Does traditional advertising work for self-published authors? Traditional advertising are website ads, magazine ads, billboards, radio, mailing lists, and anything outside of social media. These can be helpful for building your brand and promoting your self-published book. However, is the cost of traditional advertising worth what you get out of it? Will it help you sell more books? Read on to find out more.
Traditional Advertising
Paid advertising is one way to increase the visibility of your brand and products. Your brand is not the same as your books (products). Advertising helps authors grow awareness of who you are and what you write. For example, everyone knows that Stephen King writes horror. You may not know all of his books, but you are aware of his brand and what he represents.
Publishers will often pay for traditional advertising to build brand awareness for the authors they represent. It’s expensive and much more difficult for self-published authors to do the same thing due to limited financial resources, especially when you are first starting out.
What Influences Readers to Buy a Book?
Readers most often make the decision to buy a book based on various factors:
- Cover Art
- Book Summary
- Reader Reviews
- Endorsements from Notable Persons
- Social Media
- Word of Mouth
5 Questions To Ask Yourself
How is the ad billed?
Advertisements require investment capital. You need to have money to pay advertisers if you want to run an ad. This is true for traditional advertisers as well as online advertisers. But traditional advertising online can be based on a number of factors such as:
- Clicks on their advertisement
- Impressions or people who view the ad
The most effective of these methods is pay-per-click. Using this method, you only pay for when shoppers click on the ad. The other method charges you every time your ad is merely viewed.
Traditional advertisers will charge you upfront simply to run your ad, whether or not you receive any interaction or response from it.
Will the ad reach your target market?
If you pay a traditional advertiser to run a billboard by a busy intersection, you may pay a lot of money and receive little in return for it. The same is true if you run an ad in Reader’s Digest or some other generic media publication. However, if you are an author of fantasy fiction, you might do well advertising in Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine. Your best return on investment will come from narrowing your target audience to a specific readership and capture as many of those readers as possible.
Is your timing right?
Advertising at the right time of the year is important. For example, if you write horror, you will want to advertise near Halloween. If you write about backpacking in Europe, you will likely want to advertise just prior to the Summer. Timing is everything!
Where will the ad be placed?
Advertisement placement is very important to avoid being lost in the shuffle. If you advertise traditionally, be certain to get good placement. You want to be in the front of the magazine since most people rarely make it to the end. Color ads always catch the eye more than black and white. These cost more, but it could result in more interest from readers.
The same is true in online advertising. You do not want your advertisement to be at the bottom of a long web page full of other ads. The masthead, or top of the page, is the best place.
Is the production quality superior?
Make sure you speak with the creator to convey your ideas on the advertisement, images, and words to use. You will also want to make certain they use quality images and not boring, old, stock images or ones that are fuzzy/poor quality.
Make the most out of promotions
Your book cover image is a great tool to use when advertising. Create your own flyers, cards, web ads, and more on your author website. Offer these same images to online advertisers. For traditional advertisers, give them high quality image files. Speak with your local bookstores about placing free bookmarks featuring your book on their countertop, or placing a small poster somewhere in the store. Most booksellers are very helpful in this regard. 80percentdone.com also offers book promotion for a nominal fee.
For information on how much you should spend to advertise, click here.
What has your experience been with advertising? We’d love to hear! Comment in the comment section below.
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