Answer: Yes.

Click testing is responsible for $200M per year in extra revenue across a ton of different industries, and it's also responsible for a ton of book sales.

Real talk:

Nothing and nobody can possibly guarantee that you'll make a dime as an author. If it were possible to predict success in advance, then publishers, venture capitalists, and startup founders would not have that dismal 90% failure rate they're famous for. 

However, click testing is all about understanding your market, which unlocks unlimited possibilities.

AJ Vanderhorst sold 115,728 books last year. You can read more about it here.

Othniel Dory and his team sold over 250,000 copies of their children's books from their Shopify store last year. You can see Othniel's interview here. 

Ben & Patty Wallace reached their first five-figure month (that's over $10,000 in book sales), then doubled it to reach $20,000 in the next couple of months. Patty gives an in-depth account of their experience here.

Britt & Laurie-Anne used Click Testing to gain clarity on what their market really wanted from them. They used this knowledge to grow their business to $400,000 in monthly revenue, and you can read more about it here.

Gordon Carroll retired early from the police force on the strength of his book sales, and has been a member of our community for years. He talks about his experience on this page as well.

Lee Savino and writing partner Renee Rose write wildly popular "bad-boy romance" novels. They grew tired of only making money whenever they launched a new book, so they used Click Testing (in conjunction with our direct sales program) to generate seven figures in backlist sales last year. Lee talks about it with me in an upcoming episode of her podcast (along with Russell Nohelty).

Here's some more name-dropping:

David Chesson (Kindlepreneur founder), Joanna Penn (author, podcaster, indie publishing luminary, and the force behind The Creative Penn), Pierre Jeanty (million-selling poet and entrepreneur), Rachel Hanna (multi-million-dollar-per-year author), Marie Force (multi-million-dollar-per-year author), Alana Terry (writing coach and bestselling novelist), Naomi Rawlings (million-dollar earner), David Doepker (bestselling author, entrepreneur, and podcaster), Lydia Sherrer (million-dollar earner), AJ Vanderhorst (sold 115,728 books last year), Monica Leonelle and Russell Nohelty (bestselling authors and book marketing coaches), Lee Savino (million-dollar-per-year author), Diane Capri (of the Chasing Reacher series), LT Ryan (million-dollar-per-year author) and many more highly successful independent authors and entrepreneurs are clients and affiliates of mine.

And as a brief refresher (see this article for more detail), here are the six market tests we recommend you perform to produce a gaggle of high-converting book ads:

Test 1: Motivations & Taglines

If your work solves problems for people, you'll need to discover what they're truly thinking and worrying about as it relates to your area of expertise. This is the "motivation" test, in our problem solver testing track inside Click Testing for Authors.

If you write stories (novels, short fiction, serial fiction, or story-based nonfiction books akin to Michael Lewis's work), then you'll follow our storyteller testing track. You'll test tagline ideas (eg, "Mad Max meets Monty Python," which is Ben Wallace's series tagline) to help sell your book or series.

Test 2: Transformations & Headlines

Problem Solvers will need to gain clarity on what their market really wants. This is expressed in the form of a "transformation statement," such as "Discover how to improve your health markers through activities you actually enjoy."

Storytellers will need to test a bunch of advertisement headline candidates to discover which ones do the best job of drawing eager fans to their book page, signup page, special offer, and/or sales page.

Test 3: Testimonials

Storytellers and Problem Solvers will both test their reader / customer reviews in Test 3 to discover which reviews from prior customers do the best job of attracting new customers to try your books.

Test 4: Images

Our brains process and understand pictures up to 60,000 times faster than text. This is why images are the most powerful part of our advertisement.

But not all images are created equal, and not all clicks result in purchases (see the article here for more on the difference between "Curiosity" and "Purchase Intent"), so we have a number of nuanced requirements for our images. I cover those requirements in detail inside of Click Testing for Authors.

Test 5: Expanded Text (or "Story") Test

Many kinds of ads that we can run on Facebook and Instagram have space for the "primary text" portion of our ads. 

Readers often read this section in its entirety, and what we write in this section often makes the difference when a potential customer is deciding whether to buy our books.

So, just like with everything else we put in front of our customers, we test our ideas to see which ones work best for our buyers.

This is the first test in which each of our test variants will be complete advertisements, rather than individual ad elements that we're testing in isolation.

Test 6: Stress Test

Our testing produces high-fidelity results very quickly, and we de-risk those results by incorporating them in subsequent tests as we work our way through the click testing process.

But the math predicts － and in real-life we actually see － that some "false positives" inevitably sneak through.

These are ads that look like winning ads, but are really NOT winners, and should really NOT be shown to your readers at scale.

To make sure we weed out these "false positives," we do a final test called the Stress Test. Those ads that survive the stress test are deserving of your advertising dollar!

But how do we actually execute these tests?

I'm glad you asked :).

Let's walk through an example Headline Test to give you a sense of how it really works.

Most of us jot down a number of headline ideas as we brainstorm how best to present our work to buyers.

This is excellent.

Maybe our brainstorming session produces headline ideas like this:

(and please note that we use REAL reader reviews, not fakes!!)

• "I died!?" It's been a tough week for our heroine. Read now!
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Best writing in decades. Move over, Lee Child!"
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "My all-time favorite thriller author."
• Is Sam Jameson in love with a traitor? Read now!
• International bestseller: Where do you run when the good guys want you dead?
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Best new spy thriller novel of the year!"
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Sam is my new favorite spy novel heroine!"
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "SO intense! I read it in one sitting!"
• "It's 5AM and I just stayed up all night reading."
• ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "LOVE LOVE LOVE these thrillers 📗📕!"

Also note that we've included very specific headline elements to get readers excited to buy books, and to discourage non-readers from clicking on our ads. I'll teach you how we do this if you decide to enroll in Click Testing for Authors.

Lots of authors brainstorm ideas for their headlines like we've done above, which is great.

And then, most authors make a very costly mistake.

They pick their personal favorite.

We've learned over and over again through our years of testing that in 95% of cases, authors and entrepreneurs pick the wrong ad elements.

They show things to readers that readers don't care about.

What we do differently in our author community is this:

We let potential customers in our market tell us which headlines they like best.

Your mind might immediately say "It's a survey!"

But it's definitely not a survey, because surveys don't work for this purpose.

(I know you might have been told different. But I'm a data nerd, and the numbers are clear on this. Surveys don't work to validate market fit, for reasons which are very interesting but beyond the scope of this article.)

So here's what we do instead. 

The way click testing works is that we place our ideas in front of random customers in our market.

We do this by using an advertisement, which we design in a very specific way.

The way we present each individual idea (for example, each one of the headline ideas we brainstormed above) is exactly the same for every one of our ideas.

When there's only one element that's different between all of our test ads, we can have confidence that the differences in their testing performance are due to the relative quality of the test ideas themselves.

This is called "isolating variables," which is critical to producing valid and actionable information about our market's desires.

We'll present each of the ten ideas we brainstormed above by placing it into its own specially-designed advertisement to be shown to readers in our genre on Facebook and Instagram.

The ideas that random readers in our genre like the most will generate the most clicks.

Meta reports the number of clicks to us, and if we have followed all of the rules that are designed to ensure that we don't fool ourselves...

The readers in our market will rank-order our headline ideas from best to worst. They won't know they're doing us this amazing kindness, because they're just going about their business, following their interests.

And the information we receive from them is truly priceless.

This information comes in the form of clicks on our test ads.

More clicks = more votes.

We show each of the ads in our experiment to a certain number of potential customers, so that each one of our ideas gets roughly the same opportunity to get "votes" (clicks) from readers.

And when each of our ideas has received the required number of opportunities, it's time to evaluate the results of our experiment.

At the end of our experiment in which we floated ten of our best headline ideas past a random sampling of readers in our market...

And in which those random readers in our genre "voted" (with their clicks) on just how cool and exciting each of our ideas felt to them...

We need a foolproof way to process, understand, and apply what we've just learned.

We're not really asking the question, "Which of these ideas are best?"

Because that question assumes that our best idea among this tiny little batch of ten ideas is actually good enough to use at scale. This isn't a valid assumption.

Instead, what we're really asking is this:

Are any of these headlines worthy of my market?

Which implies that we have objective criteria.

Which we definitely do, and I share all of those numbers with you, for both Storytellers and Problem Solvers, inside of Click Testing for Authors.

In this example, here's how my market actually ranked those headline ideas from above (yes, our hypothetical example isn't merely hypothetical :).

1. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Best writing in decades. Move over, Lee Child!"
2. "It's 5AM and I just stayed up all night reading."
3. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "SO intense! I read it in one sitting!"
4. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "My all-time favorite thriller author."
5. Is Sam Jameson in love with a traitor? Read now!
6. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Sam is my new favorite spy novel heroine!"
7. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "LOVE LOVE LOVE these thrillers 📗📕!"
8. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Best new spy thriller novel of the year!"
9. "I died!?" It's been a tough week for our heroine. Read now!
10. International bestseller: Where do you run when the good guys want you dead?

But remember, while the relative ranking is interesting, it's only useful to us if we know whether or not our best idea(s) are good enough.

So here's what my list of headline ideas looked like after I applied our click testing success criteria. Again, I'll tell you all about those criteria inside of Click Testing for Authors.

Headline "variants" (ideas) that met or exceeded our benchmark are highlighted in green. Those that didn't make the cut are red.

My market spoke clearly to me, and here's what they said:

1. "It's 5AM and I just stayed up all night reading."
2. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "SO intense! I read it in one sitting!"
3. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "My all-time favorite thriller author."
4. Is Sam Jameson in love with a traitor? Read now!
5. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Sam is my new favorite spy novel heroine!"
6. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "LOVE LOVE LOVE these thrillers 📗📕!"
7. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ "Best new spy thriller novel of the year!"
8. "I died!?" It's been a tough week for our heroine. Read now!
9. International bestseller: Where do you run when the good guys want you dead?

It's now mathematically clear which headlines are worth using in our growth ad!

The headline example above (and I know you have a thousand questions about the details, but I want you to stay focused on the concepts right now) shows you how we determine if any of our book advertisement ideas are likely to be profitable.

These ideas are used in various places, and in various ways, as we assemble the "Growth Ad" that we'll use to attract readers by the thousands to check out our books.

Those winning headlines from above will be called to serve as a text overlay atop our ad image, or as the ad headline itself, or maybe as a header in the primary text.

(Again, we cover this in thorough but digestible detail inside the CTA program).

And as the six click tests progress, you'll be building and expanding on your previous winning elements.

You'll be adding new "all star" book ad components to your growth ad with each subsequent test.

By the end of the six tests, you'll have a stress-tested book advertisement composed entirely of all-star ideas.

Your ad will have no weak spots.

And this process is how veteran Facebook and Instagram advertisers like author and coach Alana Terry ($94,000 in top line revenue in a single month), who were already experts at running book ads...

were able to cut their advertising expenses by up to half (!!!).

Other important things you should know:

* You can email us with your questions at any time.

Just click "reply" to this message, or any of the messages you receive from me.

You'll get real answers. Really. I'm known for turning people away when I don't think I can help them.

* I sell business and marketing education for authors.

I've spent 21 years in digital commerce, and I invented the marketing process behind $25M+ per year in independent author royalties.

I started the "Direct Sales movement" after Amazon mistreated me in 2017, and since then, our business and marketing programs have produced the highest per-capita author earnings of any author training system in the English-speaking world.

Roughly 70% of the authors in this Kindlepreneur survey on direct sales are my clients, including 8 of the top 10 earners.

* This has been my day job for years.

I've served 1,142 authors and counting in my courses, have been a guest on dozens of podcasts (this is a good one), sold over $1M worth of my trashy spy thrillers through my own web stores, spoken at conferences, and coached hundreds of authors and entrepreneurs on over 450 hours of live Zoom coaching calls since 2018. I'm not just mailing this in, as they used to say.

David Chesson (Kindlepreneur founder), Joanna Penn (author, podcaster, indie publishing luminary, and the force behind The Creative Penn), Pierre Jeanty (million-selling poet and entrepreneur), Rachel Hanna (multi-million-dollar-per-year author), Marie Force (multi-million-dollar-per-year author), Alana Terry (writing coach and bestselling novelist), Naomi Rawlings (million-dollar earner), David Doepker (bestselling author, entrepreneur, and podcaster), Lydia Sherrer (million-dollar earner), AJ Vanderhorst (sold 115,728 books last year), Monica Leonelle and Russell Nohelty (bestselling authors and book marketing coaches), Lee Savino (million-dollar-per-year author), Diane Capri (of the Chasing Reacher series), LT Ryan (million-dollar-per-year author) and many more highly successful independent authors and entrepreneurs are clients and affiliates of mine.

I'm also a Hertz Fellow and retired USAF officer and F-16 pilot (2 x Distinguished Flying Crosses and 4 x Air Medals, honored as the 2006 Top USAF Instructor Pilot in the United States).

But none of that guarantees that you're going to sell any books. This is a tough business, and your products have to be on point. Which brings me to the next important thing to know:

* Brilliant marketing won't sell crappy books.

Your success ultimately depends on the quality (as judged by the only people whose opinions matter: your market) and quantity of your books.

Market testing can help you advertise your existing titles in the best way to reach your ideal readers...

And it can help you write better titles in the future...

And fix your existing titles so readers enjoy them more...

But there isn't enough lipstick in the universe to turn a pig into a unicorn. :)

* There is a six-day deadline to enroll in Click Testing for Authors.

Deadlines help your prospective customers clarify their priorities. This deadline will help you clarify your current priorities for your life and career.

The deadline also keeps our program size manageable, which helps us stay (reasonably) sane, plan our personnel costs, and preserve sufficient bandwidth to respond to your questions and help you succeed.

It also ensures that most of our sales occur within the 7-day Meta ads attribution window. This ensures that our ads perform more efficiently and profitably, so we can charge you less money to help you achieve your goals and dreams.

(This is one of those details you didn't know you needed to know, because you'll need to use a similar strategy if you ultimately decide to sell directly to your readers).

Here's the countdown timer:

* You probably won't get rich next month.

But you're not an idiot. You knew that already, no matter what those sketchy publishers promised you.

Being a professional author is an actual profession. You're going to have to be a professional about it.

That means relentless effort over a period of years.

The wealthiest authors I know are also the hardest-working authors I know.

Weird, right? :)

But we'll help ensure you're not wasting your time, energy, effort, and money.

And if you've already written professional-caliber books that fit your market's needs and desires...

We'll help you find the rocket fuel your book marketing has been missing. 

* You should definitely consider watching the video.

But if you'd rather not, you can view the program details here.

To your success,

Steve

There are three ways you can learn more about how to successfully implement these six critical book advertising principles.

The most thorough way is to watch the brief webinar I put together for you.

I invested over a hundred hours to ensure that this video is fast-paced, entertaining, informative, and full of examples of how authors in many different genres have completely changed their lives and careers using our process.

If webinars aren't your thing (no judgment :), you can also check out the Click Testing for Authors enrollment information page.

You'll see details about the program contents and delivery, customer results, and payment plan options. 

We've also put together a page full of unedited, unabridged video interviews and reviews from our authors.

We asked them to help you decide if our program and process are legitimate, professional, useful, and effective.

I've never watched these videos, because they were meant for you. So I don't actually know what advice these authors might have for you, but I am confident that they have your best interest at heart.