate it, a ROAS greater than 1.0 indicates a profitable campaign, while a ROAS below 1.0 suggests that you’re spending more on ads than you’re earning from book sales. Continually monitor ROAS to adjust your ad strategy for maximum profitability.

Frequency

Frequency is a metric on Facebook that measures how often an individual user sees your ad. High frequency numbers – generally anything over 3 – can lead to ad fatigue, causing users to become unresponsive or annoyed at constantly seeing your ads. This can negatively impact your campaign’s performance and degrade its performance over time.

However, paradoxically, a frequency greater than 1 might work harder for you than constantly reaching people who’ve never seen your ad before. Advertising’s famous rule of “seven touches” suggests that people need to see your advertisement as often as seven times before they’ll actually take action on it.

Therefore, self-published authors should aim for a balanced frequency to reach the most receptive target audience without overwhelming them. If your frequency starts to climb, consider refreshing your ad creative, adjusting your targeting, or coming up with completely new ads to reach new potential readers while also reinvigorating the audience who have already seen your ads.

Details Page Views

DPV stands for Detail Page Views, and it’s an ad metric that evaluates the performance of the Product Page for your book. It measures how many users click on the Look Inside or Read More links after being directed to your book’s Product Page after clicking on an ad. Overall, this offers insights into how well your Amazon page engages traffic, and is a strong indicator of how well the page will convert visitors into book buyers.

You can check your DPV in the metrics for your Attribution Tags in your Advertising on Amazon dashboard. Compare the Click Throughs against the DPV score and you’ll see whether or not your Product Page is engaging the readers you pay to send to it. If you’re getting a lower DPV than the number of people who click on your ads, that’s a bad sign. You should work on the first few lines of your blurb to try and change that.

However, if your DPV is higher than your Click Throughs, that shows that visitors to your book’s Product Page are interested enough in what it has to offer that they’ve been exploring the extended blurb and the Look Inside preview.

Optimizing your Amazon book page is critical for improving your DPV metric, and ultimately your conversation rate. Ensure your book description is compelling, your cover image is eye-catching, and user reviews are positive.

Conclusion

For self-published authors looking to maximize book sales on Amazon, Facebook advertising is a potent tool. However, achieving success in this endeavor requires a meticulous focus on the right ad metrics. By closely monitoring these metrics, authors can fine-tune their Facebook and Amazon advertising campaigns to effectively reach their target audience and drive more book sales.

Remember that success in advertising often requires experimentation and continuous optimization to achieve the best results. With a strategic approach and a keen eye on these key ad metrics, self-published authors can elevate their book marketing efforts and propel their literary works to new heights of success on digital bookshelves!

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As we’ve said many times in this space, advertising your book is an essential step in self-publishing success, but it is not something you can just set and forget. No matter how well your Facebook ad campaign performs initially, the sad and inevitable reality is that eventually, its performance will begin to decline. Since stubbornly letting a faltering ad continue to run is just a waste of money, you really need to monitor your campaigns for signs that your advertisements are getting stale and then take immediate action.

The first step is determining the possible reasons for the decline of your ad’s performance, and then once you have an idea on that, you can figure out the best way to fix it. In today’s blog, Ginger has a number of suggestions on doing both of those things. The good news is that you don’t always have to pull a previously winning ad completely, but you’ll often need to at least make some tweaks in order to refresh it enough to get it to start performing again. 

When you finally figure out how to launch a Facebook ad campaign that actually works, it can be really exciting. It’s like a whole new level of achievement for self-published authors. Not only have you written and published books that people actually buy – but now you’ve figured enough out how to be able to turn a profit advertising them to strangers!

But that excitement can fade after a few months, when you might start noticing the profit you originally made so easily slowly diminishing over time. I speak from experience. When I launched one recent campaign in February, it made $1,200 in profit over my advertising costs and my “baseline” sales (you can learn how to calculate your baseline in this post.)

Yet in May, that profit sunk to just a few hundred dollars – and if the trend continued, it wouldn’t be long before the ad wasn’t making any profit at all!

It’s incredibly frustrating, but it’s something all advertisers have to deal with – even if they’re not selling books, like we are. The same challenges and obstacles occur no matter what you’re selling, and one of the secrets of turning writing into a career is figuring out how to overcome this problem.

What’s the problem?

The first step towards fixing this problem is identifying it. Where is your previously-profitable advertising campaign falling short?

There are generally three main problems you might encounter:

• Your Cost-Per-Click has skyrocketed up
• Fewer people are clicking on your ads
• Fewer people are buying your books

Any of these can cause your campaign’s profitability to come crashing down.

For example, in the campaign I was having problems with, my Cost-Per-Click rose from $0.11 at the start of the campaign (woot!) to $0.18 by the time I reached May. This meant that even though I’d increased my advertising spend from $20 a day to $30, I ended up getting the same number of clicks, because they were 39% more expensive.

One of the reasons my Cost-per-Click increased was because of the second problem – fewer people were clicking on my ads in the first place, driving up the price.

In March of this year, I had a click-thru rate of 8.75% – meaning nearly nine out of every 100 Facebook users who saw my ad actually clicked on it. By May of this year, that had dropped to 5.84% – a decline of around 44%. Even though I was getting just as many impressions, fewer people were taking action as a result of them!

Finally, I used Attribution Tags to track my book sales. Now, even though they don’t track every sale accurately – especially when you write in a series – they do help give a good indication of which direction your advertising is going in. After checking my figures, I found that I’d sold fewer than half the number of books in May as I had done in March. Likewise, the amount of sales I was getting over my “baseline” (which are generally sales driven by your advertising, even though you can’t track them) had declined by a similar amount.

In short, I had fewer people clicking on my ads, and those that did bought fewer books – and the trend suggested that the problem was only going to get worse!

What’s causing the problem?

If you’ve read this far into the article, I suspect you might be experiencing problems like this, too – so let’s get to work. After identifying exactly what’s going wrong, it’s time to diagnose any number of things that could be causing the problem.

Here are the likely offenders:

• Ad Fatigue: If your ads have been running for any length of time (mine had been going since February, for example) there’s a likelihood that your target audience may have seen them multiple times, leading to ad fatigue. When Facebook users become overly familiar with an ad, they’re less likely to click on it. This could be one of the reasons why your Cost-per-Click and Click-Thru rate are suffering.
• Audience Saturation: When you first launch an advertising campaign, Facebook might cheerfully tell you that your ads could reach an audience of millions. In fact, though, your total reach is often determined by your budget – and if you haven’t refreshed your target audience or expanded your targeting options in a while, it’s possible your ads are reaching the same people repeatedly. Eventually, this can lead to a saturation point at which the audience blanks out your ads entirely – meaning even fewer of them click on them. A good way to gauge this is to check on the Frequency of your advertising campaign. If it’s anything above 3, it means most of your audience has seen your ad at least three times; and they’re probably blind to it by now.
• Ad Relevance and Quality: One of the main causes of ad fatigue and audience saturation is static creative – as in images and copy for your ads that you haven’t changed in a while. You need to make sure that your ad creative and copy remain interesting for your target audience, otherwise they’ll just start to ignore them.
• Increased Competition: Not every decline in performance is your fault! Over time, more and more authors might have entered your niche, leading to increased competition for ad placements. That means you might be spending the same budget that you did previously, but because of the tougher competition you’re having to pay a higher premium for the same digital real estate.
• Seasonal or Market Factors: Finally, you might find your ad performance impacted by something else beyond your control – seasonal or market-specific factors that influence consumer behavior. Romance authors often describe the holiday season as “Smutmass” because they see such a boost in sales as people unwrap Kindles and eReaders. Likewise, summer is a great reason for authors if they publish “beach reading” novels. These factors can impact the effectiveness of your ads and result in fluctuations in your profitability that are completely outside of your control.

So, what can you do about it?

Once you’ve considered all the possible causes for your decline in campaign performance, it’s time to address them. Here’s a list of things you could experiment with to improve your profitability.

• Create some new ads: You don’t need to abandon your campaign entirely. You can try creating new ad variations with different visuals and copy to combat ad fatigue. You don’t need to remove or pause your existing ads, but by adding new ones you get to present fresh content to your audience, and test different approaches to discover what resonates best.
• Expand your audience: You can also experiment with expanding your target audience or refining your targeting options in the Ad Sets for your campaign. This can include adding new lookalike audiences, expanding the options in the detailed targeting options, or turning on Facebook’s own expansion options. This will help you reach brand new users who may be more receptive to your ads.
• Optimize your ads: It’s a little advanced, but Facebook offers a variety of options to test one version of your ad campaign against another. If you’ve run into a decline in ad performance, take the opportunity to review your ad creative, copy, and your product pages on Amazon to ensure they’re compelling, relevant, and deliver on the expectations of your target audience. If you’re confident enough to experiment with A/B, you can compare different elements within identical campaigns to identify the most effective combinations.
• Do some competitive analysis: There’s no question that more and more authors are turning to Facebook to promote their books. While this has driven up prices, and made competition for impressions a lot tighter, it also offers you an opportunity to research other author’s strategies and ads so you can figure out what works well, and how to differentiate yourself. Finding unique ad formats or targeting specific niches within your market help you stand out from the competition.
• Keep monitoring your ad performance metrics: If nothing else, keep doing what you’re doing. By tracking your click-through rates, engagement rates, and conversion rates, you’re at least learning to understand your Facebook ad campaign and how changes you make effect it. Analyze this data to make data-driven decisions to optimize your future campaigns.

That last point is key. Facebook advertising requires constant monitoring, testing, and optimization to make sure it’s delivering. By staying proactive and adapting your strategies based on data and insights, you can hopefully improve your profitability over time.

That being said, remember that experimentation is one of the most important parts of this process – and failure is baked into experimentation. You’ll have to have the courage to try new approaches and refresh your campaigns even knowing that there’ll be no guarantee of improvement. Sometimes getting things wrong is the only way to learn how to get things right – and those mistakes can be expensive!

But ultimately, the goal is to get and keep your advertising campaigns at a level at which they easily pay for all the costly mistakes you had to make in optimizing them – and continue paying well into the future.

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This May, Amazon announced the first Kindle Unlimited price increase since it’s inception, taking subscriptions from $9.99 a month to $11.99. What does this change mean, and will self-published authors benefit or be harmed?

To answer these questions, Ginger delves into three key factors he believes led to this move. From the plateauing of KU subscriptions to Amazon’s strategic maneuvering against app transaction blockades, he explores what this means for your earnings and the competition within the program. 

Having already disrupted the entire publishing industry in 2007 with the invention of the Kindle and the self-service Kindle Direct Publishing platform, Amazon took another swing at traditional publishing in 2014 with the launch of Kindle Unlimited.

A monthly subscription service, Kindle Unlimited (KU) was essentially “Netflix for ebooks.” Subscribers are able to download unlimited books from the Kindle Unlimited library for one monthly fee, while authors who opt into the program get paid a share of the monthly subscription fund for each page of their books that get read.

Whether or not putting your books into Kindle Unlimited is a good idea has remained a hotly debated topic for years. Successful authors like Erin Wright argue that self-published authors should go “wide for the win” and reject exclusivity to Amazon. However, many authors (including myself) find they get the majority of their income from Kindle page reads, and have all their books enrolled in Kindle Select.

To muddy those waters even more, Amazon announced this May that they were increasing the price of a Kindle Unlimited subscription from $9.99 a month to $11.99 a month – leading many to wonder what this would mean for self-published authors (and, more importantly, their earnings.)

Here’s are three things I believe this move indicates:

1. Kindle Unlimited subscriptions have plateaued

Authors who select to share their books with Kindle Unlimited subscribers get paid for every page of their books that get read – normally around $0.005. That might not sound like much, but for a 400 page book those page reads add up to around $2.00 – which isn’t far off what you’d make in royalties from an individual book sale priced at $2.99.

The amount varies, though – because it’s all calculated after the fact. Amazon first pools a percentage of the Kindle Unlimited subscription fee into what they call the KDP Select Global Fund. Then, each month’s fund is divided by the number of pages read to calculate the final payout per individual page. The more subscribers there are to the program, the more authors can hope to get paid.

However, it’s starting to look like the number of subscribers to the Kindle Unlimited program has plateaued. While the KDP Select Global Fund was $46.1 million in March 2023 – up from $44.6 million in February – that may be a spike rather than a trend. Since July of 2022 the fund has remained pretty level at around $45 million, levelling off what had been slow and continuous growth since 2014.

What this means is that the way Amazon can squeeze more revenue out of a static subscriber base is to charge them more – hoping that the price hike won’t scare too many customers away. I think it’s fair to assume they’ll retain most of them. In Amazon’s defense, this is the first rate hike since the program began in 2014.

2. Amazon are using KU to circumvent the Google and Apple transaction blockade

We’ve already written about the roadblock Apple and Google have created for those of us trying to advertise books online. To quickly recap: The two major phone systems providers in the United States charge a 30% fee on all app transactions made using their devices – including purchases made with the Amazon app from the iTunes or Google Play store.

This means Amazon struggled to make a profit on most of the self-published ebooks sold on its mobile platform – forcing the company to eventually remove the ability to buy them from the Amazon app entirely.

(Yes, you read that right. In fact, if you haven’t seen it for yourself, go check. You simply can’t buy most ebooks on the Amazon app, whether you have it installed on your Apple or Android phone. It’s an utterly ridiculous situation, and it’s self-published authors who are impacted the most.)

One of the worst ways this impacts self-published authors is by reducing the effectiveness of their paid advertising. The majority of Facebook users browse on their phones, so by eliminating the ability to buy ebooks on the Amazon app, it prevents the majority of traffic you send to Amazon from clicking the neat little Buy Now button on your product page. I’ve seen a massive drop in ebook sales myself, even though my advertising spend remains steady, and anecdotally I’ve heard many authors report the same.

However, mobile users can still borrow books on Kindle Unlimited through the Amazon app – meaning that there is still a way to secure new readers despite the embargo on book sales. By raising the price of Kindle Unlimited, I believe Amazon are hoping they’ll be able to give authors a way to maintain their income level by using KU borrows to make up for the revenue they’ve lost in direct ebook sales – thereby giving them a reason to keep their books in KU and off the digital bookshelves of rival platforms.

And so far, I’d say it’s working. Using Attribution Tags, I can see that I make 49% of my income from Kindle Unlimited page reads. In fact, they’re one of the major reasons my advertising is consistently profitable. This price hike to the price of Kindle Unlimited will hopefully help it remain so.

3. Competition on Kindle Unlimited might be getting fiercer

When Kindle Unlimited launched in 2014, there were 600,000 books included as part of the program. Today, that figure exceeds 1.5 million – and it’s rising rapidly. Sadly, Amazon’s self publishing program has always attracted grifters, and today the combination of ‘low content’ books and AI-written books means that the digital bookshelves are heaving with more and more titles for yours to get lost between.

As a result, many authors have complained about the average monthly payout from the Kindle Select Fund getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller.

Despite leveling off at upwards of $45 million each month, the average payout per-page-read for authors has struggled to top $0.005 for a long time, and part of that has to be because of the sheer amount of competition, each demanding their slice of the page read pie.

So, assuming that Amazon will direct at least some of the revenue from the Kindle Unlimited price hike toward authors (and sadly, that is just an assumption) it means that the payout per page read might be kept at a reasonable rate through the increased revenue balancing out the increased competition.

However, who knows if this will be sustainable.

That being said, authors in KU shouldn’t be too despondent. The advantage of the digital bookshelves being flooded with low content and AI written books means that the good books in KU stand out even more – as long as you can get your potential readers to see them!

So, as long as you can focus on producing high quality, well produced books – and you can market them effectively – this price hike might work to your advantage. Grifters and low-effort publishers never end up outwitting Amazon’s algorithms forever, so as long as you align yourself with Amazon’s purpose of creating the best customer experience possible, you could hopefully see more of this new influx of money heading towards your books sales rather than theirs.

Kindle Unlimited isn’t going anywhere…

Finally, if this increase to the price of a Kindle Unlimited subscription suggests anything, it’s that Amazon is remaining steadfast in its commitment to the program. While there’s still a lot to be said for the idea of going “wide for the win”, it’s never a bad idea to bet with the house – and since Amazon is doubling down by hiking the price of Kindle Unlimited, it might also work out very well for authors who decide to double down with the number of books they include in the program.

Do you agree? Let us know your thoughts in the comment section down below.

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