WRITING JOURNAL: Interesting fact: reviews on Amazon are very important, but we’re discovering that comments by readers on the Facebook ads for the book may be attracting more new readers than the reviews.

Right now we’re running three FB ads that are generating about 90% of sales for my debut science fiction novel GRONE. Combined, the three ads have over a thousand likes/loves plus over a hundred comments by readers.

Of course, it’s truly wonderful to be able to directly correspond with readers via Facebook comments. I absolutely love to hear from readers and get into conversations about GRONE and other great books. It inspires me to work harder to get new books out there!

It’s also nice that prospective readers see these comments. I think one of the reasons the reason the ads are so effective is the social proof provided by the likes/comments. When prospective readers see a book ad with tons of likes and comments, they are much more likely to click the ad and buy the book because they trust the social proof more than Amazon reviews. It’s an interesting phenomenon, and we’re going to see if we can better explore it in the future.