Does Online Book Advertising Even Work? Part Two - Kara

Every week tens of thousands of new books are released onto Amazon. How to get a book seen by readers when you are literally competing with hundreds of thousands of others is a never-ending challenge for authors and publishers. Last month in Part One of my posts on online book advertising I looked at Facebook boosts/ads and GoodReads ads and giveaways. This month I'm going to talk about email promotional lists and Amazon ads :)

Email Promotional Lists

Those of us who are avid readers will probably belong to many email promotional lists that notify readers of cheap books and/or free deals. The most well known is BookBub but there are thousands of smaller genre specific lists. In Christian fiction the most popular include ones like Christian Book Heaven, Spirit Filled eBooks, and Faithful Reads.

Pros: Will get your book cover/description in front of readers who would otherwise never see your book. Pretty much guaranteed to result in at least some sales.
Cons: Can be expensive (a BookBub ad in the Christian fiction category for a $1.99 deal will cost over $500 USD). There is no guarantee you will make your money back in sales.

Since the three month "new release" window for Then There Was You has finished it now just trundles along selling 1-2 eBooks a day. So I decided it was time to try and get it in front of some potential new readers by trying a couple of email promotional lists. Last month I dropped Then There Was You to $1.99 (USD) for a week and ran ads with Spirit Filled Kindle and Christian Book Heaven. As you can see from the graph above, they both definitely had an impact. October 24 was when my ad ran with Spirit Filled eBooks and October 28 was when it ran with Christian Book Heaven.

In both instances they made enough sales to pay for the ad but little more than that. Given the expense of some of the larger lists like Bookbub I would only consider going there if I ever have more than one indie book and there is the chance that I will also benefit from a uptick in sales in my other (non-discounted) titles.

Amazon Advertising

If you've spent any time traveling around Amazon you've no doubt stumbled across "sponsored" product placement. These are almost always either in the list returned from your keyword search or on one of the product placement bars on the page of the book you're looking at.

Their appearance is not random. When an author of publisher sets up an advertisement they can include up to 1, 000 keywords or phrases that they want their word associated with. For me I've got a list of about a hundred comparable authors and titles to my books. But others get a lot more creative than I do!

So for those of you who have ever searched for a Christian book and suddenly found yourselves with an eyeful of a bare chested man wrapped around a voluptuous lady, that was not a mistake by Amazon. For reasons I've never been able work quite a few "steamy" romance writers put things like "Christian romance" in their advertising keywords!

The lingo in the reporting table...

Impressions: The number of times your add has appeared (note - this doesn't mean it's been seen! It could have "appeared" on a list but the browser never scrolled down far enough to actually see it!)
Clicks: The number of times someone has actually "clicked" on your ad
ACPC: Average cost per click. The average of how much it has cost you every time someone clicks on your ad.
Spend: How much your cumulative clicks have cost you
Total Sales: The $ amount of sales you've made as a result of those clicks (it can take up to three days for sales to show up here)

Pros: Unlike GoodReads, you don't have to pay anything upfront. Amazon charges you retrospectively for clicks in your advertisement/s. The keyword reporting is good and allows you to see which keywords are resulting in sales and which ones aren't so you can adjust your "per click" bids accordingly.
Cons: Now that every man and his cowboy have caught onto Amazon ads they are becoming less effective and you are having to be prepared to pay more "per click" just to get your ad somewhere where it can be seen.
Tip!: If you see a book with the tag "sponsored post" while trawling Amazon and the ad really appeals to you you can save the author from having to pay for your "click" but just searching for the book or author directly in the search bar :)

So there you have it, my foray into paid advertising for Then There Was You! So, in a nutshell, my assessment from most effective to least (purely in my experience and bearing in mind that this is my first crack so I'm a total amateur at all of these!)...

1) Email promotional lists (requires discounted book)
2) Amazon ads
3) Facebook boosts
4) Goodreads Giveaways
5) Facebook ads
6) Goodreads ads

And, if you're a reader, tired of being bombarded with ads for books that you have no interest in reading, hopefully this will give you an idea of what authors are up against trying to get their stories in front of anyone who might like them :)

Kara Isaac lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Close to You, a RITA Award Double Finalist, and Can't Help Falling, an RT Review Top Pick. Her latest book Then There Was You released in June. When she's not chasing three adorable but spirited little people, she spends her time writing horribly bad first drafts and wishing you could get Double Stuf Oreos in New Zealand. She loves to connect on her website, on Facebook at Kara Isaac - Author and Twitter @KaraIsaac

Does Online Book Advertising Even Work? + Giveaway - Kara Isaac

Ads, ads, ads. They're on buses, billboards, in your letterbox and always wherever you go on the internet. But do they provide results for the people paying for them? 

In June, I independently released my third book, Then There Was You. There are many pros to indie publishing but one of the challenges is that you, the author, are solely responsible for trying to create "buzz" around your book and get it in front of readers. No small feat when a new book is published on Amazon every three minutes and the odds of it being "discovered" by a new reader purely by chance are slim to none. 

As a result, I've had to delve into the wonderful world of paid online book promotion. So, over my next two posts I thought I would chat about the different types of promotion that I have tried and my thoughts/experiences! 

This post I'm going to talk about Facebook Ads/Boosts and GoodReads ads and giveaways. Then next post I will be talking about Amazon ads and email promotional lists. 

Facebook Ads/Boosts
Anyone who is on Facebook will have seen sponsored ads or "boosted" posts show up in their newsfeed. The reason for this is because even if you like the page for your favourite author/speaker/restaurant Facebook still won't show you anything and everything that person/organization posts. Instead, clever Facebook, makes people pay if they really want a post to be seen.

Pros: When well targeted, boosted posts and ads can get you back in front of your target audience with important news or announcements. They can increase engagement with your page (and when someone engages with a post it makes it more likely FB will show them more things from you in the future) and Facebook provides good metrics on the results you have gotten for each promotion.

Cons: No ability to see if a paid promotion has directly resulted in sales. Facebook can be very picky about the content/format of a boosted post. For example, if they think you ad has too many words then the algorithm will limit how may people it will be distributed to but if you are running something like a giveaway you have to have a lot of words to set out the terms and conditions!

Thoughts: Know what your goals are for each boosted post or ad so you know whether your investment has delivered the outcomes you want. Do you want more page likes? If so how many? A certain reach? A certain number of entries or comments? If you don't meet your goals analyse the results and try and work out why rather than shrugging your shoulders and putting it down to the Facebook algorithm having it in for you.

Be strategic about what you choose to boost.  The truth is that most of my posts are only of interest to my really committed readers and Facebook will usually show them my posts organically because they have a history of engagement with my page. If you want to reach a broader audience then boost posts that will appeal to them. For me this is giveaways, sales and big announcements (book contracts, cover reveals etc). Also, the Facebook algorithm is smart so if you boost often it will know that it doesn't need to offer you a good reach to get your money. Whereas if you boost sporadically it will offer you a bigger reach to try and get you to spend more money, more often :)

GoodReads Advertisements
GoodReads offers the ability to create advertisements that appear in members' newsfeed and sidebars. You pay "per click" and can target you advertisements to specific readers (for example people who have read books by other authors you nominate and rated their books 3* or higher)

Pros: To date I haven't found any.
Cons: Unlike most other providers who charge you retrospectively per click, GoodReads requires upfront payment (minimum of $50 USD) which then acts as a credit that they deduct your clicks against. I have run six different ads across my three books and, after a year and many attempts at rewriting and retargeting the ads, have spent $12.30. At that rate it will take me until 2020 to spend the $50!

Thoughts: Don't bother. Amazon ads (which I'll cover next time) are a far better spend for your money.


GoodReads Giveaways

With GoodReads there is an option to give away paperback copies of your books. You nominate the number of copies, the dates the giveaway runs and the countries it is available to.

Pros: Gets your book in front of readers who may otherwise never see it. You can see a direct correlation between the giveaway and people adding your book to their "to-read" shelves.

Cons: No way of knowing if it is directly responsible for any sales.

Thoughts: You don't seem to get any greater benefit/visibility from giving away a heap of books versus a smaller number. I personally think the sweet spot is 5-10. It's enough to make people feel like they have a chance at winning one but not so many that it's going to cost you a fortune to fulfil it. (Obviously this only matters if you are having to fulfill the winners yourself. If you have a publisher who will deal with the costs of books and postage then even better!)

Writers - have you tried any of these activities or are you intending to? What was your experience? Readers - what are your thoughts/reactions when one of them shows up on your screen? I've got a Kindle copy of Then There Was You for one commenter!

*Entries close Wednesday, 1 November, midnight CST*

Kara Isaac lives in Wellington, New Zealand. She is the author of Close to You, a RITA Award Double Finalist, and Can't Help Falling, an RT Review Top Pick. Her latest book Then There Was You released in June. When she's not chasing three adorable but spirited little people, she spends her time writing horribly bad first drafts and wishing you could get Double Stuf Oreos in New Zealand. She loves to connect on her website, on Facebook at Kara Isaac - Author and Twitter @KaraIsaac

Paying to be Number One: The Power of Paid Advertising

Paying to be Number One: The Power of Paid Advertising 

by Lucy Thompson

Stats for Land That I Love box set, Aug 11, 2016

I have a secret: my books were bestsellers because I paid for that title. 

😱😧Shocking! 😧😱

Let me backtrack just a little before y'all start boycotting me on facebook or throwing my books back at me. 😉

Amazon releases many, many books each year. Like hundreds of thousands of books on Amazon. Some to very famous authors whose name alone sells a gazillion books. Others to housewives whose dream it is to see a book in print, but who isn't well-known apart from family, loyal friends, and shopkeepers who I gush to…umm…where was I again? Oh, yes. Amazon also releases books of authors who aren't very well known.

How do I find readers and convince them to buy my book?

Enter the middleman. 

Advertisers.

Companies with a well-padded subscription list of readers hungry to fill their Kindles with new books. 😍📚📲 
I'll put some links to advertisers who've worked for me at the bottom of this post.

Yay! Let me find that ASIN number and hit "send". Oh. Wait… They want me to pay money for the privilege of sharing my awesome book with lucky readers? (That was sarcasm, btw.) 

In this day and age, to get books in front of new readers (that's readers outside of the people you know personally or see down the shops) you have to pay for them. Approximately $30+ per ad. For one day. To a couple of thousand people who may or may not even open their email or click the link. It's a gamble, people. And sometimes it works. Works really well.

See that picture at the top with the #1's? Where it says #897 in Kindle Store? That was a box set my first book, Mail Order Surprise, was a part of called Land That I Love. Sadly, that box set is no longer available, but when it first came out, myself and the other four authors paid a ton of money for a whole bunch of ads--thirteen different advertisers if I recall correctly, which well and truly paid for themselves. We hit #1 in all our listed categories and crept up to #784 in the entire Kindle Store. That means that (at that time) our book was the 784th bestselling Kindle book in the whole of Amazon. Yay! 😃 Lots of new readers. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of page reads. Thousands of book sales. Yay!

But only because we paid for that. 

Call me jaded, but when I see books, particularly box sets, with Bestseller banners and high Amazon rankings I immediately think "paid advertising" not "well-crafted book". Ouch. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for those authors and cheerfully applaud them. But I'm more aware of what it takes to get to those numbers now.

Does that mean that I should rest on my laurels and not pay attention to craft? NO. Not if I want readers to read anything else I ever write. Because they're watching. 😏

 Yes, there is power in paid advertising. But there is also power in a well-crafted book that speaks to the soul. The Lord has the power to open doors that would otherwise seem impossible (hello, there was my name next to Lynnette Bonner! Next to Janice Thompson!). 

Our words have power. Let us use that power wisely. 

All the best as you write for His glory,

   Lucy Thompson
Writer of Words, Worth, and Wit
Email: dingo4mum@yahoo.com.au
Blog: http://lucythompsonauthor.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lucy.thompsonauthor
Pinterest:  https://au.pinterest.com/lucythompsonaut
Books: A Cowboy's Dare: http://amzn.to/2ikiUm1

P.S. As promised: some links to helpful paid advertisers. 😊 Prices are approximate and in US$.
Robin Reads $60  FKBT $30 for a .99c ad. Fussy Librarian $26+ Faithful Reads $25
BookBub (the best and most expensive, but hard to get into) $190