Writing a successful Goodreads ad?

Interfaced

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Morning all,

So with the release of my debut novel last week, I've begun looking into paid advertising opportunities and decided to put a little bit down to test out an ad block on Goodreads. I'm interested in hearing from others about how best to word such a block to make it successful, or is it merely a numbers game and these kind of ads aren't too effective?

In the last five days or so the ad for When Winter Calls has received 9,811 impressions with just 2 clicks. My opening text for the ad was as follows:

(Cover of book)
When Winter Calls
Corporate utopias, neural
interfaces and future technology
come together in this sci-fi
action thriller. One for fans of
Philip K Dick!

I have just recently changed the title text to read 'What do we want to be?' as the title of the book is visible in the thumbnail image and I thought that something more evocative might prove a bigger draw. Will let you know if that makes much of a difference.

What do you think? How would you change the ad text, and have you had much success with Goodread ads in the past?

Thanks!
 

WriterBN

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I did GR ads for about a year and, in my opinion, it's very much a numbers game. The best suggestion I have to offer is to create multiple versions of your ad (including different images) and rotate through them.

The biggest drawback is that you're competing with larger, graphic-rich ads that are placed more prominently. They're only available to advertisers who want to spend thousands of dollars per month, which rules out many self-published authors.