New ads for The Saint’s Rise

Mike Grist Marketing, Writing Leave a Comment

With my International Bookbub on The Saint’s Rise coming up in 6 days (Jan 10), I’ve started up a couple of new ads focused on the UK market (my biggest market after the US) to try and juice the ranking ahead of time.

Here’s the FaceBook ad:

I’ve never tried putting all retailers links in the body of the ad before, or leading with the major audiobook headline. I also rewrote the story summary – before it was primarily about the bizarre world, but now:

All Sen’s young life he’s been hunted – by the pitiless King and his nightmare monsters, by the scars of fate and a gnashing black mouth in the sky – and he’s had enough. Now it’s his turn to hunt. Like an assassin in the night, he will bring his enemies down.

It gets things going with some punch.

The ad started yesterday with ‘Landing Page Optimisation’ but that led to zero clicks, so I changed it to ‘Click Optimisation’ today and already have some results – some 30 clicks at a price of 18p (25c) per click. Not bad I think – especially with the book still at full price on amazon (where all the clicks went).

Actually – writing this at the end of day 1 of ads – I can see there have been 4 sales in the UK directly attributable to these ads. That might actually be covering the cost of the ad. A silly thing to get excited about – of course such an ad should earn PROFIT – but I’ll take covering my costs very happily.

To boot – all of this is without even adding in the 99p line in the promo, which should boost clicks. I’ll duplicate the ads for that, and not just alter the existing ones – in case it has some weird, negative effect…

Here’s the Bookbub ad:

Again here I’m going with a more active tagline – instead of ‘No Heroes Endure’ we have ‘Join the Hunt’. It’s targeted at UK readers on Google, Kobo and Apple, so no Amazon, because I haven’t reduced the price to 99c on Amazon yet.

As of end of day, I’ve received a few thousand impressions but not a single click.

I don’t know why this is. Maybe this audience is too thin on the ground? The FB ad only converted on Amazon so far. I’ll add in Amazon on BB in a few days. But, it’s also true I never really have success via Bookbub ads.

In summary

Some actual conversions are happening on FB. It is a mystery as to why. Could be luck, or the new copy, or the targeting, or that I’m narrowed to the UK, or any other thing. We’ll see tomorrow if things bear out. If they do, then it’ll be worth dabbling my toe with ads in the other Bookbub International Deal audiences – Australia, Canada and India – and maybe ramping up in the UK.

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