Відео

Covering alternative backgrounds in the next episode!

Did a designer make it for you? If so, they should be able to provide the cover without text quite easily. If that's not an option, you must get creative. You might notice that in some of these designs, I could have easily used the actual cover as the background as well, as I've zoomed in on the part without any text - that's option #1, and one I've used quite a bit in these situations. Option #2 is to use something else for your background, like a block of colour, perhaps with a design or a pattern to break it up, or a stock photo. We'll be covering that in future episodes because not all cover designs lend themselves to being good backgrounds anyway!

@@DavidGaughran Thanks. The cover in question was done by a designer in 2018 and I don't remember who I hired. I'll keep an eye out for your future episodes for ideas.

Plan to cover that in the next episode - I used to use those a lot, but not as much these days, but I do still do it occasionally.

Definitely talking more about fonts in the next episode

Simply ask your cover designer for the cover art without lettering - then upload it into Canva with your cover.

@@DavidGaughran: Ah, thanks, I see. However, I AM my cover designer. 😂 I thought you were getting hold of other people's designs.

We will talk about that in the next episode, but as I quickly touched on here, it's not essential to have a genre-focused review quote, that's just my personal preference - especially when the niche isn't immediately obvious as it helps dial that in for the reader. But you can do something else too - a tagline is often great (especially if it helps square the genre), or any kind of positive review quote can work well too, or any other form of social proof (like an award, bestseller status, etc.), or a call to action as well. Some designs might not need or want a banner like that, but you have options if going that direction, even without suitable review quotes.

Aha, it does indeed. I would probably walk that back before finalizing. And happy to hear from an actual designer! When I started out advertising on Facebook, I commissioned all my ad images - but that's not really practical, especially if you want to test variations etc. So I began asking my cover designers to provide "blank" graphics where I could drop in price tags and buttons. And then it was a short step from that to actually taking the cover art and trying to compose a not-terrible design from that. Thanks for tolerating my amateur stumbling. I'm sure there were plenty of eyeroll moments for any pro there, but the central idea is to take this lovingly designed book covers and really make them shine in our ads... instead of butchering all that lovely work, which happens all too frequently.

@@DavidGaughran Not at all, you gave some very solid design advice that I will be implementing for my very first BookBub ad.

I'll have an updated tutorial soon but you can still change placements - and switch off almost all of the AI/Advantage stuff. The only one really forced is what used to be called Detailed Targeting Expansion, but has now been rebranded as Advantage, like everything else. For Placements, look for a very subtle blue-underlined link saying "Edit" - which only appears when you hover over the whitespace to the right of Advantage Placements on the Ad Set level. It can be presented a little differently depending on your browser/device, so hunt around for it - it is definitely there.

@@DavidGaughran You are an absolute genius! I was on the ad level and couldn't figure out why all I could do was edit the ad image and not the placement. There is a lot of repetitive uses of phrase which are different on different pages which just confuses me lol.

@@jonelectronics510 I think the confusion is a feature not a bug. All this stuff used to be quite differentiated, and much of it was ignored by experienced advertisers (because they tried it and saw little value in it, especially for things like Traffic campaigns). So Facebook started defaulting to it, and then kinda forcing it, and then really hiding the options to turn it off - while rebranding it all as "Advantage" and "AI" and really really pushing it in sales calls to clients and messaging on site. Instead of, you know, fixing it so it doesn't work so poorly. Ah, tech.

@@DavidGaughran they do seem desperate to handle it all for you. Now they encourage a/b testing between your chosen settings and their AI recommended settings to prove how much you should trust them to manage everything for you!

You can indeed! I... did not know that lol.

@@DavidGaughran 👍 Glad it worked! Regarding making the currency sign smaller, depending on how granular they typography controls are in Canva, you might be able to change the font size and baseline height just by highlighting the currency sign. Might save some time.

@@LFGabel Yeah you can do that, but I often find it a little quicker just grabbing the corner of the box and judging it by eye.

We'll get more into different Canva features in future episodes - and some more Facebook tips. I hope this is a nice backdoor way of learning both Facebook and Canva.

Don't worry too much about the prices I see. Keep in mind that different customers see different things. I see the US price, converted into Euros, with local sales tax added (which can be different in each European country). Also, I am in Europe but my Kindle is attached to the US Kindle Store because I originally purchased a Kindle back in 2011 when Irish customers were served by the US store. These days, Irish customers are served by the UK Kindle Store. There are lots of similar quirks leading to different international groups seeing different prices for your books... in the US Kindle Store. That's all a sideshow though, the only thing you need to think about here, perhaps, is making your European prices neat in the local Kindle Stores in Europe - although local sales tax can mess with that too! Just make sure you are advertising correct prices in any local markets - would be the only big thing here, I guess.

You did GREAT! Thank you. I've had Canva pro forever and just learned about the pipette feature. LoL Keep the tutorials coming, please :^)

I generally run Traffic ads to Amazon but not always.

*bleeps in code*

Because I'm a dope!

Check the description for any links I mentioned (several of them are on that 12 Free Design tools post on my site linked to above)

Do you mean where do you put a CTA button on the ad, or how you link it to Amazon on Facebook?

I have so many different color picker tools and wheels - I had to look outside Canva a few years ago because they didn't have those features. Now Canva has so many features I don't know half of them. But the external tools are still useful - sometimes better!

I find Canva's a bit funky sometimes. Maybe this is because I got used to using external tools for color picking, color matching, background removal, and then Canva (helpfully) incorporated all those things over the last few years (some in Pro, some in free), but I still often prefer the outside tools. Plus I'm trying not to use the Pro features so much so anyone can follow along on the free plan. Maybe I should play around with both tools in an upcoming episode and show some differences.

how very dare you

I'm not done with it, I reckon. Think I'll be revisiting it next time for one very quick tweak...

I find that if you don't use the book cover, you often have higher CTR but far lower conversion - and I suspect that is because you get a lot of clickers who don't realize it's an ad for a book. When I use a book cover image, I usually get lower CTR but might higher conversion, which works out better. But feel free to test both yourself - just make sure that you factor in conversion.

@@DavidGaughran Thank you for explaining - I will give it a try. And thanks for showing us how to create these ads. Your step-by-step video is very helpful.

I'm not in KU, I but books. They are not free.

Absolutely - you will be targeting lots and lots of readers who don't use KU. There's no KU targeting option on Facebook and I strongly doubt there ever will be, so this is still valuable to include.

I think it's fair game once it is out there publicly. Although if I was going to start plastering someone's name everywhere, rather than a couple of their words, I'd probably message them first.

I was so excited when I saw your cover!

@@EmmaBennetAuthor Me too :)