In this new era of indie publishing (a chimera that isn’t
done evolving yet, maybe never will be), there’s a lot of talk and controversy
about marketing. Actually, there’s a lot
of talk and controversy just about every aspect, but I’m talking about my
experience with marketing today. I have
recently completed an October promotion campaign and wanted to share my
results. You can take them for whatever
they are worth to you.
I came into this with two thoughts about the whole indie book
marketing monstrosity:
1) The book marketing business is a hundred times bigger than
the actual indie author business. Every
Tom, Dick, and Harry with a website will gladly take your money to spend five
seconds posting your book, and all those guys are making a thousand times more
than your average indie writer.
2) Despite what they would have you believe, marketing your
indie books can have only a limited effect unless you are already well known
and/or already have quite a backlist of books to gain a residual benefit
from.
These past two weeks have only reinforced these two notions
for me.
I have heard it said many times, and with good reason, that
the best way to promote your books is to write the next book. I had decided well before today that until I
have half-a-million words in print, I’m not going to go overboard trying to
promote anything. My “Fall Fallout Campaign,”
as I have dubbed it, is my biggest promo effort to date. I figured you have to spend money to make
money, which is no doubt true, but I also expected to be disappointed. Given all this, my results aren’t all that
surprising. And despite the potential embarrassment
of exposing these less-than-best seller numbers, I hope doing so will be
helpful to some of my fellow indies.
Maybe they’ll keep a few more dollars in their pockets and a few more
hours in their chairs, writing. This whole
campaign, small though it is, has distracted the vast majority of my writer’s
time away from banging out forward progress on a keyboard. The money is more than I’d yet invested in
marketing, but it wasn’t horrible. I
expect I’ll make it up by the end of the year anyway.
That said, I should also note that when you do some marketing
and a big sale, part of the purpose is to sell more books in the future, and at
full price, so the short term monetary gains and losses aren’t the main
goal. Still, there is such a thing as spending too much on false promises. Again, there seem to be a lot of folks out
there happy to take your money for “advertising” your books, even if the
expected results aren’t quite what they advertised to you.
Okay, after all that introduction, on to the actual campaign.
I have thus far completed two of three legs of my “Fall
Fallout Campaign.” The first was for my
SF novelette The Thorne Legacy. I also put a handful of books exclusively on
Kindle Unlimited for a 90 day stretch to see if that would help me any. It hasn’t.
Well, my novel did get a few KU downloads, but so far I have gotten no reviews
from them and have only been paid a half-cent per page, which is far less than
if someone bought the book. So overall,
in this 90 day period, I don’t see any overwhelming benefit convincing me to
cut out all retailers except Amazon. So
I’ll be coming back out of the KU exclusivity and posting to all my channels
again next month.
The Thorne Legacy ran free for five days, during which
time I gave away 444 copies. Pretty
good. Not the thousands of new readers I
was hoping for, but I’ll take it. In addition
to minor efforts on my blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads (costing only my
time), I also used the following sites at the cited prices:
|
$$$
|
|
|
0
|
indiebookoftheday.com
|
|
14.99
|
BookMarketingTools.com
|
|
5
|
Kindle Book Review
Daily
|
|
0
|
awesomegang.com
|
|
5
|
freediscountedbooks.com
|
|
30
|
indie.kindlenationdaily.com
|
This totaled about $55 with no immediate monetary
return. Basically, I paid about 12 cents
a copy to give them away. I can live
with that. Hopefully this planted seeds
that will grow in the future. Only time
will tell.
In October, I decided to spend more cash with the hopes of
getting a more immediate return. For the
Halloween season I gave away one book for free and sold two at $0.99, which
were normally priced at $5.99 and $4.99.
(Some of you are saying those prices are too high; that’s a conversationfor another day, but you can read my opinion on the matter here.) The books themselves, I feel, are well
written, have a professional look and feel, have few but good, honest ratings,
and would be darn good reads for such bargain prices. (And all of these things are also factors in
whether they sell or not. You can judgefor yourselves, if you like, by checking out my blog post on the salehere.)
Again, embracing the idea that you have to spend money to
make money, I did some research on where it might be best spent and aligned all
three book deals so they reinforced each other and all fit the seasonal theme
(hoping that more people would be in the mood for some scary-type
reading). I also edited the descriptions
of all my works to advertise the Halloween sales on these three. What I have below is the list of promotion sites
I used and how much each cost. Below
that is a day-by-day account of how many books sold. You’ll notice some spikes on the days that
certain ads went off. From there you can decide for yourself which sites may or may not be worth your hard
earned coin.
|
BOOK
|
LIVE
|
SITE
|
COST
|
|
HG
|
30-Oct
|
Kindle Nation Daily (& BookGorilla)
|
99.99
|
|
26-Oct
|
Bargain Booksy
|
40.00
|
|
1-Nov
|
Fussy Librarian
|
14.95
|
|
25-Oct
|
Ereader News Today
|
25.00
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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P&D
|
27oct, 28oct
|
HotZippy’s 13 horror street
|
10.50
|
|
|
|
|
|
Walk
|
22oct-26oct
|
BookMarketingTools.com
|
14.95
|
|
22oct&26oct
|
Awesomegang feature
|
10.00
|
This totaled just over $215.
For my indie operation, that’s a nice chunk of change. My hope is that I can make more than that
back before the end of the year. (A
realistic goal, I think, with the holiday season and a return to normal
pricing.) But as the numbers below show,
I took a big loss in the short term.
None of the sites sold their fee’s worth of books on the days in
question, and the most expensive (at 100 bucks) wasn’t even the best sales
spike.
(And yes, I did query Bookbub multiple times, and—no
surprise—didn’t get in. I think I’ll
need at least a hundred more reviews before that’s a possibility.)
It’s worth noting that before the “Fall Fallout Campaign,”
I’d been averaging one or two sales a day all year, the vast majority of them
being for my novel Hungry Gods. I noticed a surge in May and June and a drop
in August and September, which makes me think the school year is also a
factor. All told, 2015 has been my best
year to date as an indie author, with steady growth each year since I started—healthy,
realistic growth, in my opinion. I’m not
expecting the lottery ticket, instant millionaire lightning strike that
everyone hopes for when they start out.
I’ve moved past those dreams to setting more realistic business goals.
And, of course, this marketing microcosm is just one guy’s
experience in the short term, and there are certainly more factors to
consider. But since I don’t have the
funds or the time to do this often, I’ll personally be basing future decisions
on these results. (By the way, these
numbers are all from Amazon; I did have a total of 12 sales for the month on
other venues, but they aren’t factored in here.)
|
total paid sales
|
HG
|
P&D
|
Walk (free)
|
|
22-Oct
|
3
|
3
|
|
22
|
|
23-Oct
|
3
|
3
|
|
7
|
|
24-Oct
|
3
|
3
|
|
15
|
|
25-Oct
|
40
|
39
|
|
9
|
|
26-Oct
|
19
|
18
|
|
7
|
|
27-Oct
|
8
|
7
|
1
|
|
|
28-Oct
|
4
|
4
|
|
|
|
29-Oct
|
3
|
3
|
|
|
|
30-Oct
|
30
|
27
|
2
|
|
|
31-Oct
|
2
|
2
|
|
|
|
1-Nov
|
1
|
1
|
|
|
|
2-Nov
|
4
|
4
|
|
|
|
3-Nov
|
0
|
|
|
|
|
totals
|
120
|
114
|
3
|
60
|
RESULTS: So what am
*I* taking from this? Well, “Fall
Fallout” has one more leg to it in November: a novel down to $0.99 and a
related KDP freebie. I’ve already
invested in Amazon KDP advertising for the first time, so that’ll run through
the end of the month (and I’ll see how well that goes). On top of that, I’ll probably place another
$25 ad with Ereader News Today, and that’s going to be it. (The $100 Kindle Nation Daily ad certainly wasn’t
worth the exorbitant price.) For the
freebie, I’ll likely go with Book Marketing Tools, which reaches 30+ sites for
$15, and that’ll be it for that one. (I
do also have an ongoing campaign with multiple books using Goodreads ads, which
renews when the funds get spent, and I’ve so far been pretty happy with. It’s impossible for me to really know how
many clicks there become actual sales, but I consider the service worthwhile.)
And while I wait for Phase Three to kick in next week, I’ll
be back to my desk, writing more books and stories. I don’t plan to bother with any more
promotion nonsense until my next big book comes out. Because no matter what these marketing sites
may say, I believe most of the subscription and Twitter numbers they boast
about are fellow writers—not readers—and that these most readers find their
books by some other means. I have come
to think of myself as having three roles in the indie publishing business:
writer (duh), publisher (formatting in different media and getting out to as
many venues as possible, and all the research and learning that comes with it),
and marketer. And I bet you can guess
which is most important in my model of things, and which is least.
I hope my experience and this exhaustive, rambling essay has
been helpful to some of my fellow indies.
Keep writing!
