5: Creative Research

Testing lots of ideas is the most important part of creating good ads, but it’s easy to hit a rut or just create eighteen variants of what amounts to the same ad (i.e. they all share the same core idea).
Your swipe file can help break out of this rut.
Another way is to explore books in your genre: read a few of the bestsellers in your genre, break apart their ads/Amazon description, see what they’re doing. Figure out what elements (tropes, expectations, words) readers are looking for.
Try to reverse engineer high ranked books and look for clues (but don’t be fooled by randomness as Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say; many “patterns” are just luck or noise)