Whoever said that writing is easy has clearly never written a book. Ditto when it comes to publishing. As much as we’d all love to believe that if you write it, they will come, things don’t seem to work that way. You actually have to court your readers by promoting what you’ve slaved over to create. One of the ways to do that involves online book advertising.

While traditional media advertising is usually prohibitively expensive, online book advertising can be remarkably affordable. On the other hand, you still have to invest in it, often at a time when your book hasn’t turned a profit. My longtime writing coach client, Barbara Hinske, bet on herself early on in her book-writing career. The gamble paid off, and she was eventually able to quit her job as an attorney. But not before operating in the red for a couple of years.

Here’s the deal. With an ad campaign that’s going well, it’s going to cost you a certain amount to get your book in front of readers who actually want to buy it. Now, if those readers like what they’ve read and you have a series, you start making back the cost of that customer acquisition book by book. That’s why you always—and only—want your online book advertising to feature the initial book in a series. Once you’ve hooked a reader, they’ll hopefully charge through as many books in the series as you’ve written.

You may even get them to try out another book series if you’ve written more than one. But only if it’s the same or a closely related genre. That was news to my writing coach client, Jeff Hutcheson.

Earlier this year, he decided to play with advertising his first cozy mystery, Going Barefoot. In the weeks that my associate, Keri-Rae Barnum, has been managing and monitoring his online book advertising campaign for that novel, his readership has continued to trend upward, and the number of pages read by Kindle Unlimited readers (more on that in an upcoming post) quadrupled in a single month. Once the series’ third novel, which he recently finished, comes out, I’m sure that growth curve will accelerate, especially because we will couple the new book’s release with a discount promotion on the first one to hook even more readers.

During one of our last Zoom conferences, I told Keri that Jeff was considering writing a sci-fi book next. “From a monetary perspective, you want to stick to the same genre,” she replied. “Give some thought to book #4 before pivoting. The series momentum is working in your favor.”