Step By Step Instructions for Promotion of your Book with Twitter Ads

I’ve written a couple posts about Twitter Ads now, and most of the feedback I’ve gotten has been: SLOW DOWN! People want a step-by-step on how to (hopefully) reproduce the success I’ve had with Twitter Ads. And I’m the kind of fella who gives the people what they want! (Occasionally, if I feel like it.) There are roughly a zillion steps, so I’m going to do this in a bunch of blog posts.

Before we begin, I need you to take a minute and count how many books you’ve written. I’ll wait. (doo-be-doo-be-doo…) Back? What’d you come up with? Is it one book? If so, then I’ll wait while you go finish the next book. Because what we’re going to do is run a break even advertising campaign. It isn’t going to cost you any money in the end, but you aren’t going to make any money either. This is ideal for promoting your first book, because it will get people to buy your second book without having to advertise it. You make money on the second book. If you don’t have a second book, you won’t make any money. You are better off just doing social media marketing, and making some money now and then when someone buys.

If you have written only one book, you should not be reading this paragraph. You are bad at following instructions. Repeat after me: “I am not a brand (yet).” and also “I will not pay people to buy my book.” Now go away. I’ll see you back here after the sequel is launched.

Using Twitter Ads, I am able to sell an average of almost 3 novels a day. Day in and day out. Every day. Unless it suddenly stops working, that’s 1000 novels a year. With zero net profit on those sales. This is not your only option. You can go drop $500 on newsletter ads and give your book away for free, and get it onto the Kindles of 2000 people. Very few of them will ever read it. You’ll be $500 poorer. But if you think that’s a better idea, go do that. I happen to believe that people who pay for something are much more likely to read it. And people who read my first novel are very likely to buy my second. If I’m right, then I’ll make money on the sequel.

The following posts will cover all the steps of running a successful Twitter Ad campaign. You can deviate from my advice at your own peril. You be you, baby. But if it doesn’t work, the first thing to ask is whether it was because of those deviations.

1. Create book or character accounts on Twitter
2. Get your book ready
   1. Fix the back matter
   2. Fix the blurb
   3. Fix the price
   4. Fix the reviews
   5. Set up a mybook.to link
3. Run a test campaign
   1. Write five tweets
   2. Figure out your targeting
   3. Spend $10
   4. Sell nothing
   5. Pick your winner
4. Run a real campaign
   1. Segment your markets
   2. Track results
   3. Compute your conversion rate
5. Run a continuous campaign
   1. Tune your bid
   2. Test price elasticity