Advertising Your Children's Book: Everyone Wants Your Money
But they can't have it unless...
…you get a penny back.
Here’s the basic idea. Someone has an audience. You have a product meant for that audience. They say, give me $20 and in return, you’ll make (at least) $20.01 in sales.
ADVERTISING: THE EXCHANGE
Would you make that exchange? You get $0.01 for every $20 you spend? Yes. That is a positive Return on Investment (ROI). It’s the basic premise of advertising that a message on the XXX platform will give you at least one penny ROI. In our example of spending $20 for one cent ROI, that’s only a .05% ROI, not so great. What if you got a 2% ROI, or $0.20. Much better. Let’s say you spend $500, which earns you a 1% ROI of $505. $5 profit. Not bad. Of course, we’d prefer a 10% ROI, so that you’d earn $50 on that $500 investment.
Advertising works. You can sell your children’s books with advertising and it can increase your overall profit. But you should understand the different types of advertising and popular platforms.
Emotional resistance to advertising: I know that some authors feel like advertising is “slimy.” The whole process of selling and advertising, in particular, feels beneath them as artists. It’s just not right, they think. But I approach indie publishing as a small business. I work hard to produce a quality book that kids will love.
And my business is to put a great book in the hands of the right kid.
If I’m limited to only people I know, I’ll sell few books. For marketing, you can do content marketing (such as blogs), social media ( such as FB, Instagram, Blue Sky), newsletter marketing (i.e. gathering names, sending regular emails), school visits (i.e. speaking in person), and so on.
But what if you still don’t reach your sales goals? Advertising is a way to increase sales on certain platforms, or in general, find a new audience. Remember, advertisers are selling you access to their audience. And in return…
GOAL OF ADVERTISING
…you should get a sale. The goal of advertising—always for indies—is a sale. Never brand awareness and never traffic. Sales. Show me the money. And make sure it’s a ROI amount.
When you talk to experts from a platform, they often push you toward doing an awareness campaign. Run this ad for ten days, they say, to raise awareness of your brand, and then run a sales campaign.
If you set up an awareness campaign, what do you get from it? Someone has seen your book cover, and a few of those may have read your description from you ad. What good does that do you? Is that worth PAYING FOR? No.
Your goals should always be for sales. Often an ad starts with some sales and you must tweak it (optimize it) to get an ROI or a better ROI. At least it started with sales. At least it has possibilities of a ROI or a better ROI.
CAUTIONS ABOUT ADVERTISING
Before we start looking at more details, some caveats:
Always remember that for any platform, you must learn their specific rules and nuances, and that it means an investment of time. How much is your time worth? Factor that in somehow.
Your results may vary because each book is a unique combination of story, cover art, description, timing, your reputation, and so on. The only way to know if a platform will work FOR YOUR BOOK is to test.
Testing. I hate this, but you must test platforms and individual ads. On any given platform, one ad may do great and another may bomb. When you think about an advertising budget, allow something for testing. Still—overall—there should be a ROI.
DISPLAY ADVERTISING
Display advertising is when you place an ad in a magazine or newspaper. This is more old school, but I still see people doing this. Targeted magazines, such as Story Monsters are focused on those interested in children’s literature. The audience is right! Is the price right? For this type media, you’ll usually see a Rate Card like this. The problem? How do match up ads and sales? Is there a way to attribute THIS sale to THAT ad?
The problem of attribution is the most frustrating thing about display ads. It means it’s very hard, if not impossible, to measure ROI. It may be possible if you send people to a dedicated page on your website. That is, sales from THIS page could only come from people who found it through THAT ad. You can use UTM tracking sometimes, a digital way to track clicks. But in general, it’s hard to judge the ROI of display ads. For that reason, I seldom use this type of ad.
DISTRIBUTOR CATALOGS
In the children’s book world, many school districts or libraries use an educational distributor. These are companies who provide extra services to the school/library market to capture the sales. For example, if a school district wanted to use a book in a reading program and needed 500 copies, they could order from Amazon. But that would be a full-price retail purchase. Instead, an educational distributor can provide a hefty discount (10-25% or more), AND provide the information needed to catalog the book in the school library’s data system. Many libraries or school districts work exclusively through an education or library distributor. (See this list of Preferred Distributors from Penguin Random House.)
Which means, that distributor has the right audience for us. Their audience is customers (people actually buying children’s books!) who use the distributor’s system to research and purchase books. And those distributors will offer you access to their audience with advertising.
Catalog advertising is the most common example of what the educational distributors offer. You can choose the size of the ad, and often add an author interview (for extra fee). They also offer advertising on their website, usually a banner ad (long, horizontal, usually at the top of a page, crossing all the columns). They are happy to send their rate cards or put you on their mailing list for notification of availability. Often, they have targeted catalogs. For example, they might target STEM books, K-3 books, middle grade books, or series books as the focus for a certain catalog. Costs usually start at $250 or so, and can go up quickly, depending on add-ons.
I wish I could recommend these catalogs. After all, the audience is proven customers of children’s books. But I’ve never had any luck with these. YMMV! If it sounds interesting, check out Follett for schools and Brodart for libraries.
CPC ADS
Most indie publishers prefer Cost Per Click (CPC) ads over display ads. These are online ads, which means the platforms have the capability to track each click and provide mostly accurate attribution. THIS click resulted in THAT sale. It allows you to measure with some confidence the ROI of your advertising. And that’s very important.
(Of course, some will argue about the accuracy of a certain system’s tracking, but that’s another story.)
The main CPC platforms for children’s books include Facebook/Meta ads, Amazon ads, and Bookbub ads. IngramID ads will aggregate this for you and place ads on the appropriate platform.
FBAds, Amazon Ads, BookBub ads each have quirks related to their own platform. But we can still generalize about how this works.
You create text and images that should hook your reader and get them interested in your book.
Next, you decide on the audience. Each platform lets you choose audiences, but the methods differ.
Bookbub lets you target readers of other books, but these must be readers active on the Bookbub platform. You must research an author’s popularity on Bookbub to determine if they have enough readers to be worth targeting. After choosing comparable authors, you can also add a category. This is helpful because some authors have popular books in several genres. For example, Neil Gaman has a couple award-winning children’s books, but also has a strong audience of fantasy readers. If you target him, you’ll also want to add the category of children’s books.
Amazon ads lets you target by keywords (topics, author names), ASIN (specific products), or categories. In addition, you can decide if you want exact matches, near matches, or broad matches. It means testing your approach to audience for your particular book.
Facebook/Meta has started relying more heavily on artificial intelligence for targeting ads. They are starting to prefer that you leave the audience to them, confident that their AI can match an ad to an audience. The results are mixed so far; as usual, romance and thriller authors tend to have better results. It means, IMHO, a longer and more expensive testing phase before you see results. Unfortunately, FB/Meta are moving toward making the AI audiences mandatory. As of this writing, you can still add keywords such as “children’s literature,” narrow by demographic categories such as “parents of 9-12 yo,” limit age ranges, and limit to a certain country. But the options are narrowing as FB/Meta invests in its AI technology.
Bids and Budgets. Amazon lets you monitor how much each click costs, and you can raise/lower bids for each keyword. A bid means that you think a click is worth XX amount and will pay up to that amount. To figure this, you also need to know how many clicks you get before you get a sale. If you get one click for every ten impressions (or the # times the ad is shown), that’s a reasonable 10% Buy Through Rate. If you only get one sale per hundred clicks, it’s hard to make a profit on books, which are relatively low profit margins. Again - you must test and track your ads. You can also set a budget, or a daily spend limit, on your ads.
Bookbub also lets you bid on clicks, but there are two options. You can pay for impressions or clicks. Paying by impressions means that they will charge the fee you set for views. For example, it may be $12.00 for 1000 views. You hope that you’ll have enough click through (monitor the CTR or Click Through Rate), that you make sales and turn a profit. This can rapidly give you an idea of how effective an audience target may be. But most people prefer to set a price per click; you only pay if someone clicks on your ad.
On the other hand, Facebook/Meta focuses on setting a budget for the campaign, rather than bids per click. If you decide to spend $100/day, Meta will try to spend that. Again, experiences vary widely and you should study the platform before jumping in.
Regardless of which platform you choose, it’s wise to study the platform’s quirks. I suggest reading several books for each platform because many books are explaining how that author earned on the ad platform. Rarely, though, are they children’s book authors. What applies to Romantasy YA titles, will likely not apply to children’s literature.
RESOURCES
Here are some books about advertising that I’ve read and respect. Always look for the most up-to-date information since the platforms change constantly. Like - constantly! Still, the older books give you great basic information on the platforms and ways to think about ads. The thought processes are as important as anything as you look at these platforms. And look for information on selling books via ads, as there are nuances.
Fayet, Ricardo. Amazon Ads for Authors: Unlock Your Full Advertising Potential (2023)
Gaughran, David. Bookbub Ads Expert (2019)
Potter, Deb Amazon Ads for Authors (2019)
VIDEO COURSES abound these days. The grand-daddy of all of them is Mark Dawson’s excellent Advertising for Authors course, which is constantly updated to keep up with the changing platforms. The course only opens at certain times, but you can sign up for the waiting list.
After that, it’s a wild west out there. Gurus show up regularly touting a certain approach to advertising on a certain platform. First, be skeptical that their approach is the best one for children’s books; we are the odd man out in most business decisions like this. Second, read as much free material on the author, their approach, their successes, and their failures as you can. Look for podcasts, blog posts, and Facebook groups. Before you spend money an expensive course, do your research. The course may or may not give you that all-important ROI.
This has been a quick overview of advertising for children’s books. I think there’s a place for ads in the overall mix of marketing activities. For some titles, and for some time periods, advertising can boost your income. Whatever you decide, don’t let anyone take your hard-earned money, unless they give you at least a penny profit!
Darcy, your content is always excellent. I've learned so much from you. I appreciate the research you've done that in turn has helped me on my fledgling indie journey.