Wrong Stuff

The nice thing about running ads on BookBub is you can find what works and what doesn’t. Usually in pretty short order. I’ve been running ads for the past few months targeted directly at readers in the UK. In most cases, it’s the same ad I’ve run in the US, Canada, and Australia, but the price in the ad shows pounds instead of dollars. The ads have been very successful, at least until this week. The ad shows the front cover of First, with the ad text reading, “The Right Stuff meets The Martian.” Seems decent enough, right? Until I got zero clicks over the past three days on that ad in the UK. Which made me realize, duh, that The Right Stuff probably doesn’t resonate there the way it does in the US. It’s a story of the first astronauts, the pioneering spirit, the in-your-face cockiness of those early test pilots. I’m sure there are people in the UK who appreciate that book by Tom Wolfe, but apparently not a lot of them. I get it. So, today I changed the ad to one that’s worked previously. We’ll see how it goes.