Juliet Clark presents a new product called Author PromoCast, which has great potential to transform book advertising like never before. In this episode, she explains how this guarantees around half a million impressions per month while requiring less time and effort than managing Amazon ads. Juliet also discusses the inclusive ad materials of this product, as well as how fiction authors could vastly benefit from using it.
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The Future Of Book Advertising: Explore The Benefits Of Author PromoCast
I’m going to tell you about a new product that we are offering for fiction and nonfiction authors that is a real game-changer out in the book marketing world. Before we get started, I want to remind you about our June event. We have our monthly training, which is free to everyone. In June 2024, we’re having Jared Rosen share book trailers. If you want to sign up for this and learn more about him, you can go to BAMagTraining.com. They’re usually on Friday mornings.
Jared’s going to talk about marketing magic with video book trailers, how to learn how to script a book trailer and create an emotionally engaging experience, and then also multiple ways that you can use that book trailer. This is something that’s visual. We’re seeing more and more video out there. It is a fun thing to do with your book. It’s a great teaser. It’s a great ad. There are all sorts of stuff you can do with it. For our June training, go to BAMagTraining.com, where you can register. As usual, we make it into an episode and put it over on YouTube as a training.
Presenting A Brand New Product: Author PromoCast
What I’m going to talk about is a new product called Author PromoCast. A group that I work with on podcasts has been testing PromoCast for at least a year or a year and a half. What it is, is ads that are placed on apps. There are over 1,000 different apps a month that your book will be exposed to, and there’s a guaranteed 500,000 impressions a month.
That means when someone opens a Newmax, CNN, or one of the thousand apps that this appears on, they’re going to see your book and be able to click and buy that book. To me, that is a fabulous way. It’s an untapped market. It’s cool, too, because the more and more people are listening to podcasts or the more they’re being exposed to new apps, this is a game-changer.
Results-wise, the company that did this ran ads for an author and his podcast and sold over 30,000 books. I don’t think you can dispute that there’s an actual return on investment here. We’re not saying you’re going to sell 30,000 books, but he’s been running these ads within PromoCast for about a year on different podcasts for different apps. It is a game-changer.
To tell you a little bit more about it, you’ll get 500,000 impressions a month that are guaranteed for your clips. That means your clip is going out to that many people. Also, typically, you’ll get about 400 to 600 clicks, which is about 15 to 20 a day, probably far more than you’re getting in other places. Here’s the thing that I love that you can’t see in a lot of places. You’ll have a dashboard where you can look at your analytics, so you’ll be able to tell that it’s working.
To me, this is amazing because books haven’t had this visibility before. We’ve been stuck with either Google ads that are super expensive or Amazon ads. Amazon ads can be even more expensive than this because you usually have to pay a company to set them up. I have a vendor I can send people to for fiction. It’s $500 a month plus the ad spend. You have to remember. Do you want $200 or $300? You have to spend quite a bit on Amazon to get good results.
Amazon ads can be more expensive than the Author PromoCast because you usually have to pay a company to set them up. Share on XThe other part of that is that, in my own company, we charge a $750 set-up, and you need $12 a day. When you extrapolate that out over the month as well, you’re looking at about a $300 ad spend. The beauty of Author PromoCast, which is what we’re calling it, is that it is a $500 a month flat fee, and the setup is included in that. When you first start out, we do require a 90-day minimum because we’re new. You’re new at it, and you may look at your analytics and say, “We need to adjust that ad,” and we’re happy to do that. There is no ad spend. It’s all set up, and it runs automatically.
How Does This Stack Up To Amazon Ads
You’re probably wondering how this stacks up to Amazon ads since that’s probably the biggest competition. You can run Facebook ads, but you don’t always have the control you have over there and the keywords you need. Let’s start with the basics of how I feel about Amazon. On Amazon, we can run ads in presale, which we can do with this as well. Both of them hit the ground running. One of the real successes of Amazon ads is that from the get-go, in the 48 hours after you upload that book, you can run those ads. That with both of them is about the same.
There are multiple ways to run your ads. Amazon has the advantage here because you can run your ad as a sponsored product. There are 3 or 4 different ways you can run the ads, depending on what you are looking for in book sales. With us, there’s only one. However, we do record three different ads, so there is some variety in that as well.
Ready-to-buy prospects are probably the biggest advantage of Amazon. The people on Amazon, for the most part, if they’re over in books and being served book ads, they are looking for books. It’s a ready-made prospect. They’re looking in a specific genre. When it comes to PromoCast, you’re being run across a lot of different apps. It’s a little bit more hit and miss, but I have to tell you that I buy a lot of stuff off of apps. A lot of times, I’ll see something on an app.
When I go to the Newsmax app, I buy books there all the time. If I see something that looks interesting that’s political, I’ll buy it there. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a particular genre when it’s on an app. If you are on a news app and you see a sci-fi book, great. You might buy it then and there. That’s probably the one advantage. You don’t have the ready-made prospects that Amazon has, but you do have a lot more impressions for the money, so it’s easier to find those prospects there.
The flip side of Amazon ads is that you have to spend a lot to get noticed. The beauty of PromoCast is you don’t have to spend that kind of money to be noticed. When you think about the $500 a month, which is the cheapest Amazon ad vendor that I have, versus the $500 flat fee that we charge, you don’t have the ad spend on top of that, so you don’t have to spend as much to get noticed.
There’s still competition for ad space, but in running through the apps, there’s not as much as there is on Amazon. On Amazon, they’re going to run those ads depending on how much space they have and on what kind of ads you choose. With PromoCast, they just run. You don’t have to worry about the competition for ad space.
Amazon ads require a lot of time and resources as well. If you’ve ever run an Amazon ad, you have to go put in the keywords, make the adjustments, and change up the ads if the analytics aren’t coming out the way you want. There’s a lot of time and effort that needs to be put in. That is why we charge $750 a month to do that, because there is so much time. We have to go in and adjust the ad, and then we have to look at the analytics again in a few days to see if they’re working. With PromoCast, you don’t need to do that at all. It is the setup, run with it, and let it go.
Also, with Amazon, I find that there’s way too much data. With these, you look and say, “I got X amount of impressions. I got X amount of clicks. Here are my book sales for the month. Is it profitable? Am I getting more books out of it?” There are a lot of pros here for Author PromoCast that Amazon does not have. It is an amazing product.
The Process Of Using Author PromoCast
What do you do? What is the process for this? Once we get into the queue, what we’re going to do is take your book and create three scripts for you. They are three fifteen-second scripts. You can either choose to record them yourself, or we have lots of voice-overs. The voice-over is included in it. I know that for the authors we have done already, they all wanted to record their own ads. If they have podcasts or a YouTube channel, those people are expecting to hear your voice, so it’s not a bad practice.
We run those, and then a graphic is created. The graphic is created by us. You decide where you want to drive traffic with that. We’ll have a book cover and anything else you want on there. We do have to keep them pretty clean. You might want to send people to Amazon. You might want to send people to a book landing page. However you choose to do it, that’s where we’re going to drive that traffic. You will be able to gauge what’s going on. We then turn that all over. Once we have those three items, the voiceover, the graphic ad, and where you want to drive traffic to, we’re off to the races.
Initially, you do have to buy a three-month package because not only do we need to set up, but we need to go in on the other side, and they make those adjustments for you. You don’t have to try to figure out what’s wrong here. They go in and look at it. We’re running the awareness, the nurture, and the click campaign in that three-month period. After that, you can go month to month on that as long as you tell us 30 days in advance so we can get it going and make sure it keeps going.
Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words
I’m excited about this project. I’m especially excited for fiction authors because Amazon is the only place you can get good traction for fiction. You have to remember that fiction, when you’re building a platform, is based a lot on your characters, getting people excited about those characters, and getting excited about the story. With a nonfiction author, you have so many different ways to sell books. You can be out there promoting via speaking, podcast tours, TV, radio, or whatever medium you choose. There are a lot of different avenues that fiction authors don’t have that you have.
If you are interested in finding out more about this, you can go over to AuthorPromoCast.com and check it out. There are buttons on there to click and schedule an appointment with me because I want to make sure it’s right for your book. Don’t automatically assume, “I want to do this and it’ll be okay.” We want to take a look at whether we can service the book correctly. We do have genres that do better than others. I might be able to communicate that to you as well. If you don’t want to go over to AuthorPromoCast.com, you can always jump on my calendar at ChatWithJuliet.com, and we’ll take a look if this product is for you. Thanks a lot. I’ll see you in the next episode.
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