Bookbub ads give you a lot of control. You can set budgets, turn them on and off at will, etc. As paid advertising is an excellent way for authors to set our money on fire; that’s an advantage. The disadvantage is they are HARD to crack. And there are aspects of design, getting feedback and advice on a tight budget that I found missing from sources that were otherwise great. So I’ve summarised the process that worked best for me, the design and text aspects of which all apply to promoting your book on social media too.
Note: Bookbub allows you to choose which bookstores to target your ads at, including; Kobo, Apple, Barnes & Noble, your direct store, Itchio etc, as well as Amazon. So you can use it for Amazon ads, Amazon AND wide stores, or non-Amazon stores only. The latter is why I’ll continue trying to get better at it.
Before You Start Designing: Keep It Simple
Think single colour background. High contrast between text and background. Very limited number of fonts. Very legible, possibly bold fonts. Limited number of words.
Your ad will be in a newsletter with other ads or on a homepage with other ads. People are busy, the world is on fire, spoons are limited. Get immediately to the point and stay there! Make it as accessible as possible!
Getting Ready
Research
Study effective ads.
What core ingredients do you see in effective looking ads?
Do ads in your book’s genre/ categories highlight certain things? eg. diverse casts, tropes ect?
How do great looking ads utilise covers/ art?
How do effective looking ads place/ layout text, and images?
For Bookbub, here’s blogs breaking down successful series ads, new releases and more good examples.
Ad Design
Selecting Fonts
Priority 1: legibility. Every letter needs to be clear and easy to read, even at Bookbub’s small ad display size. If any level of squinting is required; its the wrong font for a Bookbub ad.
Priority 2: genre/ vibe. I found fonts I loved on canva pro, which nicely matched the mood of SciFi, children’s books, horror or contemporary. But I write Fantasy. I needed a font that wasn’t too modern, or too plain, to sit well beside my cover fonts and suit my genre. A font can indicate MG or YA without you wasting space and words stating so. It can also create contemporary Earth, or otherwordly vibes.
Don’t Use Too Many. Bookbub ads are small. You may have a title, teaser and price. If you use your cover (as opposed to art without tect); that’s a forth piece of text and font. I suggest limiting your ad to 1 font, 2 maximum, for all text.
Text
Common Bookbub ad text includes;
-a few adjectives describing genre/ tone/ style/ hooky headline sentence.
-a teaser
-list of tropes (especially if its romance)
-price (in currency matching target countries; $ or £) or ‘New’ for full price new releases.
-a call to action eg. ‘Read/ Download Now!’
-a review extract
Note: Don’t do ALL the above in ONE ad. If all appeals, experiment with multiple ads, varying which of some of the above you use in each.
If you’re considering a teaser, my blog on crafting a quality pitch can help.
Background
This is where ‘keep it simple’ comes in. If you have a teaser written over art and multiple colours; its hard to read. Even a multi-colour background can distract from words. My ad that got the most clicks had a single colour background. Note the high degree of contrast between background colour and fonts. And the use of blank space background, all sets of text and the cover, intended to make all text easier to read.
Using cover art as a background for the entire ad has worked on some of Bookbub’s blog’s successful ad examples. But note that with those too; text is displayed over a section of art that is single colour, and creates high contrast between text and background.
All Design Elements Together
This is where my AuDHD tendency to break things into smaller parts, to avoid visual and info overload and to hyper focus, worked against me. My first round of Bookbub ad testing focused on all the above elements in isolation. So to avoid overall design issues, consider:
Is there too much text?
Does the ad look cluttered?
Is it too busy? (Too much anything/ too much altogether?)
Is there high contrast between every letter and the background?
Do you hit any of the above issues when viewing the ad at Bookbub’s display size? (Likely smaller than canva’s default display -upload it to your draft Bookbub add to check this.)
Feedback & Revisions
As with drafting, you bring too much knowledge of your book to your ad. You may be in love with the art and or prone to get stuck in your own head and struggling to perceive how the ad presents to your target audience; random stranger.
So having made multiple ad designs, maybe tweaked them multiple times; seek feedback. Post on social media/ ask on your author discord (my Writers & Authors Discord is here.) Show people what you think are your best 3 or 4 ads, ask which they like best and why, and do they think any changes could make it more effective?
Then revise. Then seek feedback again, on the same or a second platform.
Ad Budget & Testing
Yes, testing. You don’t want to throw down a bunch of money, get zero clicks THEN realise your design has ISSUES. As noted at the start; Bookbub ads are hard. The ad might be ‘fine’ and Bookbub newsletter subscribers may still not click. This is why you need to test; to get the audience of your paid ads clicking and buying, not an audience who loved that same graphic elsewhere.
So consider;
-how much money are you willing to spend testing?
-how many ad designs do you want to test?
-how much money do you have for advertising this book, or series, this time around, in total?
If having to pay for testing as well as trying to get sales worries you; also test how cheaply you can get ad impressions. For my first round of ad testing in 2024; 7 USD was a sweet spot for epic fantasy add impressions of around 2k, on Amazon. For testing in 2026, on wide stores only; $5 wasn’t quite enough for the US ad, was excessive for Australia & Canada combined ad, and also inconclusive for the UK.
What Are You Testing?
Impressions and Countries Note: in the above second round of tests, I wanted lots of impressions, swiftly, to test my click through rating. Standard advice is to run your tests in the US (on Amazon, if your books are on Amazon). But with an ad I suspected would appeal more to an Aussie audience, and then out of sheer curiosity, I tested the same ad in the US, Australia and Canada (each was too small to test on wide stores solo) AND the UK, simultaneously.
Target Authors
On Bookbub, your ads aren’t pointed at all subscribers who get the newsletter. You can target ads to readers interested in specific authors. Authors with more readers (which means people who’ve clicked on their books, not followers), will get more impressions faster, so you might need to remove that author part way through the test, to test authors getting less impressions. I found authors with fewer readers (under 5,000) very worthwhile, as their click-through rating was far higher. That’s because my smaller authors were closer in subgenre and queer rep to my books than authors with 30-20k readers.
Secondly, if you’re turning authors on or off during an ad, or starting a new ad with different authors, AND you’ve changed you ad design; is it that those readers don’t like your book? Or is it that the design changes you made aren’t improving your click through rating?
Also: target yourself. Yes, even if you only have 100 ‘readers’ as recognised in Bookbub ads. I did that for one of my ads and the ad began with a 50% CTR, because the second reader who saw it clicked. Of course that dropped right off as more saw and didn’t click, but it proves you’re more likely to get clicks from your readers -however few- than anyone else’s.
Design Tests
Try to test ONLY target authors, OR design changes at once. You may even test things like teaser vs. review extract in two different designs. Then try changing the background image. Then try changing target authors. David Gaughran suggest only targeting one author at once.
But between writing niche books; queer and neurodivergent led, epic fantasy, and only testing wide stores; my audience was small. And with ADHD I was impatient, so I added as many as 10 authors per add, turning each off if they hit 800 impressions and less than 2 clicks. Then I turned them off at 400 impressions with less than two clicks.
Targeting
Not Wasting Money:
View Targeting Data Mid-Campaign
When I first ran campaigns, I didn’t realise that you can change your target authors, and target store links during a campaign. I thought I had to let the ad finish, then see what Click Through Ratio (CTR) each author got. Not so.
During a campaign;
1. Select the ad name on the left of the ‘live’ ads menu.
2. Then select ‘aggregate status’.
This will show you both the CTR for authors and, if you run ads on wide stores, for stores as well. That means that if an author or store is unperforming, having got enough impressions with too few clicks; you can cease targeting underperforming authors or stores mid-ad.
Not Wasting Money:
Switch Target Authors Mid-Ad
The most important thing to know about targeting your ads is how many impressions you want to result in how many clicks, to reach the click through ratio you’re aiming for. Note: you need to set your ads to ‘cost per impression’ to test this. David Gaughran suggests aiming for a CTR (click through rate) of 1% or higher before concluding an ad test has been ‘successful.’
For an ad graphic that still needs some editing, I’m looking to target authors whose readers are giving me at least 2 clicks per 400 impressions (which is only a CTR of 0.5%). That’s a small sample size, so I may continue targeting them until they hit 800.
If I’ve refined the ad design and am sure its just author targeting resulting in low clicks, I’ll remove a target author getting less than 3-4 clicks at 400 impressions.
Not Wasting Money:
Switching Stores Mid-Ad
Similarly, if you’re doing wide ads; monitor store impression and CTR. I got too few impressions to bother testing ads on Kobo, so I pulled back to targeting Apple, Barnes & Noble or ‘Other’; Itch and Direct Sales. Barnes & Noble got too low a CTR for a high number of impressions, so I dropped it and continued Apple targeting, for my single book sale. Itchio got half the CRT of Direct, so my trilogy bundle (which was exclusive to Itch and my direct store) targeted ‘direct’ only.
So if you’re doing wide ads, keep an eye on stores getting too few impressions to yield test data. And keep an eye on comparative CTR, so you aren’t paying for a thousand impressions that get zero clicks on any one store. (At 1,000 impressions, whether by store or author, you ideally want 10 clicks, to hit 1% CTR, or more.)
Wide Multi-National Targeting
Its possible that your readers will gravitate towards a particular store, and which store that is may vary by country. For example, the greatest percentage of my sales before selling via Bookbub ads were on Apple. For US ads I got the most impressions on Apple, Barnes & Noble and Itchio links. Apple got far more clicks and I suspect my sales data will confirm 2/7 of those clicks got sales (D2D is so slow to identify sales by store that its to connect this.) So my US ads for Round 2 testing only targeted Apple.
For my ad targeting Australia and Canada, there were so few impressions for Kobo and Apple that it wasn’t worth targeting either. Itchio got a couple of clicks at 500 impressions, but my direct store link got 6 clicks at 600 impressions; the coveted 1% CTR. So I only used my Direct Sales link, targeting readers who ‘have no store preference’, for Australia and Canada. (I know, Kobo began as Canadian but those were my book’s results!)
Target Authors and Multi National Targeting
Don’t assume your target authors outside the US will be the same as within the US. For Canada and Australia, within the genre of fantasy, I’m finding the audiences are so much smaller across the board that my target authors have anything from 1,000 to 40,000 readers. Whereas in the US, I’m getting the most clicks from authors with under 10,000 readers, the next best from 20-30,000. (I’m likely to cease targeting the later as their CTR is only 1/3 of what I’m seeking.)
Next Level Targeting
If you’ve got time and money; you can test which authors get more clicks AND on which store, AND in which country. I have no idea if target authors are likely to get more clicks in their own country, but as an Aussie, I suspect this would be the case in Australia.
Country Specific Appeal Ads
The standard advice I’ve read is to test your ads on the US market first, because its the biggest and toughest. An ad that works there is sure to do well elsewhere. But, if you’re not American and anything about your ads is likely to appeal to Australia, Canada or the UK in particular, I suggest testing in the likely-to-do-well country too. An ad that doesn’t do well enough in the US might for example do better when targeted at Australia and Canada. For example, this one of mine.
‘Atheist’ isn’t a word I anticipate resonating widely in the US, but in Australia it certainly would, as would ‘Aussie-er.’
Budget Note & Conclusion
If your budget is tight, especially if you haven’t experimented much with book graphics, teaser text etc on social media; do that first. If you worry about annoying your followers; post on different platforms, and or at different times of day. Even schedule it when you’re sleep, for parts of the world that aren’t 😉
Remember that nothing in paid advertising guarantees sales too. My 2026 tests got my ads CTR close to where I want it, but being on wide stores only, and writing fantasy with queer and neurodivergent main characters, I ran out of target authors and readers quickly. At most I got two sales from it. My main gain was refining my book graphics for social media pinned posts, my website and newsletter, and the beginning of great print outs for my table at bookfairs (which I’ll post about in 2027, as well as direct sales paid advertising!)
Good luck!
Related Reading
Bookbub Ads (ebook) by David Gaughran
Bookbub Ad Guide (a Bookbub page linking blogs by category of advice)
Crafting a Quality Pitch
Author Social Media
Becoming an Indie Author Part 2: Book Launch
Author Newsletters the Basics
