Advertising Your Book on Facebook

It’s been a busy summer for me!  Working in the textbook industry for me is like the month of December for retailers, except our rush season starts July 5th and lasts for almost three months as college bookstores prepare for students to return to campus. After coming home from a grueling day, the last thing I wanted to do was to look at a book, much less anything related to books.  But Facebook and its many “Oregon Trail” like games helped to unwind my busy mind supplying a numbing sensation and much time wasted watching virtual crops grow.

We’ve talked about using Facebook to promote your book before.  I created a Facebook page to promote my own book, Stealing Wishes, a while back.  Since I was already on Facebook at the end of the day, I took the time to make a few updates to my book’s page and last week I came across an interesting ad in the right sidebar.  The ad said GET MORE FANS. “Advertise your page and pay only for new fans and clicks. Preview below.” (see image to the right)

Always looking for a new marketing opp, I decided to click on it to see what this was all about.  I was immediately redirected to a simplistic screen wanting me to design my own ad.  This consisted of choosing a title (the title of your book’s page) and writing a brief description, then uploading a new image if you want.  I chose to leave the image as it is, but changed the body of text to say, “Love and Good Coffee.  Why can’t we have both?”

After clicking Continue, Step 2 opened up where I basically had to fill out information about my target audience:

• Location
• Age
• Sex
• Keywords
• Education
• Relationship Status
• Sexual Preference
• Languages
• Connections
• Workplaces

I spent a good 30 minutes selecting different options and playing around with this feature because as you make changes Facebook gives you an estimate of how big your target audience is based on the number of users and the preferences they have set in their profiles.  For instance, not making any changes gave me a target audience of over 74 million, but changing the Relationship Status to Single immediately dropped the estimate to 14 million.

I also noticed you should be very aware of the keywords you choose (if any).  I entered several keywords related to my book from “comedy” to “romance” to even “gay” and “coffee,” but all of them decreased my target audience considerably. I decided to not list any keywords for this reason.

Another interesting fact is that since the main character of my book is gay, I decided to try targeting only men who were interested in men.  This dropped my target estimate to only 264,000.  So, the lesson learned here is to definitely NOT limit your audience.

My final target audience estimate after all my selections? 19,868,760.  Not bad.

Step 3, the final step in the ad process involves how much money you are willing to invest in your ad.  The first important selection is your daily budget and how much you are willing to spend per day. The minimum is one dollar, so that’s what I decided on since this is a test run for me. Then, you have to choose a schedule.  Do you want your ad to run continuously or for a set amount of time?  I decided on 30 days.  If I reach my maximum daily budget each day then that’s only 30 dollars. And yes, you can even choose a specific live date and end date for your ad. Then, you have to choose how much you are willing to pay per click.  The minimum is a penny, but Facebook estimates that you will only receive 2 clicks per day if you choose the minimum.

It is important to note that you will never pay more than your daily budget, but that you may actually pay less depending on how much traffic you get per day.  You can also choose to pay per click or pay per impression.  So, you can choose to pay each time someone actually clicks on your ad or you can pay for how many times your ad actually just appears on someone’s Facebook session.  Obviously, the impressions get your ad seen more, but can become much more costly. And it appears that those willing to pay more are the ads that get more Facetime on Facebook.

After making selections to my budget, I got to review my information and enter my credit card number.

After entering my payment information, I was redirected to a screen called My Ads where I’ll actually be able to track the progress of the ad on a daily basis.

So, will the ad work?  Who knows??  That’s the joy of advertising!  I like the fact that I’ll be able to track the clicks per day to see if my investment was worth it.  Obviously, if I had a budget of say $100 it would probably be much more worthwhile to invest more money in this, but we’ll see how it goes at first.  I’m more interested in seeing if people actually become fans of the page.  To me, that’s my true way of attracting an audience.

Some interesting figures…

• If the ad only costs me $30 in the end, I will need to sell at least 47 hard copies of the book to pay for the ad because I only make 64 cents per sale through Lulu.  64 cents X 47 = $30.08
• The book lists for $14.00 and is on sale on Amazon for $12.60.  That’s $562.12 profit for Amazon and/or Lulu after my royalty.
• I make $1.05 per sale of the book on the Amazon Kindle.  It would take only 29 Kindle sales to make back the $30 dollar investment. $1.05 x 29 = $30.45
• Earning at least 30 fans from this experiment on my book’s page, 1 per day?  Priceless.

So, if you see my ad out there over the next 30 days or if you decide to give it a try yourself, tell us about it by posting a comment here.