Our Targeted Online Advertising Service

In Autumn 2024 we launched our Targeted Online Advertising service, an innovative offering designed to help authors increase visibility of their title using AI-generated digital advertisements on Google, Facebook, and Instagram, to a highly targeted audience of potential readers. 

In partnership with Shimmr AI, we have been boosting the online presence of a variety of titles since launching the service, and between Autumn 2024 and Autumn 2025 we saw: 

We were thrilled with these results as it meant that potential readers engaged with our books' adverts and were interested enough to click through to retailers’ sites over 24,000 times, a huge number of readers that may have otherwise not been aware of our titles. We can’t wait to see these figures grow even further!

How It Works 

The AI engine scans a digital copy of your book/ebook and generates imagery, taglines and descriptions that it will use to promote it on Google, Facebook and Instagram. Neither Troubador nor the author has input on the imagery or text used on these adverts.

Once the scanning process is completed, the file is removed from the platform to ensure the author’s copyright remains intact. The content of your book is not used to train AI, it is scanned purely for the purposes of generating imagery and text for advertising your book. During the four-month campaign, the platform analyses which images, taglines and descriptions are performing best and optimises itself to make the most out of your marketing spend.

As part of the service, you receive progress reports offering valuable insights into the campaign’s performance so far, including metrics such as clicks, impressions, and engagement. A report is sent to you after two months and again at three months, which includes the statistics and the renewal options, should you wish to renew it, further increasing your book’s visibility. 

If you do not wish to extend the length of the campaign, it will automatically end at the end of the four months.

Example Adverts

Since the service was launched, the look of the adverts has changed due to Shimmr’s ongoing efforts to improve and refine the visuals, with the intention of increasing engagement. 

Here are some example adverts of the ‘new-look’ ads which now include a thumbnail version of the book cover. You’ll see that the tone of the imagery and taglines will vary depending on the book.

When an advert is clicked, the book cover, a description of the book and links to your book on retailers’ sites, such as the Troubador bookshop, Amazon, Kobo, Waterstones and others, are shown, and the potential customer can click through to their preferred retailer. Whilst not everyone who clicks through to retailers' sites may go on to buy a copy, any traffic to your book’s listing on sites such as Amazon can have a positive impact on your rankings and make your book more easily discoverable.

Why Choose This Service?

Our Targeted Online Advertising Campaign (£650 + VAT) is tailored to authors who want to enhance their book’s visibility, accessibility, and sales potential in today’s competitive marketplace. Whether your book is fresh from print or has been available for a while, this service provides a powerful way to increase its visibility to potential readers.

The service is great for authors who want a more ‘hands off’ approach to promoting their books across social media. AI is used to create, run and optimise the ads independently and there is no manual tweaking or monitoring involved. This type of advertising works best when authors are comfortable allowing the system to test and learn what resonates most strongly with readers, even if this is different to how you imagine your book to be advertised, as we cannot make changes to the ads once they have been created.

Is this service right for you? 

This service is not suitable for:

• Authors who want creative input on the ads
• Authors who want the book’s illustrations included on the ads - the imagery used on the adverts is created entirely through AI. Apart from the thumbnail of the cover, images from inside the book/on the book cover are not used in the adverts.
• Children’s picture books
• Collections of short stories or poems without a singular theme/genre
• Books with a word count lower than 1000 words 

For authors who are very focused on maintaining tight control over visuals and copy, or who want ads to match an established online identity precisely, a fully manual advertising setup can sometimes be a better fit, e.g. you could look at running your own Amazon, Facebook or Instagram ads.

 

If you are interested in this service, please contact us to get started.