Like it or not, in order to make headway with your book’s sales, you’ll have to spend some money promoting it.

You’ll already be paying for your website, and possibly your email service. I hope, too, you’ve paid for cover design and interior design (and that includes paying for a program like Vellum if you’ve chosen to do that).

Social media is free, but it’s not necessarily the best way to make book sales. Constantly shouting “buy my book!” on your social media platforms doesn’t get you the kind of readers you really want. It can be a way to connect with readers and writers with similar likes and raise your overall visibility, and those are good things in themselves, but they’re not necessarily the way to get your book into readers’ hands.

We’ll talk about paid advertising below, but there are other things you can do to raise your book’s profile that cost money but not too much.

Blog Tour

This is both a way to create some buzz and also to get reviews. There are a few places that run these tours. The one I use is Rachel’s Random Resources. She was recommended by another author of historical romance I know and who has had success with her before. She’s based in the UK, but she covers both US and UK bloggers.

How it works:

You sign up for the service you want and the dates you want (if they’re available—she’s very popular and gets booked up). Here are the packages she offers (and I imagine others are comparable):

I think just starting with a 7 or 10 day blog tour is a good idea. I chose a 10-day blog tour for The Dressmaker’s Secret Earl. She will book up to 3 bloggers a day to post their review or spotlight about your book.

Here’s a peek at what my blog tour page looked like on her website:

Notice that not all dates have all three slots filled. She doesn’t promise you’ll get the maximum, but I was pretty happy with what she booked for me here.

What you have to do is provide electronic copies of your book for free and furnish information for the bloggers, including your bio and head shot.

Cost

Rachel lists her costs in British pounds, but my 10-day tour was just over $100 US. Some other companies are R&R Blog tours and XPresso Book Tours, whose prices are fairly comparable. I didn’t list companies that make you sign up in order to get pricing, or ones that say they don’t work with self-published authors.

As I said, the benefit is not just added visibility for your book, but also very likely some good pull-quotes from reviews to use on social media and your website.

Discount e-book lists

These are lists that go out to their subscribers offering discounted e-books to them. Authors pay to have their books included on the list, and the requirements differ depending on the list.

Some of them have new-release offers that allow you to feature an e-book that hasn’t been discounted, but not all of them. The ones that require discounts are great to book just before your second book in the series comes out.

Below are a few of them that I know about. There are probably others in your particular niche.

bookBub

I’ve mentioned before that you should join BookBub as a reader. Once your book is up for preorder, you should also join their partners program. This gives you access to their marketing tools, which include submission for featured deals and ads at the bottom of their emails.

A quick review: When you get a BookBub featured deal, your discounted e-book is listed in ONE daily email. You pay for it, big time. As of right now, one day as a featured deal in the category of historical romance is over $600 for the US only.

Here’s a chart that lists the current prices and reach for each of the romance categories they feature as of this writing:

The pricing is based on a few things:

1. Size of the list of subscribers with that interest identified
2. Discounted price of your book (free is cheapest and it goes up from there)
3. The estimated downloads or sales you’re likely to get

You’re probably wondering if it’s worth it. The short answer is YES. It’s very competitive to get a featured deal, but BookBub is the gold standard, and will have a very noticeable effect on the books you sell.

Other Discount Book Lists

However, getting a BookBub featured deal is unlikely, especially for your first book. There are other options that cost less, but of course they don’t have the reach that BookBub has. That doesn’t mean they’re not still worth it!

Here’s a list with links to the ones I know about:

• Robin Reads
• eReader News Today
• The Fussy Librarian
• The eReader Cafe
• Book Cave
• Book Rebel
• Freebooksy or BargainBooksy
• My Romance Reads

These range in price from about $10 to $100. Way cheaper than BookBub, but they don’t have the reach. Still worth doing, however.

They are very useful to keep up the momentum for your book after launch as well, or to prepare for the launch of the second in your series. This is exactly what I did with The Dressmaker’s Secret Earl about 6 weeks in advance of the launch of The Soprano’s Daring Duke. I used some of these newsletters to stack a promotion for my free offering through KDP Select.

I was extremely pleased with the outcome of my 5-day promotion. Here is a very rough, short video detailing what I did, how much it cost, and the results. Overall, I spent about $.05 per download of the free book and achieved international bestseller status in the Kindle Free Store.

Advertising

There’s no question that targeted advertising can help your book sales. However, it’s important to remember that your book is a low-ticket item. If you spend a lot of money on advertising, you have to sell a lot of books to make it worthwhile.

It can be worthwhile to take a loss on your first book if you’re trying to get established in your sub genre. It depends on your budget and your tolerance for risk, as well as your ultimate goals.

The three places it makes sense to advertise your books IMO are Facebook, BookBub, and Amazon itself.

A complete tutorial on how to use those advertising interfaces is beyond the scope of this program. But I’ll give you an overview and a few tips here.

BookBub ads

The reason BookBub ads can work well is that the people who receive the emails are looking for books like yours. How do you know? BookBub lets you target based on other authors and categories, so your ad will be served only on emails that go to the people interested in those kinds of books.

The cost: You set your own budget and bid, but obviously the more you spend and the higher your bid, the more people will see your ad. BookBub gives recommendations for bid amount. You set the total amount you’re willing to spend, and whether you want it served as quickly as possible or spread out over the period of your campaign.

I’ve done both of those things. When I told it to spend my $100 all at once there was a dramatic result in my Amazon ranking. But you don’t necessarily want that. It’s better to build up and keep rising rather than fluctuate wildly. With the spend spread out, the results are obviously not going to be so dramatic, unless you have a big budget.

How you do it: It’s pretty simple to run a BookBub ad. Their step-by-step instructions are good. You can use their drag and drop interface to create an ad, but I think you have better options if you upload your own creative. Here’s what I ran for my campaign for The Dressmaker’s Secret Earl:

The ads are small: 300 x 250 pixels. so you don’t want a lot of copy on them. I use Canva for pretty much all of my designs—ads, social media posts etc.

BookBub gives a lot of advice about testing ads, too—and testing is always a good thing. For instance, I’ve run two additional ads that test different copy:

I may test different types of cover images and different calls to action as well.

These ads are featured at the end of the list of featured deals, so readers have to scroll down to see them. But if you target well and bid right, you definitely get clicks.

Amazon Ads

Amazon ads can also be effective for the amount of money you spend. That’s because you’re reaching readers when they’re actively looking for books to buy.

The learning curve on setting up an Amazon ads campaign is a bit higher than for BookBub. I can’t do better than direct you to Dave Chesson’s free course on Amazon ads. His guidance is easy to follow, and he explains thoroughly how to maximize the effectiveness of your ads on Amazon.

These ads work with bidding and budgets, similar to the BookBub ads. But here, you’re only paying if a customer actually clicks on your ad.

You can also target closely using keywords or other products. Chesson explains the pros and cons of both.

The other good thing about Amazon ads is that you don’t do any creative. They simply show your book cover and title details in the search results and the pages specified. You’ve seen these ads. They’re just in the search results with a flag above them that says “sponsored:”

Facebook Ads

These ads are the most expensive and have the highest learning curve, and are also complicated to set up. You have to have a Facebook Ads account and a pixel on your website, and you have to understand conversion events and other marketing concepts.

You’re also advertising to people who are not looking to buy at that moment.

However, Facebook ads allow you to be much more creative and give you more scope for copy and visuals. You can use videos in those ads, which is a better idea than static images.

There are many tutorials out there, but to give you a sense of the kind of marketing thinking you need to do, here’s a blog post on Jane Friedman’s site that discusses Facebook ads for book marketing.

Bottom line, this strategy can absolutely work. But you need to have a decent budget and be confident you can sell a lot of volume. Or you are in that phase where you’re looking to establish yourself and so therefore don’t mind losing some money.

Ad copy

Chances are, you’re not a skilled advertising copywriter. I am, and I still don’t always write the best ads for my books. I have one word for you:

AI

For this kind of promotional writing, ChatGPT or whatever you normally use is your friend. It can spit out lots of variations to your specifications, and you can hone and refine until you’ve got something that resonates with you. It’s also a great tool to use to test variations not only of ad copy, but of your blurbs, your titles, your subheads and more.

Whatever your feelings about AI, it’s a tool that has some extremely useful applications for authors. I would never use it for actual writing, but for summarizing, synopses, promotional copy etc. it’s awesome.

You can also use it to write your newsletters, but be careful there: It’s important that you sound like yourself in your communications with the people who have honored you by giving you their email address. I always write my own newsletters in my own voice, but sometimes I’ll use AI to generate a quick poll, or a subject line.