This is exactly how you build amazing ad images 🎈

Gimme those sweet, sweet clicks. View in browser Hey, If you just want to dive into my latest video showing you how to build amazing ad images - even when you have a tricky cover - then you can do that here (but come back and read the rest of this email because we have a lot more to talk about!). In last week's email, we broke down the elements of an attractive ad image. Recapping very quickly, a successful ad image typically has: Your book cover - because it is a unique bat-signal to your Ideal Reader and most likely purchasers. Some nice background art - I show you how to do this in the above video. An enticing offer – an important but misunderstood concept which we spoke about in depth last week. I want to re-litigate the last case a little because I see ad images all the time containing what you might call "pseudo offers." A perfect example is "Free in Kindle Unlimited!" I'm sure what I'm about to say will be controversial – possibly generating even more pushback than my insistence that using a book cover in your ad is almost always better – but I'll repeat my perma-caveat: data beats the most convincing argument. And if you personally have data which clearly shows "Free in Kindle Unlimited" is a strong offer in your ads, and works better than other potential offers, then don't listen to me and keep on keeping on.  I would never change a successful ad on someone's say-so. I might copy that winning ad, and tweak it and test variations, but if it ain't broken… don't break it. That said, I do feel pretty strongly about this, so I'll make my case. "Free in Kindle Unlimited" is a weak offer for two reasons. First, it's inherently underwhelming because every book in Kindle Unlimited is free in Kindle Unlimited – all you are saying is "this book is in Kindle Unlimited." Subscribers to Kindle Unlimited already know they can borrow over a million books for free whenever they like so all you are telling them is that your book is one of those. Not a valueless piece of information, perhaps, but not the most compelling either. Second, it's inherently limiting because not every reader who reads ebooks from Amazon is a Kindle Unlimited subscriber. We don't have numbers on this, but the proportion of readers who can avail of your (already weak) offer is surely in the minority. Possibly even a significant minority if you believe, as I do, that Kindle Unlimited subscribers might make up an even smaller proportion of a deal-hunting audience like at BookBub because they already have access to a free library of over a million books they can borrow any time. I prefer offers which are overwhelmingly attractive and have near-universal appeal – which perfectly describes free or 99¢. With a strong offer like that, all I have to do is make my ads pretty, point them at the right readers, and then clicks, conversions, and sales will naturally follow. Let's show you how to make those ads pretty. Outsource or DIY? Outsourcing the job is both the easiest and hardest thing in the world – easy to sort out when ordering your cover, and surprisingly difficult outside of that. Let me explain. If you get your designer to bundle ad images and other promo graphics with your book cover – as I recommend in my monster guide to book cover design – they will often do that quickly for a nominal fee. Easy peasy. But if you go hunting for a designer just to make promo graphics for you after the fact, it suddenly becomes inexplicably difficult. Don't just take my word for it, look at how few designers threw their hat into the ring when I put a call out on Twitter. I guarantee you that if I asked for recommended book cover designers, I would have received 20x the responses. I'm not sure why it's so hard to get designers interested in this kind of work. Maybe it's too much effort for too little return?  After learning to do my own – partly because it was so hard to find designers to do this work – I can understand that. Converting an existing design of yours into another format is trivial enough... but building something from scratch can be a different ball of wax. In any event, even if you had a stellar designer who could handle such work for you at a reasonable cost, it would still be very useful indeed if you knew how to create simple promo graphics for your own books, to turn your book covers into newsletter headers and Facebook Cover Photos and BookBub Ads and website graphics and a million other things in these branded times. Best Tool For The Job is Canva My #1 recommended tool for the job is Canva. That's an affiliate link, meaning I get a small commission if you eventually sign up for a paid plan, but the free plan will suffice for most of you anyway. The free plan is genuinely great – and you should certainly start with that – but if you are an intermediate-to-heavy user you might be able to justify springing for the paid plan ($9.99 a month).  I'll probably do a free plan vs. paid version video at some point to show off some of the premium features, but just having access to a massive library of stock photos means that you could actually end up saving money with that paid plan, depending. Book Brush Is Popular With Authors Also Outside of the professional-designer-world of Photoshop, the next most popular choice among authors these days seems to be Book Brush. By the time it came out, I had already invested a decent amount of time in getting good with Canva so I never really spent a lot of time with it, but my hot take was the learning curve might be a touch easier with Book Brush. I didn't like the Book Brush interface as much personally, and I think you can do much more with Canva overall - so that might be the smarter investment of your time long-term - but it is a tool developed by authors for authors and definitely has its passionate fans.  Just note that it's twice as expensive as Canva if you want the unlimited plan and the free plan looks a good bit more restrictive than Canva's as well. (Both sites have a comprehensive listing of the respective features under the various plans if you want to peruse that in detail.) Stencil Is Very Cheap Right Now For those seeking the cheapest price overall but with a full feature set, Stencil deserves a mention this week as AppSumo have a lifetime license for just $49.00 (aff link) – and that is pretty much an unlimited plan as well.  Honest review again: I didn't like it as much as Canva (or Book Brush) but that is a very cheap price for a tool which can do a fair bit, and Stencil certainly has its fans as well. I bought Stencil on a similar lifetime deal around a year ago and if I had to describe its USP, Stencil is best at making lots of images very quickly. So if you post images very regularly on your social channels, manage lots of Facebook Pages, or otherwise are a high-volume user looking for the most efficient way to generate graphics, Stencil might be the best choice for you.  Stencil also has very handy WordPress and Chrome plug-ins as well - allowing you to make images on the fly - which is pretty damn nifty and the only one of these three tools with that feature, which should be of particular interest to the speed merchants among you. Remember, AppSumo does have a no-questions-asked 60-day moneyback guarantee on all its deals, so I regularly grab things which sound half-interesting, test them out, then return them if I'm not totally sold on it – and I've never had any issues on that front. Just FYI. And that's all he wrote! Well, except for this bit: the video up top should be pretty useful in showing you how to build your own ads and put the principles I've been speaking over the last two emails into practice. Just take your time. Practice, practice, practice. Don't get frustrated but do go over your designs again and again to try and improve them. Pay special attention to those little bits of finessing I speak about in my latest video – which can really elevate a graphic. And don't forget to check out all the other promo graphic tutorials on my YouTube channel - I have several there now! Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Bats for Lashes with What's A Girl To Do. DavidGaughran.com Broomfield Business Park, Malahide, Co. Dublin, Ireland You received this email because you signed up at DavidGaughran.com. Unsubscribe