How to get results from advertising a book series

You need a series to really get serious with book sales but once you’ve got a series how do you get the best results when you’re spending money on ads?

Book promo site Bookbub has just come up with a rundown of ads for book series that have produced good results.

There are, of course, a lot of factors other than ad design that have a bearing on how well books are going to sell, such as keywords, genre, author’s reputation, book quality, etc, but it’s still valuable information to take into account.

Bookbub have picked 17 ads using three strategies which they say have performed well, with click-through rates (CTR) ranging from 1.5% to 27%. Unfortunately, they don’t tell you what the CTR is for each individual ad. I’ve just sampled a selection of those 17 ads here.

The three ad strategies set out by Bookbub are:


Series Starters

This type of ad plans to offer a promo price or free on the first book in a series to bring in readers to the rest of the series.

Here are a couple of example ads of this strategy

The Bow of Destiny (The Bow of Hart Saga Book 1) by P H Solomon
Cavendish & Walker series by Sally Rigby (12-book mystery series)

Sales Across a Series

This approach features a discount on all the books in a series, with advertisers often linking the ads to a series page on Amazon so readers can pick up the whole series with a click.

Here are ads for a Regency romance series by Darcy Burke and a non-fiction series by self-publishing specialist David Gaughran which offer discounts across a series.

Tiered pricing for Darcy Burke’s Regency books which range from free to $0.99 to $2.99
Self-publishing stalwart David Gaughran has some great advice for authors with his series priced from free to 99p (for UK market).

Series Box Sets

Box sets are a big draw for readers, especially when there’s a big discount on offer. Bookbub says for Featured Deals, they see 20% higher CTRs on box sets than on single titles.

Star Scavenger: The complete series by G J Ogden. This ad offers a highly rated five-book box set for $0.99 or free reading to Kindle Unlimited subscribers
Detective Sarah Burke box set by Elizabeth Gunn. This is my pick of the ads as it has great use of color and typography to push a three-book box set for $0.99

You can check out the rest of the ads on the Bookbub site.