Kevin Ortegel's Blog: Overdue Prose

This entry is dedicated to detailing my personal experience with two low-cost Christian book advertisers. Let me preface everything first by saying that this is only meant to share my own experience with these particular providers. It is not meant to convey that another author's experience will be similar or that my experience was typical.

Today we will be looking at Christian Kindle News and Cross Reads

I had a great sense of optimism when I discovered these two sites because I figured that any advertising to my exact audience for my book's genre is going to yield results in theory. I thought that the only variable that I could not account for was audience size, but for the cost, it was worth a try.

It is correct for most authors to try one advertiser at a time in order to know for certain which site was responsible for results. If you time a promotion for two advertisers, of course, you will theoretically double your exposure for a given promo, but you won't know which of them contributed to your sales. I went into this not following this advice, but it didn't impact me and I'll explain why in a minute.

For this particular promotion, I figured I would run a nice week-long promo, primarily because both sites were rather ambiguous as to when the book would actually be featured. By running a week-long promo, I figured that I would still see the bounces in sales on the days that the promotion for each site was actually posted.

So let's look first at Christian Kindle News. For $10 I was able to purchase a "Spotlight of the Day" promotion. I put the dates of the promotion in my request, assuming (incorrectly) that my book would stay posted on the site for the duration. I thought this because I noticed that the web page only changed when a new book was posted. Even when new books were posted, the older books remained on the site.

I paid for my promotion on a Thursday evening with the hopes that it would start on Sunday and run through Saturday. I have an unproven theory that Christian books should be promoted on Sundays in the event someone mentions your book on any given Sunday in church and people go looking for your book. Nevertheless, my promo did not start on Sunday as planned (the site's guidance states that a book takes 3-5 days to post). It was posted instead the next day on Monday.

Unlike the other books on the page, the day after my promotion, poof - it was gone. So for $10 I got 24 hours of exposure on a Monday for a promotion that was supposed to last a week (my promo mentioned the period that the book would be on sale). I have a hard time believing that the other books on the site are paying $10 per day to be promoted on this site, especially given the fact that my sales were not enough to make back my investment.

The other advertiser I sought to promote my book through was Cross Reads. Again, the cost was $10 and even though I went into it with the expectation to start the promotion on a Sunday, the web site's only guidance they provide is that they post new books on Tuesdays and Fridays.

So after realizing this, I decided to reach out to Cross Reads (they provide not only a feedback form but also a phone number) on Monday. In my correspondence, I asked if it would be possible to give me an idea of their backlog and/or when my book would be featured. I further explained that I wanted to know this so that I knew when to put the book on sale. It makes no sense for me to put my book on sale indefinitely until they get around to featuring my book because doing so is also bad for other advertising opportunities, because other providers sometimes want to know what the regular price of your book is so that they can see that your book isn't always on sale.

The website advised that it could take up to 72 hours to get a reply so I waited until Thursday to call the number and leave a message, asking the same question I asked in my earlier request. As of this writing, I have not received any response. The folks at Cross Reads are well-intended people based on what I see on their website so I want to be clear that I'm not saying that they are disingenuous, but perhaps they don't have the staff needed to provide adequate customer support. As a paying customer, I get no sense of obligation on their part to be timely, responsive, or communicative and that's really not a good business model.

I am contemplating sending in a request for a refund through PayPal but will have to save the outcome of that decision for a future post. At the end of the day though, I wanted to convey that my excitement to advertise through two Christian, genre-specific vendors ended in disappointment.

In my quest to explore the marketing side of being an author, I dipped my toe into the pool by researching websites that offer free advertisements for e-books.

Two weekends ago I selected eBookLister and DailyCheapReads. It turned out that ebooklister was the site responsible for my book sales that weekend, and they exceeded what I did on launch day! I peaked at #24 for Christian/Inspirational on Amazon, besting my previous #35 rank.

There was a lag getting this data from my publisher's site and I presume that somehow this was due to the sales being linked through these sites(?), but when I saw the results I realized that I needed to keep pursuing this method.

In my attempt to recreate this magic, I chose three more free book advertiser websites this past weekend:
free99books

Awesome Gang

and Choosy Bookworm

I feel as though it is safe to write about my experience (at least thus far) before the weekend is even over because only one of the three listed my book, and that was free99books.

I received confirmations for all three, but I guess at least in the case of ChoosyBookworm, they offer free listings, but perhaps in practice, if you don't pay to guarantee yourself a spot, there's a good chance you won't be featured.

We'll see in a week or two whether or not free99books paid off for me, but regardless of that, I plan to explore some paid options this coming weekend, starting with the lowest cost ones and gradually moving up if sales increase exponentially as I spend more and more to advertise.

Stay tuned!

Do you remember the recurring skit on Mad TV called "Lowered Expectations"? For those of you not familiar or too young to know, it was a brief skit that made fun of a real 90s dating site called "Great Expectations" and the skits always centered around for settling for far less than what you started pursuing.

Pouring your heart into a book and putting it out to the world is not much different. That is because writing and publishing a book is only half of the battle, and most writers don't have a clue what to do when the best seller in their mind sells a significantly less amount of copies than they anticipated.

Another world of challenges exists when it comes to the marketing of your book. I came into it with no lofty expectations. I studied writing twenty years ago and took my time to put out my first work. Impatience was not an issue. After all, I had waited this long, what did it really take to see the process through?

Well, that’s not entirely true. I grew impatient towards the end of the process when I realized that I had to just put it out there and stop waiting for it to be perfect. An author’s works are never complete in the eyes of the writer. I had to put it out there so I would just.stop.tweaking.it. Self-publishing is a liberating experience compared to the narrow gate one used to have to pass through with publishers in order for an author to see their work in print. The Internet changed all that, and that’s a double-edged sword.

Writers are now on the lucrative side of the royalties split, but now everyone with a computer can publish a book, regardless of whether they actually should or not. How does one get their work to stand out among the ocean of other writers? By never quitting. There are truths that all authors must acknowledge in order to persevere and do their work justice by not giving up on it too early when it comes to letting people know it exists.

It makes no sense to do otherwise. Why did you just slave over that book for the past year or longer, only to throw in the towel because you DIDN’T sell 2,000 copies the day it was released? Did you really think that was going to happen? If the total sales on the day of your book’s debut didn’t bring you back to reality, I’m not sure anything I would say here could.

The industry certainly makes you think that you underestimate yourself at times. I went into my launch date more focused on how many of my friends and family would buy it, with no expectation that anyone who didn’t know me the day before would happen upon the first work of this unknown author and eagerly grab a copy. But the ascent up the charts on Amazon certainly made me think I was wrong. I started in one category at #2000+ and I peaked at #35! How can you not sell a bunch of books after closing that big of a gap?

Well, it does happen, and it’s because the built-in hype in the industry is no different than the film industry (I was a writing/film major twenty years ago). The adage to follow in the film industry is to always add or subtract a zero from whatever number a film’s press release is putting out to the public. If a blockbuster movie claims it did 200 million dollars in the first weekend, it really did 20 million. If that art-house independent film “only” had a budget of two thousand dollars, it was really twenty thousand dollars. And so on and so on. Hype is its own industry.

The same is true with books. Do you know how many books you have to sell to go from #2000 plus to #35?

A thousand, you think?

A hundred, you say?

Eighteen.

To go from the bottom of the ranking to near the top of the ranking, I only had to sell eighteen copies, and sell only eighteen copies I did that day. Not exactly the type of outcome one hopes for, but you know you’re doing what you love when you don’t care about the number of copies sold. No, I was basking in the fact that I had fulfilled a life-long ambition and had put it out there to the world. Thanks to Pronoun, my book literally IS available around the world, as that particular self-publishing platform (owned by Macmillan press) puts me not only on the biggest ebook retailers in the US but it also puts my book out there on three other continents. I expect more writers to quickly find Pronoun and realize that it is the best thing going for authors seeking to self-publish.

With all of the careful steps taken to get me to this point, it would be foolish to scoff at selling only eighteen copies and call it a day. No matter how underwhelming an author finds their launch day sales to be, you can’t stop there. To do your work the proper service and maximize success for that book, you have to take a more long-term approach. You have to look for ways to get a copy of your book into people’s hands who didn’t know you before your book launch and still don’t. You don’t have to kill yourself doing it either. If you just continue to do your research and look for opportunities to market your book, along with an intentional sales strategy, you can steadily rack up sales one effort at a time. Remember that your book is a flame, and if you get it in the hands of the right person or audience, it could catch fire. But don’t lose hope and let the flame go out before you’ve done everything you could to get your work known.