How To Create A Facebook Ad For Your Book

Facebook 1.4 billion users, and as an author, you can’t afford not to market your book to them.

Authors know that writing a good book is hugely important, but the next most crucial thing is understanding how to market it. With an oversaturated market and a readership who are increasingly impatient and time-poor, if you want your novel to be the one they buy, you need to get it noticed.

Facebook ads are a great way of doing this. Done well, and using all that Facebook has to offer can help you build your mailing list, drive traffic to your website and give you helpful insight into who your fans are and what they want more of.

So how do you set up a Facebook advert? Here is a step by step breakdown of the process:

Create your author page. You need a separate page from your personal Facebook account. Try to use Google Chrome as your browser when doing this and when setting up your ads, as other browsers are sometimes incompatible with certain functionalities, which can cause all sorts of hair-pulling moments for you.

Once your page is set up, you can navigate to the ‘create advert’ link. You will be taken to the Facebook ad screen. Here you have to state your objective, which is the reason or end goal for setting up the ad in the first place. It’s essential to get this right as not doing so could result in you wasting your time and budget. There is a huge range of objectives to choose from, such as boosting posts or promoting your page or gaining more web traffic.

Once you have selected your objective, click on the blue ‘create advert account button’, and you will be taken to the account creation screen where you must fill in the relevant details to create your account.

Defining your audience is the next and possibly most crucial stage. Here you get to select different factors that will affect who your ad is visible to, such as the location, gender, age, and interests of the people you wish to target. Hopefully, you will have done some research beforehand and have a clear idea of who your book will appeal to most, and be able to define your audience fairly painlessly.

The next step is to set placements that decide where your ad will be placed, i.e., people’s mobile news feeds, desktop news feeds – or even on other social media platforms such as Instagram.

From here, you must decide on your budget. You can set a daily budget as well as a schedule of when your advert will be published as well as when to end your campaign. Doing this is imperative as otherwise, your ad will run indefinitely and become much more costly than you had intended! Stick with a modest budget to begin with as it’s vital to ensure you are getting a good ROI before you up your budget, and if your ad doesn’t work, you can tweak and retry without having spent all your money.

From here, you can create your advert. The content and imagery you use is up to you. It would be best if you had done some research and thought about keywords and how to deliver a compelling message to your customers. You can get really creative here, but make sure you work within the guidelines Facebook has set; otherwise, your ad could be blocked or pulled.

Once you have finalized your ad, you can go ahead and hit the ‘Place Order’ button. You then have to wait – Facebook will review your ad and ensure that it meets their guidelines before publishing. Usually, this should happen within the hour. If for some reason, Facebook has an issue with the ad – they will email you to explain why and give you an opportunity to adjust – you can also speak directly to a customer service rep to help you.

Once your ad is live, you should monitor its performance closely. By analyzing the data and trying out different advertisements to see what works best, you can learn how to create compelling, effective Facebook ads that meet your objectives. Good luck!