Can you pick the best book advertisement image?
When authors get serious about advertising their books, many quickly realize (to their surprise) that they have a ton of ideas for their ads.
But money is a finite resource for most of us.
So how do we know which of our ad ideas will sell more books than the others?
We don't want to waste money on ads that don't resonate with readers.
Should we just go with the idea we like best?
Our data from 800+ authors and businesses in 75+ industries suggest that in 95% of cases, that answer is a resounding "NO!"
This includes me − I'm only a little better than average (10% success rate instead of 5%) at predicting winners, and I've been doing this for a looooooooong time.
I'm going to show you a handful of book ad images, and I'll ask you to guess which one did the best job of driving profitable book sales.
Note: These ad images will be for thriller novels, but you shouldn't get the idea that this concept only works for thriller novels. It works for anything you're trying to sell, as long as there's a market for it.
Why pay attention to this? Because it can reduce the average cost of finding a new buyer for your books from over $50 per customer down to just $12 to $20.
For example, later in this article, I'm going to tell you about how a tech startup used this concept to make the Inc 5000 list.
But for now, I just want you to guess which of these images brought in over $24,600 in book sales in one month alone.
Ready?
Here are the images:
Which of these images is your favorite?
Which one earned $24,600 in book sales in a single month?
What is it about your chosen image that leads you to believe it was the one that performed best?
Ready to learn if you're right?
Here's the winning image:
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(drum roll, please)
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Were you surprised?
I was.
I really didn't like the image all that much.
I didn't expect that it would do very well.
(And this was not an amateur's opinion. I've spent millions of dollars advertising online since 2003.)
But my expert opinion was wrong.
And that's the whole point.
Lucky for me, I don't rely on my expert opinion to tell me what my market wants.
I ONLY rely on my market's ACTUAL preferences, which I discover through a process called "click testing."
