How to Make Facebook Ads to Promote Your Self-Published Book

Luckily, you’ve done most of the hard writing work already. The next step for you will be marketing your book so that it can gain traction and be seen by as many people as possible.

The best way to do this is through Facebook marketing. Along with updates from your friends and family, Facebook is a great place to advertise your work as an author.

With an author business account, you can create timely book ads on Facebook.This is different than your standard profile page, and allows you to do more with your account.

This is a strategic move if you’re looking to extend the reach of your work, and appeal to audiences outside of your immediate network of friends and family.

You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars to see results on Facebook ads, either. With around $50 a month, you can boost the reach of your ads for thousands of people.

Here’s our easy guide to using Facebook ads to market and promote your book, and how it can help you sell more books and gain followers for your next project.

Why Do Facebook Ads Work For Authors?

Despite the many social media platforms that your future fans can choose from, Facebook remains very popular.

As of the first quarter of 2021, Facebook reported roughly 2.85 billion monthly active users, making it the fastest growing and most used social media channel.

If you have an idea of the right audience for your upcoming book, you can find them here and can direct your ads right to their feeds.

Since you can target readers by location, interests, or behavior, they’ll be that much more likely to buy your book — or at least click on your ad when they see it.

So, if you have a book about local history, or a business book about building a company from scratch, you might target a specific city mentioned in your book or people that work at a certain company.

Facebook also provides detailed analytics, so you can track the traffic of your ad, so you can tweak your next ones to be even better.

How to Make Facebook Ads for Your Book

You might actually be closer to a finished Facebook ad than you think.

Building an ad will take a few minutes (and tinkering with settings), but you likely have images and advertising copy already for your book that will speed up the process.

Shall we get started?

Step 1: Make Your Facebook Ad Account

To create your first book ad on Facebook, you’ll need an author business page. To make one of these, simply head to your Facebook dashboard and look for the left-hand side for “Pages.”

Click “Create New Page,” and follow the prompts to add information to your page. Here, you can make it clear that this is your official author page.

Once you create your account, you’ll automatically have access to the Facebook Ads Manager feature to create ads to promote your book.

This is also where you can add any other members on your marketing team (if you’re lucky enough to have one of those!) as admins on this account.

No worries if you’re on your own — creating a Facebook ad for your self-published book isn’t as hard as you might think. So let’s dive in.

Step 2. CreateYour First Ad

In Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll see a green “Create” button. Go ahead and click that to start making your first ad.

Next, select “Traffic” from the drop-down menu. This is essential if you’ll be sending Facebook users off of Facebook and to your Amazon book listing or author site to purchase your book.

Step 3. Fill in Your Personal Info

Here you can add your billing information, or whichever payment you’d like associated with running your ads.

Step 4. Set Up the Ad Parameters

For this next step, you’ll choose where to direct people who click on your ad. You should select the “Website or Messenger” option so that you can add links to lead your readers off Facebook to purchase your book.

You can also switch on or off the ability to send reminders through a feature called “Offers.”

Next, you’ll pin-point the location of your audience. Consider if you think your book will appeal to a certain zip code, or in highly populated cities. For example, if you have a book about the best green chile served in Denver, you might target those Denver neighborhoods and the patrons of those restaurants.

You can also set primary age, gender, and languages. You can always adjust these later, and use the analytics feature to test how successful your ads are to the audiences you choose.

Not sure who your ideal reader is?

Follow these easy steps from our blog >

Another great way to target your ad will be through audience behavior.

For example, you can target people who read their books on a Kindle or iPad, and readers who read a particular genre.

Next, you’ll choose where your audience can view your ad. There’s an “Automatic Placement” option where Facebook will place them on platforms it thinks will perform best on. Or, you can select the “Edit Placements” option to tailor it to your liking.

Last, but certainly not least, you’ll need to set your Facebook Ad budget and get ready to schedule it.

And while you don’t need to drop hundreds of dollars on a single ad, Facebook doesn’t allow you to go under $10 USD per day.

For Facebook advertising, you can ballpark anywhere between $50-100 a month.

This is a perfect opportunity to sit down and think about the overall budget for your book project.

Successful self-publishing authors set aside funds for printing, marketing, and perhaps a venue for a book launch. If you’re crowdfunding your book, also think about how much money you’d like to spend in each of these categories and share that on your campaign page.

You could spend hours doing just this, but the important thing is to be realistic with your budget and leave a little cushion room for the unexpected.

You can select your ad to run continuously, or for a specific period of time. For example, the week your book comes out would make a great lead-in with a Facebook Ad.

Also essential, you can select if you’d like to be charged based on impressions (when people see it) or clicks (when people actually click on your ad).

Once you make your selections, Facebook will summarize how it thinks your ad will perform, along with all the selections you made while creating the ad.

This is a great place to see if your ad is specific enough using the colorful “Audience Definition” meter. If it’s not, consider going back to the drawing board and figuring out who your audience really is.

Facebook will also estimate the potential reach of your ad, giving you an idea of what to expect when you hit publish.

Step 5. Create Ad Copy, Images, and Links

Here you’ll create the physical copy and imagery that users will see when they come across your Facebook ad.

Video is the most successful medium to get people to stop scrolling. You can also experiment with images and links to your author site to purchase your book.

When uploading your images or video, Facebook will let you know the size of files and specs it requires. So be sure to adjust any of your files so that they can be uploaded properly.

Next, link your ad to your Business page with the drop-down menu and add any links you’d like to direct your viewers to.

Give the ad a catchy headline and some brief text about your book and why they should buy it.

In the “Advanced Options” be sure to add a short caption as well. We like using emojis in this section!

And voila! You’ve just made your first Facebook Ad to advertise your book.

Step 6. Monitor, Measure, and Tweak Your Ad

Now that you’ve done all the hard work, you can sit back and watch your ad sweep the world by storm.

Facebook will let you see how the ad is performing just below the post with shares, likes, and comments.You can also check out more detailed analytics in left column of the Ads Manager main page, and select on your ad.

In Ads Manager, you can make adjustments as you need to, for your running ad or for future campaigns.

While you can’t always track every single book sale, Facebook ads let you see directly how many clicks you’re getting to your site. This is pretty exciting, especially when it leads to more book sales and exposure for you.

The same rules apply for other author ads you might want to run — like going on a book tour or doing an author signing at a local bookstore. You can run an ad to point viewers to get tickets or reserve a spot at your next speaking gig.

Make the Most of Your Facebook Ads

Once you get the hang of it, running ads for your book on Facebook is a breeze.

But what you might need to improve upon first is your Facebook Author page.

This will be the first place people will go to learn more about you and your work. You’ll want to make sure it looks professional and has plenty of information for your fans.

Not there yet? Don’t worry, we’ve got your back.

Check out our social media series about how to get your Facebook game on point >