Goodreads Advertising Tips

Marketing isn’t called marketing in digital book land, it’s called Discoverability.

Until very recently Amazon KDP Select, with its free lending days was, if you could accept their exclusivity clause, a good method. Offer your ebooks for free for 5 days out of every 3 months, ratchet up “sales”, promote your other titles and get real sales when the freebie starts charging again. All thanks to Amazon’s complicated ranking and “also bought” system. Now the Algorithms have changed, and, for reasons too complicated to go into here, this isn’t so good.

If you have a paperback version of your ebook (create one free at CreateSpace) you can advertise on Goodreads DIY “self-serve” advertising. Like FB and GoogleAds, you can target book ads to specific readers (via genre or their favourite authors) with a few dollars’ investment. Goodreads has 19 million unique visitors per month, all of them readers. Their forum is where the Fifty Shades of Grey saga started: reader word of mouth.

So far I have got absolutely nowhere. When I emailed to ask what I was doing wrong I got a very helpful response then a follow-up attaching the Goodreads “Self-Serve Best Practices” PDF. You can find this on the the menu bar to the right of your ad dashboard.

* Don’t over target. Remove any age and country targeting and keep it to just authors or just genres.

* Run two ads under the same campaign. Sharing the funding, target appx 5 genres in one ad and appx 8 – 10 authors in the other. Stick to authors with a rating of more than 25,000.

* Keep Tweeking the ad copy. A call to action at the end of the wording, like “click to read more” or “add to your shelf” gets more clicks.

Tick the “engagement box” at the end of the ad to reveal review stats.

You can tailor how much you pay per click. Goodreads recommend 50 cents per click for good ad visibility.

Add your book as a giveaway prize and advertise it in your ad. Giveaways can run for months with just one book, a way to raise visibility for a small investment of one paperback and cost of postage.

26 June 2012 Campaign End : What have I learnt? Make 3 or 4 ads with different copy (wording) under the one campaign and see which one gets more attention. Then ditch the others and try your top ad against some different copy. I also learnt that targeting particular authors brought very low returns as opposed to targeting genres. So I gave up on the author target thing. Then I gave up altogether. For the return on clicks and “Adds” not worth it. The time needed to get the perfect copy is, for me, better spent elsewhere. SZC

Goodreads have just issued a detailed breakdown of a larger advertising campaign – discussed here at Digital Book World.

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