The Winning Ad — Lessons In Book Promotion
By: Mateja Klaric
Tags: Self Publishing, Writing, Marketing, Books, Publishing

Version A (thank you, Vico Biscotti, for your review used as copy for this ad)

I’m deep into book promotion. I recently started to create the first ads for the How to Self-Publish Your Book: The Fast, Free & Easy Way promotion campaign. The one above seems to be the winning one in the A/B test. It proves that less is more and that what counts are the reviews and price.

Here is the B version. It’s not exactly tanking, but it doesn’t produce nearly as good results.

Version B

As a writer who not that long ago started her self-publishing career, I feel that book promotion is one of the most treacherous and confusing aspects of self-publishing. The number of misleading information and book promotion businesses bordering on scam is astonishing.

Writers get easily swindled out of money on the sites that do not bring any sales but take their money nevertheless, and then, if one dares to complain, they will blame it all on the writer, the book cover, or whatever else but themselves and their poor service.

The truth is, some sites will bring sales to the same author promoting the very same book, while others won’t. It’s that simple. Unfortunately, separating the wheat from the chaff is not simple at all and there is no other way but to try it out and test the options.

By doing this, I’ve already wasted a lot of money on useless promo services and that’s one of the main reasons why I’m writing my next book in the self-publishing series. It’s called You Self-Published, Now What? How to Promote Your Book.

The book will help writers avoid unnecessary losses I and too many others have endured and show you how to make the best out of what little funds you have, which is exactly what I’m doing. The ad above is doing well on BookBub promotion platform and I’m happy with how that is working out.

That, for instance, is one of the options I can recommend and will write more about in the new book. Like my previous book (How to Self Publish Your Book: The Fast, Free & Easy Way), the new one will also come in the form of a 101 guide for beginners and I will keep it at the lowest price point so that it will be affordable to all.

As a result, I’m not earning much and am currently facing a loss due to the investment in promotion. On the other hand, though, the book has stayed in the top 10 in two categories on Amazon for three months in a row now, which means that Amazon algorithm is recognizing it as something worth supporting and is helping me promote it.

I’m going to earn a bit over $70 this month on Medium and I will (yet again) invest it all in the book promotion. While this will allow me to continue with testing and experiments that are vital for a better understanding of what is worth the investment and what isn’t, it’s not quite enough.

I’m currently conducting the research and collecting the links to useful resources and information as well as monitoring the results, costs, and sales resulting from my marketing campaign. I’m also testing different ads and copy. Like with the previous book, I will soon start publishing my findings in a form of blog posts prior to launching the book.