Hey,

I hope you had a lovely Christmas. Apologies (again) for going quiet recently - I won't bore you with the details but I had some more medical issues and a quarantine to navigate... like half the world right now.

But I'm fit and healthy and back at work again - all is good, bar the blistering hellscape which is my To Do list.

Before we crack on with Facebook Ads, as previously promised, I just want to say congratulations to Theresa Elmes in Australia - who was the winner of the Kindle Paperwhite Black Friday competition. (Your Kindle is on the way, Theresa!)

OK. Let's get deeper into Facebook Ads. If you missed my previous email on 5 Killer Mistakes that beginners often make with advertising on Facebook, make sure to check that out at the recently updated Email Archive - which now helpfully delineates between older and more recent Facebook Ads missives.

5 Things To Do Before Advertising On Facebook

I'll be talking a lot more about Facebook Ads this year, starting this coming Friday with a hands-on guide to ad creation. Before we get to that though, there are some things you need in place to advertise successfully on Facebook.

And by that I mean run profitable ads which actually sell books so you can grow your author business in a responsible, sustainable, and scaleable way.

1. The Books

Yeah, I know. Everyone is sick of hearing it but even the best Facebook ad-wrangler on the planet can struggle to turn a profit unless they have good books to work with.

Note the plural.

Profitably advertising one book is possible… as is juggling flaming chainsaws while pirouetting on roller-skates but I don’t fancy your chances.

Facebook Ads require money, which has to be recouped by our intrepid author. That’s much easier when you have several things for readers to buy, preferably in a series, as that will propel readers through your catalogue several times more powerfully than unconnected standalones. Indeed, if you only have standalones, the chances are quite high that your dear reader will read something else next (as in something not written by you).

BTW “good” here doesn’t necessarily mean purple prose, or mind-bending structure, or experimental punctuation, or the kind of tale clearly aimed at prize judges. It means something more hard-nosed: a series of books in a commercially viable genre. And by that I mean a category which exists on Amazon and where the books in the charts are selling enough for the author to support themselves.

But I mean something broader here also. You don’t just need to nail the storybits but also package the books reasonably well so that readers of that niche respond positively when you dangle your books in front of them via Facebook Ads.

All of that needs to be done pretty well for you to have success with any kind of advertising, by the way, and if there’s a weak link in any part of the chain (I’m talking about things like the title, blurb, category, sample, formatting, cover, etc.) then you will probably lose money with Facebook Ads, no matter how great your ads themselves actually are.

But here’s the flipside: if you nail all this “book” stuff, then even mediocre Facebook Ads can do well for you. And good ones can send your books all the way to the moon and revolutionize your author life.

Everyone wants to jump in and learn the Big Secret to Facebook Ads – but this is the real secret to advertising and authorship generally: nail the book stuff and the rest is so much easier. Skimp here and you could end up losing your shirt… and perhaps end up so despondent that you quit writing altogether.

For those who don’t know, or who haven’t signed up yet, I have a comprehensive free course covering all that, packed with videos and tutorials and all that jazz. Sign up here if you haven’t already.

Aside from your book, which is a hell of a caveat, the most important element is probably the cover so make sure you really nail that part. I have a giant article covering that topic exhaustively over on my website.

I recommend working through some of the exercises in that article because it will help you nail things like your tagline, which will be very useful when creating your ad text (and images) for Facebook.

2. Reader Capturing Wotsits

Ad spend begets sales and money but also Likes and newsletter subscribers too… if you are all set up to to capture that reader interest. You always want more than a one-book stand with readers – easily the most important thing for a sustainable career, with the possible exception of putting those pesky words in the right order.

You will get considerably more value from your ad spend if you are all set up to capture reader interest efficiently, and by that I mean an active Facebook Page (not a Profile), an email list, and placing some enticing text after “The End” to convert all your new fans into newsletter subscribers who will buy your next book on Day 1.

For bonus points: have a website with a slick sign-up page for new subscribers. Really work that angle with a reader magnet (a free book or story given as a sign-up bonus). And then boss this side of things with an automated welcome sequence.

(See the section in the Email Archive - link above - for lots more detail on all that stuff.)

3. Know Your Audience

One of the most important parts of Facebook Ads is targeting – i.e. to whom you show those ads we are going to be building.

If you know your audience, you will find targeting much easier. You will still have to test different audiences to see who responds best but it will be more a process of gradual refinement rather than spinning around and desperately shooting in the dark.

Same goes for the other key elements of your ads: the image and the text. Getting both of those right is a learning curve involving disparate skills but you will do learn much faster if you know your audience.

“OK,” you might say, “how do I do that?” Errrrr.

Knowing your audience is a huge topic in and of itself. I covered it lots in my book Strangers to Superfans in a more theoretical way, as well as in numerous blog posts and emails and the like, and then in quite a hands-on, over-the-shoulder, guess-who-got-a-bag-of-hyphens-for-Christmas kind of way in the aforementioned free course Starting From Zero which you can find a link to above.

Choose your preferred poison, just don’t race through this step.

4. Define Your Offer Clearly

What’s the deal? What do you want readers to do, exactly? What’s your offer? You need to be able to answer these questions with the precision of a German lathe.

Cutting through the considerable noise on the average reader's Facebook feeds requires a clear and compelling hook. Price is an easy way – crude, perhaps, but most definitely effective. But Facebook isn’t BookBub and you don’t need a sale as much to make an ad work.

Besides, a good ad will have several hooks reeling in that tricksy reader. Even if you are pushing mega discounts, you should think further about your angle – beyond simply seducing them with price.

We will cover this in detail in a future email, but let me give you a concrete example before moving on:

“Visit my website where you can find out more about my books, learn about me, and also sign up to my occasional newsletter.”

That’s a weak-ass offer. Weak and diffused (as well as flaccid copy which will do little to pique the interest of new-to-you readers – who are the target).

“Fred Farmboy is Fantasyland’s only hope – he just doesn’t know it yet. But when Totally-not-Orcs invade his tranquil village, he discovers mystical powers… which have a terrifying cost. Read the first adventure free at Apple Books.”

This offer is much clearer. It also hits genre tropes and dangles something specific in front of readers and tells them exactly what to do. It’s much more focused than the first example, and I’d bet what remains of my liver that it would be much more effective too.

Don’t worry about what specifically works as Facebook ad text and how long it should be or any of that stuff quite yet, just start thinking in the right way: focused, hooky, hitting tropey notes, and so forth. It takes a little practice, but any writer can do it… once they push through that uncomfortable feeling at the start.

Again, the above-linked post on cover design will assist you here.

5. Set Your Goals

You don’t just need to know your audience, and what you are dangling in front of them, it’s also important to be clear about what you want from advertising. I mean aside from a tsunami of sales, dumpsters full of cash, and a life frequenting swim-up pool bars.

One of the easiest ways to lose money with ads is to be fuzzy about what you want, which usually leads to being overly forgiving with your results. Being unclear on your goals allows you to dress failure up as success, which will stop you from fixing your bad ads.

If you are clear about your goals, and clear-eyed about whether you achieved them or not – and banish any kind of fuzzy thinking – you will be honest about failures and more equipped to fix mistakes. This is the path to real success with ads. Everyone loses money to begin with, but you only push through that into profit if you are real about where you’re falling short.

Finger Wagging Takeaways

All this might sound super obvious and basic to some, but - together with the common mistakes I listed in my last Facebook email - these are the most common pitfalls with Facebook Ads. Or the places where most people screw up, to put a finer point on it.

Authors tend to dive in and start creating ads and make some wholly avoidable mistakes (often expensive ones). Or they get a little bit of success and when they try to scale the wheels come off (in an expensive way). Or good ads stop working and they don't know how to get them going again (costing them lots of money). Or they simply never get any kind of ad to generate sales for them (which isn't just expensive in terms of money, it's also incredibly demoralizing).

Sometimes the issue is some finessing of targeting, or improving the image, or reworking the ad text, or addressing some technical aspect of Facebook Ads they botched - but more likely it's they weren't quite ready to advertise as they hadn't nailed all the above. So make sure you do, and you'll find Facebook Ads much easier to get working for you.

And we'll get our hands dirty next time with some actual ad creation.

Happy New Year!

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is Harry Dean Stanton with Cancion Mixteca.