Indie Writing, Marketing Controversy, and Naked Numbers

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
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!