How to Sell More Books Before You Spend a Dollar on Ads
EPISODE ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN
If your book sales are slow, it’s easy to assume the answer is more visibility and start wondering whether Amazon Ads, Facebook ads, or paid book promotion will finally get things moving. But before you spend a dollar on ads, there’s one question you need to answer first: what are the readers who already find your book doing next?
In this episode, Jenn explains how to tell whether you truly have a visibility problem or whether something else in your book marketing is stopping readers before they buy. If you’ve been trying to sell more books, grow your audience, improve your book sales, or figure out whether paid advertising is worth it, this episode will help you make a much smarter decision before putting money behind your marketing.
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Transcript
Your book sales are slower than you want them to be.
You’ve been posting. Maybe you have an email list. You’ve tried promotions. And eventually you start thinking, “Maybe I just need to run ads.”
Because logically, that makes sense.
If more people saw the book, more people would buy it. Right?
Sometimes, yes.
But before you spend money putting your book in front of more people, I want you to answer a much more important question:
What are the people who already find your book doing next?
Because if readers are already seeing your book and something is stopping them from buying, paying for more visibility isn’t going to solve that problem. It’s just going to send more people into the same problem.
I’m Jenn Hanson-dePaula. I’ve spent nearly 20 years helping fiction and nonfiction authors simplify their marketing, connect with readers, and sell more books.
And today I’m going to walk you through the four things I want you to check before you spend a dollar on ads, so you can figure out whether you genuinely need more visibility or whether there’s something else in your marketing you need to fix first.
More Visibility Is Not Always the Answer
Here’s the thing.
When book sales are slow, visibility is one of the easiest problems to blame.
Not enough people know about the book.
Not enough people are seeing your posts.
Not enough people are finding you on Amazon.
So the solution seems obvious: get in front of more people.
And that might be exactly what you need.
But there’s another possibility.
You may already have people finding you. They’re just not moving any farther.
Think about it this way.
If you had a store and hardly anyone was walking through the door, your problem would be traffic. You would need more people coming in.
But what if plenty of people were walking into the store, looking around for a few minutes, and then leaving without buying anything?
At that point, bringing in another hundred people doesn’t necessarily fix the problem.
You’d want to know why the people already coming in aren’t buying.
That is exactly what I want you to do with your book marketing before you pay for more traffic.
Instead of asking, “How do I get more people to see my book?”
Ask:
What happens after someone sees it?
There are four places I want you to look.
Check #1: Are You Reaching the Right Readers?
The first thing to look at is not how many people are seeing your book.
It’s who is seeing it.
This is where follower counts, views, and reach can become misleading.
You can have a post reach thousands of people and still make very few book sales if those people were never likely to want your book in the first place.
That happens all the time.
An author creates content that other writers love, so the posts get engagement. But the book was written for readers, not writers.
Or a fiction author creates very entertaining content that attracts people who like books in general, but not necessarily people who want the specific kind of story they write.
Or a nonfiction author talks about a huge topic when their book actually solves a much more specific problem.
So before you pay to reach more people, ask yourself:
Can I clearly describe the person I want the ad to reach?
And I don’t mean, “women between 25 and 55 who like books.”
For fiction, ask yourself: what kind of emotional experience is that reader looking for?
What tropes, themes, tension, atmosphere, or type of story make them immediately interested?
For nonfiction, ask yourself: what is happening in that person’s life that makes this subject important to them now?
What problem are they trying to solve? What are they frustrated with? What outcome are they looking for?
If you don’t have those answers yet, I would work on that before I spent money trying to reach more people.
Because ads can increase your reach.
They cannot tell you who your reader is.
Check #2: Is the Reason to Buy Clear?
The next thing I want you to look at is what happens when the right reader encounters your book.
Do they understand why they should be interested?
This is where authors sometimes say, “But they can read the description.”
Yes, they can.
But first you have to make them interested enough to want to.
There has to be something that creates recognition.
Something that makes the right person think, “Oh, this is my kind of book.”
For fiction, that usually means the emotional promise of the story is clear.
Not just what happens in the plot.
What kind of experience am I signing up for?
Is this a dark, obsessive romance? A comforting small-town mystery? A tense psychological thriller where nobody can be trusted?
The specifics will obviously change by genre, but the reader should be able to recognize the experience.
For nonfiction, the question is a little different.
What is going to be different for me because I read this?
What am I going to understand, solve, change, or be able to do?
If someone has to work too hard to figure out why your book is important to them, more visibility will not fix that.
You’ll simply have more people seeing something they don’t quite understand.
So before you run ads, look at the words you’re using to talk about your book.
Look at your posts.
Look at your book description.
Look at your website.
Could the right reader tell, fairly quickly, why this book is for them?
If not, that’s the next thing I would fix.
Check #3: What Happens When Someone Clicks?
Now we’re getting much closer to the sale.
Let’s say the right readers are finding you.
They understand the promise.
They’re interested enough to click.
And then they don’t buy.
That tells you something important.
Your problem may no longer be visibility.
It may be what they find when they arrive.
For fiction, I would start looking at things like the cover, the description, reviews, the way the genre is being communicated, and if it’s part of a series, whether there is an obvious reason to start with this particular book.
Does the cover fit the genre and look like the kind of book that particular reader already buys?
Does the description deepen the desire created by the marketing?
Does everything feel like it belongs together?
For nonfiction, I’d look closely at whether the title, subtitle, description, author credibility, proof, and promise all reinforce one another.
If your content says one thing and the book’s sales page seems to promise something slightly different, you can lose people right there.
All of this is incredibly important and plays a part in someone deciding if your book is for them.
Because if you’re getting clicks but not purchases, your instinct may be to think, “I need more clicks.”
Maybe.
But I would first ask why the clicks you already have aren’t becoming sales.
That question can save you a lot of money.
Check #4: Do You Have Any Evidence That the Reader Path Works?
The last thing I want you to look for is evidence of movement.
To be clear, I’m not saying you need hundreds of sales before you’re “allowed” to advertise.
There is no magic number.
You’re looking for evidence that the pieces are connecting.
Are the right people responding to your content?
Are people clicking when you talk about your book?
Are readers joining your email list?
Are subscribers opening your emails and taking the next step?
Are some people buying when you make a clear offer?
You’re looking for signs that people can successfully move from discovering you to becoming interested to taking action.
The numbers may still be small.
That’s okay.
Small and functioning is very different from broken.
If ten of the right people encounter your marketing and some of them consistently move forward, you have something you can learn from and potentially scale.
If one hundred people encounter it and almost nobody does anything, I wouldn’t immediately assume you need one thousand.
I’d want to understand what is happening first.
So When Do Ads Make Sense?
Now, I am not telling you not to run ads.
Ads can be incredibly useful.
But advertising works best when you know what job you are asking it to do.
If your reader is clear, your book’s promise is clear, the path to purchase makes sense, and you can see that qualified readers are already moving through that path, but you simply aren’t getting enough of those readers into the system?
THAT is a visibility problem worth testing.
It's a completely different situation from saying, “My sales are low, so I guess I need ads.”
One is a diagnosis.
The other is a guess.
And this is where authors can waste a lot of money.
You want to spend your ad dollars on something that you know already works.
Otherwise you’re going to waste a lot of money amplifying a sales system that doesn’t work.
That gets expensive very quickly.
Before you pay to send more people into your marketing, make sure you understand what happens to the people who are already there.
Are they finding you?
Are they recognizing that the book is for them?
Are they becoming interested?
Are they clicking?
Are they buying?
Find the place where that movement stops.
Then fix that part.
And if the path works but not enough qualified readers are entering it, that is when increasing visibility through ads becomes a much more logical next step.
What to Do Next
If you went through these four questions and realized your issue may not be advertising at all, but that the pieces of your marketing aren’t completely connected yet, that is exactly what I built the 90-Day Book Sales System to help you do.
It walks you through the foundation first, who your reader is and what makes your book relevant to them, then connects your content, email list, and sales strategy into one system so you’re not throwing random tactics at slow sales and hoping something sticks.
And just as importantly, you have a way to look at what’s happening and figure out which part needs attention instead of changing everything at once.
You can find the 90-Day Book Sales System in the description for this episode.
But whether you use my system or build this yourself, what I want you to remember is simple:
Don’t spend money solving a problem you haven’t diagnosed yet.
Figure out where readers stop moving.
Fix that part.
And when the thing you genuinely need is more of the right people entering a path that already works, then you can make a much smarter decision about whether ads belong in your marketing or not.
I’ll see you next time.