Frequently asked questions.

Shimmr is advertising on autopilot that drives discoverability and sales. You supply the product; Shimmr’s fully automated solution creates, deploys and self-optimizes the advertising, hands free.

With machines. They read the book, understand and distil the elements we’ve taught them to identify, create advertising assets faithful to that essence, then place the ads into relevant media channels. It is end-to-end and automated. We need only the authorised ePub from the title’s publisher to begin.

Ad copy for assets, product descriptions, keywords and author bios. All of this copy is optimized to improve engagement, visibility in search results, and conversion to sales, and has been tested extensively.

Shimmr deploys ads across major digital advertising platforms, including Google and Meta. On Google, ads appear across the Google Display Network. On Meta, ads are displayed on Facebook and Instagram feeds, Stories, Messenger, and other placements within their advertising ecosystem. Shimmr gets narrow on the niche and finds the right people, in the right place, at the right time, automatically optimizing placement based on the best-performing ads.

Shimmr pushes traffic to a variety of e-commerce stores where the book is sold, such as the publisher’s own website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstones, Bookshop.org and Rakuten Kobo.

Shimmr uses a combination of large language models and reinforcement learning models. We use in-context learning to match products to audiences based on psychological factors like values, interests and emotions, and analyze trends and events to understand what impacts interest. Our language models process text, titles and covers to generate marketing assets. These assets are fully AI-generated and carry no risk of using copyrighted images from any other source. Reinforcement learning powers the agent-based system that continually improves our analysis and creative generation.

Current models in use include OpenAI’s GPT, Flux, Sora and Veo. This AI chain is built on our proprietary framework.

Any, really. Shimmr is effective at driving discoverability and sales for all trade books, both non-fiction and fiction, in any format. We use psychological profiling to match books with readers, whether they’re looking for a how-to book or a holiday read. Picture books, poetry, short stories and anthologies, and academic titles are coming soon.

Tip: make sure your book has strong social proof like reviews and ratings, making it fit and ready to receive advertising traffic.

Ads are deployed automatically, but you can choose to stop or remove them at any point. We encourage our partners to review the first rounds of ads Shimmr produces for their titles before moving to automatic deployment.

In a nutshell: the right audience for a product, the most effective creative to advertise it, and the best channels to advertise it on. In the platform you get complete transparency of all the ads and formats going out, the product descriptions, the audience matches for the title, and the click-based results for each ad and title.

Shimmr is an annual subscription service with a monthly charge. This includes creation, deployment and optimization of advertising per title. Additional media spend packages, beyond what is included in the base monthly fee, are also available. Full tier detail is on our pricing page.

Book a meeting straight away at shimmr.ai/book-a-demo, or get in touch at hello@shimmr.ai — we’d love to show you the platform.

Yes. Ads are specific to a country. Targeting specificity and deployment are most effective when focused on a particular market, so the algorithms can learn what works and optimize best. That is how we structure our subscriptions.

No. The ePub is used to create our ads but does not become part of the training set of the language model. The ProductDNA produced is used purely for the benefit of that title, nothing else, and permission for us to produce it is granted when a publisher or author joins Shimmr.

All campaign images, text and other assets Shimmr generates are original creations, produced using AI and made solely for your advertising, using only your provided file as input. We do not copy or extract anything from third-party copyrighted works. You get a license to freely use these generated assets worldwide for your marketing during the campaign term.

Shimmr has no effect on an author’s IP. Shimmr creates ads or marketing assets only for works for which it has express permission to do so, or for works that are copyright-free. Shimmr will never infringe an author’s copyright in the creation of assets.

Shimmr implements strict age-based targeting in our advertising campaigns. For products with mature content, such as those featuring alcohol or explicit material, we set demographic targeting to adults 18 and over. This prevents our ads appearing on websites primarily visited by children, or being shown to users under 18.

We are committed to creating diverse and inclusive assets that maintain high integrity to the representation of each work. Our approach includes:

• Training our AI models on diverse datasets to minimize bias
• Individually vetting all generated assets
• Continuously refining our algorithms to eliminate discrimination based on protected characteristics
• Regular testing and monitoring for unwanted biases
• Welcoming feedback from publishers and authors to improve representation

Shimmr learns from your campaigns only in a privacy-safe, IP-respecting way. Shimmr uses aggregated advertising performance data — such as which ads got more clicks or sales — to learn what types of campaigns work best across genres and audiences. We do not reuse your content, quotes or proprietary materials in other campaigns, and we never use your content to train or fine-tune the underlying AI models.