Our guest blogger today is Randi Minetor, the author of more than 80 books, including seven in the Death in the National Parks series—nonfiction books about people who visit national (and some state) parks and do not survive the experience. She also writes about U.S. travel, hiking in New York State, birds, nature, historic cities, and a wide range of general interest topics. Be sure to read Randi’s other articles here, “I wish I hadn’t done that: Tales from the book promotion road” and “Amazon sales rank: What the heck does it mean?“

Affiliate Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links, which means if you click on them and make a purchase, I will receive a small commission (at no extra charge to you).

Can a Facebook ad really sell books? One nonfiction author says “Yes!”

By Randi Minetor

Minutes after I created my Books by Randi and Nic Minetor business page on Facebook, I started receiving messages encouraging me to “boost” a post by making it a paid advertisement.

I dismissed the idea at first. The common wisdom I’ve heard since the 2002 release of my first book is that paid advertising doesn’t sell books.

The world of social media, however, gives us a whole new perspective on advertising, turning it from a broad-spectrum, mass-market enterprise into a highly targeted messaging system.

With that in mind, I decided to give a Facebook ad a whirl to promote my latest nonfiction book, Death in the Everglades: Accidents, Foolhardiness and Mayhem in South Florida, to see if I could raise its visibility during the holiday season.

Creating a Facebook ad, step by step

First, I used the book’s promotional copy to create a post on my page,  For the image, I used MockupShots, the wonderful tool Sandra Beckwith recommends that drops a book cover into any of the thousands of templates available on its site.

The click-through “call to action” went to the book’s page on Amazon.

Once I clicked “Boost Post,” it took me to the Create Ads page. I added a “Shop Now” button and moved on to the most critical part of the process: selecting the audience.

Here’s where Facebook advertising offers advantages I have not found in other online ad programs. Facebook suggests what it calls an “advantage audience” that it selects, but this is likely too broad for most books.

Instead of using this default, I selected that advantage I mentioned, “People you choose through targeting.” That allowed me to create my perfect niche: people ages 18 to 65+, living in Florida, who have expressed an interest in the Everglades, South Florida, camping, hiking, outdoors, hunting, or national parks.

Next, I chose my daily budget. I started conservatively at $12 per day for 10 days.

Facebook told me that about 1,800 people per day would see the ad. Advertisers only pay for the actual clicks on the ad, however, so I thought it very likely that this would not cost me much.

Results and tweaks

So you can imagine my surprise when I launched the ad in early December and the numbers started to come in.

In the first seven days, nearly 30,000 people saw my ad, and 408 clicked on the link. I watched my Amazon ranking numbers rise out of the basement, and the book became #1 in the Miami Florida Travel Books and Florida Keys Travel Books categories.

With 12 days to go before Christmas, I decided to run the ad again, right up through December 23. This time, I looked at the graph provided in the Ad Center and found that nearly all of the audience who interacted with the ad were older than 40—so I adjusted my audience target accordingly.

Fewer people—19,300—saw the ad, but the closer targeting generated twice as many clicks (see below).

When I looked at my actual sales on Bookscan a week later, more than 400 copies of Death in the Everglades had sold in just three weeks. (By contrast, other books in the series usually sell about 30 copies per week during the holiday season.)

Equally important, the momentum continued into January. People shared the ad on Facebook nearly 100 times, so it has continued to enjoy robust sales—especially rewarding for a niche book about true crime and accidents in South Florida.

And all it cost was about $270.

Pro tips for a Facebook ad that will sell books

I learned a lot through this process. Here are my five top tips for creating Facebook ads that sell.

1. Put your book cover in a great environment.

Displaying your book cover on a plain white background won’t make the book look exciting and special.

Thanks to MockupShots, we don’t have to spend a small fortune or a long afternoon photographing our books in movie-set conditions. It took me ten minutes to browse and pick an engaging template.

2. Punch up your sales text.

This came easily to me because I used to run an advertising agency, and I spent much of my career writing marketing copy.

I took the book’s back cover copy (which I had written) and boiled it down to a few clipped, declarative sentences with a throat-grabbing opening. You’ve got maybe three seconds to catch the eye of a reader scrolling through Facebook, so make that first sentence count.

3. Location, location, location.

Define your audience first by geography if you can—where the book takes place, or where your most avid readers may be clustered.

Ads that target the entire U.S. will not be effective at $12 per day—you’ll need to spend a lot more money to reach enough people to make a difference. Try to narrow that geography.

4. Target your readers.

Facebook is all about uniting people with similar interests, so use that to your advantage.

You can type in any topic to find your people: book genres (romance, fantasy, travel, true crime, etc.), hobbies, interests, professions, travel preferences, political views, religions, or other categories relevant to your subject.

Knowing your ideal audience’s age range can help as well—that turned out to be my biggest success secret. The more you can pinpoint your niche, the more effective your ad will be in reaching your target.

5. Set a realistic budget.

You can decide to spend as little as $1 per day, but don’t expect results from such a small expenditure. I found $12–$15 per day for 10 days to be very effective for a book with a fairly narrow audience.

If you’re promoting a book with a much broader reach, it may take more money to find them. Keep in mind that if the ad doesn’t seem to be helping you sell books, you can halt it with a single click and not spend another penny.

My nearly effortless ad campaign has given Death in the Everglades the visibility I need to peddle it to podcasts and blogs throughout the state.

The bottom line: If you know your audience well, you can reach a very specific group fairly economically using Facebook ads and see your sales rise.

Have you used Facebook ads for your book? What did you learn from the experience? 

I wish I hadn’t done that: Tales from the book promotion road

By Randi Minetor

We sat at the six-foot table in the middle of the Wild Birds Unlimited store in a small Connecticut town, and we waited.

The owners had invested in 15 copies of our latest book, our magnum opus: Birding New England, an overhaul and relaunch of publisher Falcon Guides’ Birdfinding series. The new format replaces the text-grayed pages and black-and-white photos of the original series with hundreds of full-color bird photos and specific information on where to find each species.

They’d also bought a plate of Italian cookies.

The cookies, it turned out, were the more popular investment.

Schedule a talk, not a signing

In the two hours we sat in this store on a Friday morning in June, exactly one person came in to purchase a book and have us sign it.

Despite our luring people to the table with the cookies, chatting them up as they munched, and opening the book to selected pages so they could see my-husband-Nic-the-photographer’s gorgeous photos, they walked off without a copy.

I should have known better than to schedule a signing instead of a talk. When Nic and I have the opportunity to perform—our tag-team presentations are filled with photos, tips for finding bird species, and funny stories from the road—the stacks of books dwindle as happy customers buy multiple copies.

Book signings with no talk, however, rarely result in sales for a midlist author whose name does not spark instant recognition.

Pay your own way promotion

In an age when 75 percent of all books are sold on Amazon, face-to-face book promotions have lost much of their power and luster.

Publishers only pay for book tours when the book has a chance of reaching the New York Times bestseller list. As a result, authors who want to travel to promote their books receive little to no financial support to do so.

We who write about regional nature, history, and other nonfiction topics can build our own book tours, paying for transportation and lodging out of our own bank accounts. We can even generate our own publicity for these events. Or … we can stay home and find better, more effective ways of promoting our work.

What doesn’t work, and what does

My first book, Breadwinner Wives and the Men They Marry, had the remarkable benefit of being the first book about women who make more money than their husbands do.

I paid to have a video made of myself speaking at a meeting of professional women. Sadly, it was scheduled for September 12, 2001, so it was attended by exactly six women. Nonetheless, I put together a snazzy hard-copy speaker package, built a list of women’s professional association chapters across the country, and approached them for engagements.

Not surprisingly, many of them responded favorably to my offer to speak to their clubs.

Also, not surprisingly in hindsight, not a single one would pay a speaking fee. Some did offer to arrange for hotel accommodations, and all but one paid for a meal (yes, one of these organizations would not even buy me lunch at a lunch meeting). I scheduled more than 40 gigs from Long Island to San Diego.

On one tour, I barely broken even

I stayed with friends where I could and took advantage of whatever meager hospitality these organizations offered. (This included a stay in one member’s home, where the shower door and walls were covered in black mildew so thick, I thought it was paint.)

I sold hundreds of books at cover price that I had bought from the publisher at a 55 percent “author discount.” Even so, the cash and checks did not quite cover the overall cost of the endeavor. Worse, I learned that the sale of books at such a significant discount didn’t count toward royalties, so in the end, I barely broke even.

I swore then that I would not be sucked into the not-so-glamorous whirlwind of a book tour again.

Put the focus on publicity

Since then, my book promotion efforts have focused on publicity, especially in print.

I create media lists by hand and contact newspapers and radio stations in the areas near the national parks that are the subjects of my books. With luck, such stories attract the attention of the Associated Press, which can take an article in the Kalispell Daily Interlake in northwestern Montana and spread it to newspapers in hundreds of markets.

This strategy helped my first book in the “Death in the Parks” series, Death in Glacier National Park, sell enough books to generate royalties in its first year.

“I wish I’d listened to my own instincts”

In spring 2019, with the release of both Birding New England and Death in Acadia National Park at roughly the same time, Nic and I received invitations to speak at libraries in Bar Harbor, Me. and Barre, Vt., with accommodations included.

What the heck, I thought, let’s try scheduling some other dates around these. I put together a road trip with additional gigs in Maine, Vermont, and Connecticut, and Nic and I spent late May and much of June darting from one place to another.

“I wish I’d listened to my own instincts,” I said to Nic as we drove away from the Wild Birds Unlimited in Connecticut, our last stop on the tour. Other bookstore appearances had been slightly more successful than in the past, but not enough to warrant the effort it took to get there.

So, no more unreimbursed road shows for me.

From now on I heed the excellent advice you’ll find here on Sandra Beckwith’s BuildBookBuzz website and blog, and I will work to promote my books via interviews, guest blog posts, and online promotions while sitting in my home office in Rochester, N.Y. It beats cheap hotels and countless tanks of gas literally burning up my book income.   

What’s your take on Randi’s experiences? Does any of this ring true for you? Please tell us in a comment. 

Amazon sales rank: What the heck does it mean?

By Randi Minetor

Are you obsessed with your Amazon sales rank?

If you’re like most authors, you may find yourself checking the book’s page daily—or several times a day—to see if the number has changed, and to speculate on what it means.

If it changes by 1 million or more in a day, is your book a runaway bestseller?

If it zigzags up and down across the 100,000 line, does that mean sales are especially brisk?

If you’re not watching this mysterious ranking on a daily basis, let me introduce you so you, too, can join the fun.

Where to find your ranking

On any book’s sales page on Amazon, there’s a block of type toward the bottom of the page with the heading, “Product details.” Under this, you’ll find a line titled Amazon Best Seller Rank, and a number.

This number tells you how the book’s sales compare with all of the books for sale on Amazon. On the day I’m writing this, there are more than 22,920,000 book titles listed for sale on the world’s largest bookseller’s site, so this figure can tell you a lot about your book’s relative popularity.

I have 49 books currently for sale on Amazon, and for the past 15 years I’ve watched their rankings rise and fall with the rapt fascination of a raccoon studying a morsel of food in a trap. I’ve had the opportunity to interpret the rank’s meaning, and I’ve researched what others have observed as well.

Amazon doesn’t reveal information about its algorithm or how it works, so what we can discern falls under the heading of “educated guess”—but marketing experts share my conclusions.

The basics

The ranking works like a golf score: The lower it is, the better your book is selling. So the #1 book at any given time is the bestselling book on Amazon at that moment. A book can become a #1 Amazon bestseller for days or weeks or minutes.

Amazon updates its rankings of the top 10,000 bestselling books in real time.

Books ranked between 10,000 and 99,999 are updated hourly, and those at 100,000 or more are updated daily. (That’s the official word, but during the busy Christmas season and occasionally at other times during the year, I have seen the rankings above 100,000 change several times a day. Extremely high volume sales throughout the Amazon site will move the needle more frequently.)

Books don’t have any ranking number at all until the first copy sells.

If your book is ranked 4,984,306, for example, don’t despair—at least one copy has sold at some point in its lifetime. So you’re off and running once the number appears.

Here’s the part that seems crazy: Sales over the life of the book are not computed as part of the ranking. For example, on the day I wrote this, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was ranked #276 in books. This is one of the top-selling books of all time, but if this fact were part of Amazon’s ranking process, the Harry Potter books might occupy the top spots for eternity.

The Amazon rankings indicate sales that are happening (or not) right now, giving any book the opportunity to strive for the #1 ranking, no matter how fleeting its presence there might be.

How sales activity affects your ranking

Here are some general rules of thumb for interpreting the number as it fluctuates over time:

1. Numbers higher than 1 million generally indicate that the book has not sold in some time.

The time since its last sale may be as short as a week or as long as its entire lifetime on Amazon. The more millions accumulate in your book’s ranking, the longer it has been since anyone bought a copy.

So, books that have sunk into the 8 million area or more may have had exactly one sale on Amazon, while those in the 2- to 3-million range have had numerous sales, but their last sale might have been months or even years ago.

2. On the day someone buys your book, it will immediately shoot up to a ranking in the 100,000 to 200,000 range.

If just one copy sells that day and none the next day, the book may slide back into the 300,000 to 500,000 area by the following day, and return to the 1 million or more ranking within four or five days. If someone else buys it, it will remain in the 100,000 range for longer—so you can surmise that you’re selling one book a day as long as your ranking stays between 100,000 and 200,000.

3. A second sale on the same day can catapult your book into five-figure numbers.

So, for example, the first sale sent you to 153,922, and the second one—later the same day—pushed your ranking to 85,635. Now the ranking will start to update hourly, so you can watch to see if it remains at this height throughout the day and into the following day. If it does, you’ve sold several more books.

Now, perhaps you’ve organized a posse to buy your new book on the same day. Maybe around 70 of your relatives, coworkers, pals, and classmates converge on Amazon and purchase your book within a 12-hour period.

What happens to your ranking? Your number gets lower and lower with the volume of sales, until you’re looking at a four-figure number (say, 6,532).

Now your ranking will update in real time. You can watch as it climbs with each new sale, perhaps rising to 3,285, and then 1,961. As long as sales continue at a rate of several an hour, the book maintains this significant ranking.

Hitting #1

How many sales does it take to hit #1?

This depends not only on your own sales, but also on how other books are selling that day.

If you’re attempting your one-day sales boost on the same day that Nora Roberts or Stephen King releases a new book, your chances of hitting #1 may be compromised.

I can say from experience that it requires hundreds or even thousands of sales on the same day to move from a four-figure ranking to a three-figure one—and to reach the single-digit rankings, you will need many more.

If it’s so difficult, how are there so many books that claim to be Amazon #1 bestsellers?

The clever folks at Amazon came up with a way to allow hundreds more books become #1 bestsellers every day by dividing the site’s millions of titles by genre and area of interest. This created niches in which books can be “category bestsellers,” like my Best Easy Day Hikes in Buffalo, NY, which became a #1 bestseller among books about Buffalo.

I was amazed recently to find that my newest book, Death in Zion National Park: Accidents and Foolhardiness in Utah’s Grand Circle, had become a #1 bestseller in the new books about Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks category. Amazon places a bright orange banner on the page of a #1 book . . .  even if, like Death in Zion, it’s actually the only book in that category.

Have you ever been obsessed with your Amazon sales rank? Tell us in a comment how often you refreshed the page!