Social media ads: Author rip-off?
When authors use social media ads to promote their books, they are getting ripped off. The ad campaign costs money and it will never (or rarely) bring in enough in royalties to cover the expense of the promotion
I’ve come to this conclusion after years of wondering why my social media promotions and ads never produced positive results.
So let’s look at a few of my conclusions. What follows are my thoughts and I’m usually in the minority. Nevertheless, I write on.
Large corporations use social media and spend millions of dollars on ads and are happy with the results. But they have SEO and social media experts on staff and their job is make sure the promotions have positive results. Then there are us authors who are a bunch of f——-g amateurs. We know little or nothing about SEO and we’re not sure just what social media means. So all our promotional efforts are doomed to failure because we don’t know what we’re doing..
Another issue is targeting, an important ingredient in marketing. Promoting a book to the general population is a waste of money since about 99% of this population has no interest in your genre. To be successful a promotion has to be targeted to the tiny sliver of the population that reads your genre such as romance, or fantasy or mystery. But you can’t target that sliver using popular social media ads. Using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. you can’’t come close to targeting your sliver. Consequently, the money spent on the ad is wasted on people who will never buy your book..
To be effective, a fiction promotion must be targeted at your specific genre. For non-fiction, it must be targeted to the problem the book is solving, such as plumbing problems or modernizing a kitchen.
So what’s the alternative? Hire an expert and let her run the promotions. This will undoubtedly be expensive, but it might be cheaper in the long run than dropping $50 or $100 at a time on useless promotions. And the results with the expert can’t be worse than doing it yourself. Of course hiring an expert comes with risks. This is because some ‘experts’ are really scam artists who talk a great game and use marketing doublespeak to sound authentic.
So what are your thoughts on this topic? I’d love to hear them.