SciFi and Fantasy eBook Club discussion

Does anyone here divert funds to paid ads for their work and how many of you do a lot of paid promoting as a way of building your audience, and adding new read?

Do you set aside money to promote every week, month, occassionaly, and how effective do you find it?

Thanks.

John

HI John,

I've set funds aside in the past for advertising, and done a small amount it. I always check the stats and have typically found that an ad gets lost in the noise.

It comes down to the reader taking an interest, and again, an ad may catch someone's eye, but we're not selling shirts or visual art; we're selling a commitment, something tough for anyone to jump into.

Hang tough and best of luck.

I've tried a few different approaches with nominal results. I've yet to make back what i have spent on an 'ad blitz' in increased book sales. For example Facebook ads always feel like they are doing better than the actual results suggest, I would see something like '3000 people viewed this ad!' and would dash off to my sales dashboard all excited only to find two extra sales that covered about a tenth of the ad spend.

Organic stuff genuinely seems to work the best and ironically is cheap/free. Whenever I do a guest post on another blog or put out a free short story, those are the things that seem to drive traffic to my website and resultant book sales. If people enjoy a short story you wrote then its easier to convince them they might like a novel you wrote.

I've been trying instafreebie to promote and it works great.

There are multiple ways to go for paid advertising, such as Google ads, Facebook, Goodreads (yes, you can advertise also on Goodreads). The results that I have seen from these are mixed, and certainly not worth the return on investment (ROI). You get visibility, people get familiarized with your name (which is important), but that does not lead necessarily to bigger sales (at least in the short run).

I have one however a Blitz campaign combining a paid Bookbub feature with (unpaid) advertising on Goodreads, Twitter, FB and a couple of other sites for a book that was free. It got some 5000 downloads in ONE day (about 8000 downloads total). As the book is the first in a series, I expected a significant raise in sales (I have 70% of people buying the whole series if they buy the first book), but the results have also been mixed - I got higher sales, but not dramatic improvements. I suppose that people that get free books leave them in most cases on their "to read" list. My hope is that when they eventually get to my book, they will follow the road of paid customers.

Advertising is important. My first book sold 84 units in the first 6 months. Now it sells about 2000 per year through different channels. The difference? Publicity (mostly of it not paid, mind you). The lesson, however, it that a publicity campaign of a few days will not change things. You need to keep on the publicity on for months or even years to start getting noticed. But you can obviously not pay for that period of time, so try mixing unpaid publicity continuously and paid one for special occasions.

I've never had enough money to make advertising work (if I had that kind of money, I wouldn't need to write for a living). Low budget targeting is largely ineffective, so I no longer bother.

Historically, I didn't do much advertising and was blessed to experience a modicum of success. (I sold 10,000 books within the first 6 months and 25,000 in a little over a year.) The landscape has changed, however - especially on Amazon. Now, even with a solid mail list, you probably need to advertise just to stay top-of-mind. The trick is finding that sweet spot where the income exceeds the spend.

Kevin wrote: "Historically, I didn't do much advertising and was blessed to experience a modicum of success. (I sold 10,000 books within the first 6 months and 25,000 in a little over a year.) The landscape has ..."

I dream of numbers like that.

An informative discussion, thanks everyone

What are everyone's thoughts on Amazon Ads and Bookbub Ads? Has anyone used Amazon's A+ content?