I look back at my first tries at designing a Bookbub ad for Driftless Spirits and cringe. (If you really want to see, there are some in this post from two months ago.) I’m slowly learning how to make better graphics, what “marketing tricks” are best practices, and how to find comparable authors to use in targeting strategies.

This post is mostly for me to mark my progress and record some links that others might find useful. I hope it gives a few authors a leg up and some tools to try.

Bookbub ads are 300×250 pixels. They are displayed on their website and in their emails. You win placement either in cost-per-click (CPC) bidding or paying a cost-per-thousand (CPM) placements amount. I am using CPC because I explicitly want to know if my ad looks good enough to get a click. Also, a click might mean a sale, so I might make up the cost (or lose less money on average).

Here’s my best ad so far for Tangled Roots:

I’m not using AI to generate my ads. I use Paint.NET as my graphics program. I do use AI to get advice on design though. I make a draft, upload it and ask “How would you improve this Bookbub ad?” It gives me advice on fonts, readability, visual balance, and generally hammers me on my call-to-action buttons. I’m terrible at designing the buttons to look “tactile.”

The nice thing about the Tangled Roots ad is that the background image of the cover made for a very good place to zoom in on (the moon area) for font placement. Although I tried a few variations, I couldn’t come up with the same “zoom in the cover” layout for Driftless Spirits. The optimal ad for Book 1 is still very much a work in progress:

The glossy ereader didn’t make a lot of sense here so I used the flat book cover with a drop shadow. I thought about using the 3D paperback mockup but that seems like false advertising because only the ebook is 99 cents. Anyway, I’ll have to ponder this ad’s design a bit yet.

I do think overall my artwork is finally looking pretty good. After artwork comes the even harder part of ad targeting. In Bookbub, you can target by genre, comparable authors, or both. They highly recommend both and I agree. If you target only by genre, you get no information back on which authors in that genre your clickers think you are like. Thus, targeting by genre is a kitchen sink approach with no information in return. If you target only by author, that’s fine unless you pick authors who write in multiple genres, some of which don’t match your book. The combination of “readers of these authors in only these genres” seems best.

Of course, there are thousands upon thousands of authors out there. Finding authors whose readers might like my series has been the hardest part. I have read blog posts about authors testing “comp authors” one at a time, running hundreds of Bookbub ads at once. I am in awe of these people but I’m just not there yet.

Here are three ways to find comparable authors whose readers might like your book:

Bookbub Itself

Of course, books on Bookbub are organized by category. However, the trick to finding “authors like you” is to not browse by category. Rather, go to their base search page. From here, select a basic category and then tunnel into available tags. For example, I select “Mysteries,” “Supernatural Suspense,” “Small Town,” and “Women Sleuth” and that narrows down the listings to 103 books. Adding “Cozy Mysteries” narrows that to 85. This is a reasonable number to sort through, looking for covers that look like mine or themes to include (e.g., ghosts) or exclude (e.g., witches). I made a shortlist of authors from the books that looked most comparable to mine.

Your Own Sales

This is good advice if you actually have enough sales to use it. Most retailer sites have a “Customers who bought this also bought…” section. You can browse your own sales pages to find what else your readers read and consider those authors reasonable comps for a Bookbub ad.

Author Recommendation Tools (Online)

Author recommendation tools help readers find authors who are like authors they already read. As an example, the Literature Map tool asks you for an author and gives you a visual representation of how close other authors are to them. The more people like both authors in a pair, the closer they will appear on the map. It’s a handy tool for readers to ask “I really like reading Author X, who else is like them?” That makes it a handy tool for finding comparable authors for ads if you know one author whose readers are responding to your graphic.

For example, if I type in “Angie Fox” (author of the Southern Ghost Hunter Mysteries series), I get this map:

Each name in the map is interactive and can be clicked on to explore further. It’s an interesting social experiment, really, being built over time by real readers. As an author looking for comps, you might as well take advantage!