In this week's episode, I share five tips for getting the most out of Bookbub Ads.

This coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Wizard-Thief, Book #2 in the Half-Elven series, (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store:

THIEF50

The coupon code is valid through March 30, 2026.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates

Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 295 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March 19th, 2026, and today we're looking at five tips for setting up BookBub ads for indie authors. We will also take a look at my current writing projects and do Coupon of the Week.

So let's start off with Coupon of the Week. This week's coupon code will get you 50% off the audiobook of Wizard-Thief, Book Two in the Half-Elven Thief series (as excellently narrated by Leanne Woodward) at my Payhip store. That code is THIEF50. As always, you'll be able to see the coupon code and link to the Payhip store in my show notes. This coupon code will be valid until March 30th, 2026 so if you need a new audiobook this winter, we have got you covered.

Now let's have an update on current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects. Progress has not been as fast on Blade of Wraiths as I would have liked just because I've had so much stuff in real life that has taken priority lately. I'm still at 73,000 words, which puts me on Chapter 12 of 21 in my outline, so I'm over halfway through the rough draft. As has often been the case recently, the final draft will have more chapters than the rough draft because I tend to write longer chapters but the readers prefer shorter chapters, so I will split the longer chapters into shorter chapters. The final draft will probably have around 30, maybe 35 chapters, depending on how I split things up. But based on my outline, I am over the halfway point, so that is a good feeling. I am also 8,000 words into Dragon-Mage, which will be the sixth book of the Half-Elven Thief series with Rivah. I'm hoping I can get, despite delays, I'm hoping I can get Blade of Wraiths out in April and Dragon-Mage out in May, but we will see how the rest of this month goes.

In audiobook news, Blade of Storms has finished recording (by Brad Wills), and it's a great audiobook. I'm looking forward to sharing it with you all. Currently, as of this recording, it is on Payhip, Google Play, and Kobo, but it should be showing up on the other audiobook stores before too much longer. Since Coupon of the Week was for Wizard-Thief, it's a good time to mention that Leanne Woodward is currently recording the fifth book in the series as an audiobook, Wizard-Assassin. We hope to have that out sometime in April, if all goes well. So that's where I'm at with my current writing, publishing, and audiobook projects.

00:02:33 Main Topic of the Week: BookBub Ads For Indie Authors

Now let's move on to our main topic this week, five tips for setting up BookBub ads for indie authors. Lately, I have been doing a lot more with BookBub ads than I have in the past because as I've mentioned before on the show, Facebook ads have declined in effectiveness and quality a great deal because there's so much AI slop on the platform and because Meta insists on putting the AI slop into the targeting of the ads, which makes them much, much less effective. Despite all the testing I've done since I stopped using Facebook ads in October, I have not gotten good results. I stopped using Facebook ads most of the time in October. I still occasionally do boosted posts for things like book announcements and maybe audiobook announcements, but the traditional targeted ad campaigns have become so much less effective with the Advantage Plus targeting that Meta uses.

The idea behind that is that it bases the targeting off the ad off the text you put in the ad as opposed to letting you manually select targets. In theory, this sounds good. In practice, the targeting is just not good and doesn't work. So I've mostly stopped using Facebook ads and have switched more efforts to BookBub ads and Amazon ads, which is why we are talking about this now.

So to start off, what are BookBub ads? BookBub is a book newsletter service that people sign up to receive in their email inbox. They can pick which categories they receive in the newsletter, such as romance, fantasy, science fiction, nonfiction, and so forth. The newsletter itself focuses on book deals or new releases and the bottom of each one has a small ad space that people can make a bid to be featured on.

Unlike Facebook ads, for example, you're directly reaching an audience that wants ads about discounted books and are eager to learn about new releases and good deals, but let's be honest, mostly good deals. BookBub ads are a separate entity from BookBub Featured Deals. Anyone can make regular BookBub ads without being accepted like you have to for a Featured Deal. I'm not going to talk about the process of getting a Featured Deal in this episode, although I have been able to get them several times.

Many people feel like BookBub ads aren't as effective as they once were, but I found that a good creative, the right targeting, and the right price can really make a big difference in how well an ad campaign does. For example, January when I set up this episode was the last month I had complete data for and for January, my four BookBub campaigns averaged a 2.89% click-through rate (with the highest one actually having a 4.2% click-through rate). For reference, BookBub has said that they consider 1.5 to 2% to be a good click-through rates on their platform.

So with that in mind, here are a few things I've learned from my time doing BookBub ads.

#1: Try Amazon ads first. I would recommend getting familiar with Amazon ads first before starting to use BookBub ads. Amazon ads are more forgiving. It's harder to overspend on them, and sometimes it feels like it's hard to get Amazon ads to spend at all. Amazon ads will give you important data on similar books and authors (often called comps) that you can use to build your BookBub ad campaigns when you do start them. It's also easier to get clicks on Amazon ads than BookBub ads. I recommend using both your Amazon ad and "Also Bought" data to make a list of at least 10 authors to use to target your BookBub ads, although you will probably not use all 10 in the same ad campaign.

When you're choosing authors to target in your BookBub ads, you should also limit by genre as well, since many of your comp authors will write in multiple genres. Using myself as an example, I write fantasy, science fiction, and nonfiction books. Limiting by genre alone for your ads is too broad of a target, but the combination of similar authors and the right genre should narrow it down enough. BookBub currently provides a little too broad or too narrow feature on the page to help you find the right balance.

#2: Get your pricing right. It must be a good deal. Your book needs to be on sale. The BookBub audience are first and foremost deal seekers. The most successful campaigns will feature either free or $0.99 books, but anything under $2.99 is the right price range. Do not advertise regular price books through BookBub ads, especially if the price is something like $9.99 or even above, even if the price at $9.99 is actually a good discount, like it's a cookbook or a technical manual, which tend to be more expensive. BookBub readers aren't very likely to be excited about that. This audience may even be annoyed to see books at those higher prices, even if it is a new release or a discount over the normal price.

If your book is regular price but it is available in Kindle Unlimited, it's probably best to leave out the price information in your ad and focus exclusively on putting the Kindle Unlimited logo or language prominently in the creative. Obviously you want to limit your ads for this exclusively to Amazon. Many BookBub subscribers have Kindle Unlimited subscriptions so for those readers, that is even more of a draw to them as a discount would be since they can read the book at no additional cost to them since they already paid for their Kindle Unlimited subscription that month.

#3: Try one ebook site for each campaign. Run your first campaign focusing on just one ebook site instead of running all of them at once in a campaign. For most people, that means picking Amazon or their home country's biggest ebook site. Limiting each campaign to just one ebook site will show you what platforms are the most effective for your ads and let you focus on how the clicks impact actual sales.

#4: Don't go crazy on your bids. It doesn't make sense to make aggressive bids until you feel like you have your comps dialed in. Ignore the suggested amounts that BookBub provides and start small. Again, limiting to just one ebook site for each campaign is also a way to limit how much of the campaign budget gets spent, although it may still spend the full amount, especially if you've chosen Amazon.

#5: Keep your campaigns short. People get tired of seeing the same ads, so it doesn't make sense to run a campaign for months on end. Limit each campaign to a bit less than a week. For myself, it's usually about four days that I'll run a BookBub ad and you'll generally see the best results on the first two days, usually the best results on the second day, and then diminishing returns but still decent on days three and four, and after that, it kind of flatlines. So I've found that generally, at least for my books, four days is about the best.

Now we're going to talk about a slightly different topic, creating the creative for the image, which is the biggest part of the BookBub ad. First up, what do we mean by a creative? BookBub uses the term creative to describe th...