Find more readers with online book advertising services

We get asked this question daily, and the answer is: It depends on your goals, and on the response you get to your ads. Most commonly, authors advertise their book for two reasons: 1. To build awareness that the book is available, and 2. to sell books.

In order for an advertising campaign (for any product from books to computers to automobiles) to drive a consumer action, that consumer has to be exposed to as many as nine marketing impressions. That means that if you want to see results, you should plan an ongoing, multi-week campaign. The minimum marketing spend BookBaby will allow is $400 spread over several weeks – smaller budgets have no shot at driving a positive ROI. However, we usually recommend spending at least $1,000 to $1,200 on marketing your book.

While your ads are running, you’ll be able to track the response to your advertising in your BookBaby author dashboard. You’ll see traffic data, buyer demographics, and (for sales through our Bookshop) sales data. If you see that your ads are working, keep advertising! If it doesn’t look like the ROI is great, there is still value in the ad impressions your book is generating by getting seen online. In such a case, we are happy to work with you to tweak the ad copy, author targeting, or the budget.

Unfortunately, there is no way to guarantee the results of any marketing campaign. We promise that we will create a great-looking ad (which you get to approve before we run the ad) and that we will target the ad campaign to an audience that is likely to be interested in your genre or subject matter.

Most ad campaigns generate tens (or hundreds) of thousands of ad impressions, which create awareness that your book exists. Some of the viewers of those ads will click through to your book’s selling page on our Bookshop, Amazon, or on any other store you designate as the landing page for your campaign. And, if all works as hoped, there will be book sales. We will report on book sales as soon as we receive them. This is instant for books sold on our BookBaby Bookshop, but can take months for books sold on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or other online bookstores, since those stores report sales quarterly.

Yes, your BookBaby author dashboard will report on traffic data, buyer demographics, and sales through our Bookshop. Be aware, however, that if you direct your ads to another store – like Amazon or Barnes & Noble – it can take months for any sales data to be reported, and we won’t be able to track those sales back to any of your ad campaigns.

This may make it appear that your ad campaign is underperforming when in fact it’s not. For that reason, we recommend you use your book’s Bookshop page as the landing page for any ad campaign you run.

We generally recommend you send people who click on your ad to one of two places:

1. During your Amazon presale period, direct your ads to your Amazon page. The traffic (and any presales) your ad generates will trigger Amazon’s algorithm to place a stocking order of your book.
2. Once your book is published, direct your ads to your BookBaby Bookshop page. This allows you to generate a 50% royalty on any book sold – much higher than on Amazon or any other store – which helps you generate a positive ROI on your marketing investment. Sales on Bookshop are also trackable in your BookBaby author dashboard and are reported instantly (as opposed to quarterly for the big stores), which means you get paid much faster.