Writer Sanctum
Writer's Haven => Marketing Loft [Public] => Topic started by: Simon Haynes on October 22, 2019, 06:30:06 PM
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I don't know whether it's just me and my frugal ways, but I can't seem to get over the fear of wasting money on ads.
Partly it's because there's no tangible benefit. If I spend on a cover, or an audiobook, or editing, I get something in return. On the other hand, when I put money into advertising there's this nebulous idea that it SHOULD benefit book sales, but the hard data never backs it up. Any extra income will be spread over several days, weeks or months, and I can't point to a bunch of sales and say 'THEY were thanks to the ad'.
It's even trickier now I'm in KU, because page reads aren't shown on the AMS dash.
As an example, I'm running one auto-targeted AMS ad which ran up US$25 in costs yesterday. (I saw the amount rising and for once I decided ... stuff it, let's see what happens.) That generated 43 clicks.
The ad is for a first in a series of ten novels, so it could take a month or more for some of the people who clicked the ad to read their way through the entire series.
And here's the thing: if just 2 of the 43 people who clicked my ad DO read the entire series, that's a $15 profit.
Every business bone in my body is screaming at me to spend that much and more on ads every single day, but my brain just won't let me. I see the amount I owe AMS rising and put the brakes on.
Just to be clear, I've never spent more in ads than my incoming royalties. I'm not talking about putting myself into debt, just an unwillingness to put larger sums into advertising, even though it probably would pay off.
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I stopped.
AMS has changed dramatically since 2018 when it worked really well, and you only needed to spend mid hundreds a month to get really good results.
For me it isn't a fear of wasting money. I know it's a waste of money. It's not even a choice at the moment.
Back in 2018, I started an ad with a $10 cap, and I could see on that day's money, the ad was working.
Early this year? The ads stopped hitting whatever cap I had in place. I upped the bids, they still didn't hit the cap. I vastly increased the cap, and the bids, and spend $800 in 2 days, and saw f*cking zero extra money.
At that point, I stopped. The next book sold the exact same money without any ads, as have the two after it.
My last freebooksy try a few weeks back was a total failure as well. So much so, they gave me my money back. The promo I did over the weekend, was actually a negative result, even though it didn't cost me anything to do.
The whole advertising scene is totally f*cked now.
I'm waiting for it to just implode, and someone comes up with something new.
In the meantime, I'm still making living money, and not paying out any to make it.
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My fear is sliding into obscurity if I stop all advertising. Since going into Select my sales ranks and author rank have trended upwards, and now I'm on that path I want to keep the momentum up. Usually I make a brief splash after a bookbub or a big promo, but this time I want to convince the Amazon algos that I'm a safe bet for the longer term.
With the AMS ads earlier this year, how did you know they weren't working? Did you determine it by sales being the same in the following week whether you advertised or not?
Were you running auto ads or manual? Lockscreen or sponsored products?
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With the AMS ads earlier this year, how did you know they weren't working? Did you determine it by sales being the same in the following week whether you advertised or not?
Were you running auto ads or manual? Lockscreen or sponsored products?
I tend to look at things on a monthly basis. There is so much sine curve about daily sales over a month, only the end total makes any real sense.
I knew it wasn't working, when a huge amount of money spent in a short time didn't change the daily pattern at all. But I tested it by stopping all ads, and the next monthly was pretty much the same without spending anything. Sometimes you just have to take the risk and stop long enough to make a comparison.
What makes me money is a release every 8 weeks or so. The longer between them, the worse things get as I keep falling off cliffs. But each release pulls me back out again. It's mailing list and followers who keep me ticking over.
All my ads were manual, and I was using 900+ keywords, going for maximum impressions across the genre. But as the bid rates went up, I stopped getting impressions on all the top 100 books in my main categories, even Space Opera. And then the bids kept going up, and the impressions kept going down.
All sponsored. I've not even tried a lockscreen since they came in.
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I usually go for a few dozen hand-picked keywords, and I sometimes run the auto targeting in the hope that Amazon knows where to display them better than I do.
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Yes, me. I’ve only ever run two ads with AMS and lost money on both of them - that is, I didn’t sell any more books above my norm, so had no increase in revenue.
Quite frankly, I don’t understand ads. I’ve been promoting ever since Pixel of Ink was the c*ck-of-the-walk of promo sites. I’ve had some good (and not so good) results with them, but my ageing brain cannot get to grips with all the ad speak, the acronyms, impressions, conversions, and so on. (If a conversion is a sale, why not call it a fricking sale, ffs? Why make things so hard, so obscure?)
There’s a guy around offering to do AMS ads for you. But he wants $1300 a month!! for doing so. My average monthly earnings (without ads) at the time was c£200. Where the hell would I get $1300 a month from?
As Tim says (and Patty J before that) the best promotion is a new book. I’ve just published the first in a new series in a different sub-category than my nom, and seen a huge increase in sales and revenue. The second in the series is due out next weekend and the third is on pre-order for next June. I shall never be a millionaire, but with any luck I shall be able to hit the low 4-figure mark on a more regular basis. If nothing else, I’ve had to pay for Book Report for the last two months. :icon_rofl:
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Don't get me wrong, I love creating ads, running them, tracking the results and so on. I'm a huge stats and figures guy, and if it was someone else's money I'd be in my element!
I just have trouble ramping up the spend.
I too am trying a new genre right now, and I have a good feeling about it. I'd still like to get the maximum out of all my other books, and I always have this nagging feeling that they'd be more popular if I could just give them a boost for a few months.
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It's wise to be frugal about ad spend. I think there are a lot of writers who lose money selling books due to the mistaken belief that if they pay to place their books high enough in the ranking, visibility will ensure ongoing sales that will put them in profit. That's what some ad gurus say, too. But many more aspects of the process need to be right for that tactic to work, not only spending plenty of dosh on ads. The book has to be in a genre that has a big readership and it needs to be written to genre, have an appropriate cover and blurb, and - these days - I think it helps a lot if the author is a familiar name. If one of these things is wrong, the writer spends a ton of money promoting their book only for it to plummet down the rankings once the ad spend is over and the author is in the red.
I stopped using AMS in July when I made the same in the UK as I had spent on AMS UK. What's the point of just giving Amazon money? It hasn't had much of an effect on my book sales as far as I can tell. Having said that, if you know your read through rate for a series it should be possible to calculate how much you can afford to spend on selling book one. For example, if you earn $10 on average for every book one you sell, you know you can afford to spend, say, $8 on selling book one and still be in profit. That's the principal many successful authors follow. Dawson currently spends thousands per month. I am too easily distracted to put in the concentrated effort required but I may get there some day.
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Don't get me wrong, I love creating ads, running them, tracking the results and so on. I'm a huge stats and figures guy, and if it was someone else's money I'd be in my element!
I just have trouble ramping up the spend.
I too am trying a new genre right now, and I have a good feeling about it. I'd still like to get the maximum out of all my other books, and I always have this nagging feeling that they'd be more popular if I could just give them a boost for a few months.
Simon, I don't think you're doing anything wrong. I think it's just that comedy science fiction isn't that popular a genre. Hitchhikers Guide was an anomaly compared to most science fiction. I noticed Barry Hutchison has switched to writing thrillers, and his sci fi series was pretty successful.
Just realised my sig gives no indication of who I am. Jenny Green here: https://www.amazon.com/J.J.-Green/e/B00QI0KDSA
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Thanks Jenny, and good to see you here. Don't forget to add your covers to your signature line ;-)
My primary focus is writing new books, which I agree is the cheapest way to generate sales.
Yesterday I spent US$45 on AMS ads and US$15 on facebook ads. Sounds like a lot if someone's advertising a single series, but I'm advertising 3 different series starters on FB ($5 ea) and five different series starters on AMS ... plus a non-fiction title. (As I already mentioned, most of the spend went into the first Hal book, but that's the one with the longest tail.)
SF humour is definitely small beans, unless you get a break-out hit that crosses genres. But they come along once in a generation, and that's not something you achieve by advertising.
But only 2 of my five series are SF humour. One is fantasy humour which is easy to target at Pratchett fans, another is middle grade (ugh) and the last is pure space opera ... which is a massive category that's almost impossible to make headway in.
Still, there's always the new series!
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It was scary at first, but I'm okay with it now. My goal for this year was to really understand ads, so I spent. I have a hard rule for myself that I can't lose any money on this business, but I'm okay with a very low net profit too. Everyone's circumstances and tolerances will vary. This venture makes me very happy (with the occasional hair pulling frustration) and it allows me to be home for the kids, volunteer at the schools a lot, and a whole lot of flexibility with my time.
Admission - They kind of hooked me when they said my very first click sold a book though.
My new book is in a small sub genre and though I can't seem to get the ad spend up, it's more profitable than the other genres I was in where I was fighting Nekid McChesty for visibility.
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I live off my royalties, so I have to be cautious not to spend today what I'm going to need in about 60-90 days time.
Hence my reluctance to really giving the advertising lever a yank.
On the other hand, if spend some of my royalties on business expenses they're a legit tax deduction. That's why I've paid to record six audiobooks this year. In theory, the tax office is contributing around 20% of that cost ... and the same with my ad spending.
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I live off my royalties, so I have to be cautious not to spend today what I'm going to need in about 60-90 days time.
Hence my reluctance to really giving the advertising lever a yank.
On the other hand, if spend some of my royalties on business expenses they're a legit tax deduction.
Me too.
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Yes totally get that. I should add that I can't produce books at the rate you guys do, so while I do agree that new releases are the best publicity, I can't capitalize on that. If I ever get big enough so all I have to do is release a book, email my followers, and let the organic visibility take it from there, well that would be pretty sweet.
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That's one of the reasons I like starting a completely new series, preferably in a different genre. More ads to run, more authors and other novels to target with keywords, and another chance of finding a new audience.
(I'm not worried about disappointing fans of the existing series, because I'm still extending those as well.)
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I only advertise anywhere about once in a blue moon, and I am not nearly confident enough about my grip on statistics to risk AMS ads, and apart from that I just don't have time to work at them. I tend to be of the 'just release a new book' school of thought too, although having said that I probably won't be in a position to release one until next year. I actually made another book in my long, long series permafree just recently to try and get more people started on the series - for some reason it has got about 2,000 downloads in a few weeks, so perhaps that is working!
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To reply to the original question, I can't see any sales ROI to buying newsletter ads for the books I'm releasing shortly. All newsletter ads except BookBub lose money. The only value is visibility.
I run Amazon ads continuously for three different kinds of books. I'm not supposed to publish three kinds of books, but I do, so there it is. I run an ad for my nonfiction title, an ad for my western romance series starter, and an ad for my most recent women's fiction title. That last costs an arm and a leg because the keywords are so expensive, but it does make a slim profit. All the Amazon ads are profitable, but their margins are too small to make me happy.
I haven't published anything in almost a year, so I'm not surprised that my sales have slowly eroded. The books I'm releasing in December and January are the fifth and sixth in a series, which frankly are unlikely to help much. Diehard fans of the series will buy these if I let them know they exist, so I do expect to tell my personal newsletter list and possibly do an AMS ad or two for a short period of time. I might even do a Kindle Countdown on an earlier book in the series, a title that I have never discounted. I am reluctant to waste a ton of cash on paid newsletter ads.
I'm paying most of my profit on visibility ads with Amazon. This is not an ideal situation, but I'd prefer to have some sales rather than none. Since the Amazon ads do generate a small profit, I'll keep doing them.
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I experimented with ads but not a single sale was due to them so I stopped. I'm lesser than a prawn...perhaps a snail? Or amoeba? so not worthwhile. Better to write more books. It's great you can live off your royalties--I'd be reluctant to spend tomorrow's too.
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I just have trouble ramping up the spend.
I know what you mean. I took Bryan Cohen's 5-Day Ad Challenge last month and it completely revamped my way of doing AMS ads. I'm getting the same or more numbers of impressions as before, and the same or more in clicks, but my ad spend has dropped significantly. I used to pay around .53 cents per click and now, it's about .22 cents. For the same number of clicks and impressions.
But, like you, something terrifies me about the "possibilities" of what could happen to my ad spend if I don't keep any eye on the spend. With all the different ads I have running now, I could conceivably hit $2200 a month in ad spend, that being $72 a day in spend. That would be if every ad I'm running maxed itself out. I'd have a heart attack if I saw that.
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But, like you, something terrifies me about the "possibilities" of what could happen to my ad spend if I don't keep any eye on the spend. With all the different ads I have running now, I could conceivably hit $2200 a month in ad spend, that being $72 a day in spend. That would be if every ad I'm running maxed itself out. I'd have a heart attack if I saw that.
That's my point exactly. For 18 months now I've been building my ad spend little by little, but I can't seem to take the next step. I'm comfortable with US$100/week for short periods, but there's no way I'm throwing US$500 out there on a chance.
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Oh I actually meant the exact opposite. I want the ads to spend more, but I can't seem to make it happen. My bad.
I'd love to get to Anarchist's level of spending and ROI but I haven't cracked the code yet. And quite possibly it wouldn't work with my inventory.
Simon - why does it have to go from $100 to $500. Why not $150?
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It's wise to be frugal about ad spend. I think there are a lot of writers who lose money selling books due to the mistaken belief that if they pay to place their books high enough in the ranking, visibility will ensure ongoing sales that will put them in profit.
That's the conclusion I came to after last month. With a significant change to the way I do my ads, I saw my impressions and clicks go up, but my spend went down. In July I had 284K impressions, in August 156K and in September 148K. July cost me a lot more than I ever wanted to spend. Now, here in October, I'm on track to see 300K impressions, a slight decrease in clicks over July's numbers, but my spend is a fraction of what July was. That's when I came to the conclusion that paying to see my ads on the first page was a waste of money. I can't point to one single sale resulting from being in on the front page of the search or sponsored ads carousel.
An impression is an impression and it doesn't matter if it happens on page one, page ten or page twenty. It's still an impression and it passed in front of a potential reader's eyeballs. I'd much rather have a person click on my book's ad on page 15 and pay .13 cents for the click than to have them see it on page one, click and buy and have that click cost me .78 cents.
That's why I dropped all dynamic bidding to the upside.
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Yeah, I learned the same lesson back when they switched everything in May (?).
I guess I should clarify. I could spend more, for the "better" placement, but I found that wasn't worth it. I'm not looking to mindless throw money at it. I want the quality of clicks and ROI I'm getting, just more of it. I don't know, it's a smaller genre I'm focusing on now, so there will a limit, I guess. If I could get in AMS UK that would be nice. Still waiting to hear back from them.
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I gave up ads altogether. My sales were equally non-existent with or without ads. The current advertising game is beyond my skill level and financial means.
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Oh I actually meant the exact opposite. I want the ads to spend more, but I can't seem to make it happen. My bad.
I'd love to get to Anarchist's level of spending and ROI but I haven't cracked the code yet. And quite possibly it wouldn't work with my inventory.
Simon - why does it have to go from $100 to $500. Why not $150?
I found that increasing the amount I'll pay for bids sure manages to spend more ...
$500 was an example. I agree that 100 to 150 to 200 or so is the natural progression. But if I took the brakes off completely across all five series I'm sure I could find a way to spend $500. (Hint - try running auto and manual ads for the same book, include ALL the books in a series in the same ad, and add all your keywords as all three types - phrase, exact and whatever the other one is.)
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include ALL the books in a series in the same ad,
:icon_eek:
How do you do that?
I've not heard of that one before.
Is it limited to a series? Or can you include a whole universe?
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You have to select the ad type with no custom text/blurb. It doesn't show all the books at once, it just picks random covers and shows one whenever you win the bid. Sometimes that can be ten of your book covers filling a carousel from the same single ad (I've seen that with my books.)
Doesn't have to be the same series.
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I didn't even know you could do that with the multiple books. Not sure it is right for me with my genre hopping/trope breaking catalog, but thanks.
I've never done an auto ad. Too much of a control freak.
I think it's phrase, exact and broad. I usually just do broad. There were some weird titles I wanted to advertise on that I tried exact but got no where.
So I guess I am back at square one, with ads I am happy with, spending sometime every week trying to find more keywords, and hoping to ramp up slowly, like so slowly you barely notice you are moving but someday you get there slowly. Can we have a llama inching along emoji?
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You have to select the ad type with no custom text/blurb. It doesn't show all the books at once, it just picks random covers and shows one whenever you win the bid. Sometimes that can be ten of your book covers filling a carousel from the same single ad (I've seen that with my books.)
Doesn't have to be the same series.
Can you show us a screen pic of the setup for that?
That might be what I've needed to get me looking at ads again.
I wonder why this was never part of an Amazon mail out to authors? Or did I miss it?
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You have to select the ad type with no custom text/blurb. It doesn't show all the books at once, it just picks random covers and shows one whenever you win the bid. Sometimes that can be ten of your book covers filling a carousel from the same single ad (I've seen that with my books.)
Doesn't have to be the same series.
Can you show us a screen pic of the setup for that?
That might be what I've needed to get me looking at ads again.
I wonder why this was never part of an Amazon mail out to authors? Or did I miss it?
It was always part of the UK advertising site and I've been using it there for 18 months.
According to this update dated 10 days ago, it's new on the US site:
https://www.kdpcommunity.com/s/article/Promote-multiple-books-in-a-Sponsored-Product-campaign?language=en_US
You can now promote multiple books in a single Sponsored Product campaign with Amazon Advertising. This means you’ll be able to:
• Advertise different formats of the same book
• Promote similar books using the same set of keywords
• Add books to existing campaigns
The last one is really handy.
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Any practical limit to the number of books you add?
I guess I'll need to try this.
Any idea if you can specify the series page asins?
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I didn't have any luck with auto ads. I ran one of each at the same time and the one with keywords out sold the auto. Mind you, I'm not a big spender, but I sometimes feel the AMS ads are better than no exposure at all.
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You have to select the ad type with no custom text/blurb. It doesn't show all the books at once, it just picks random covers and shows one whenever you win the bid. Sometimes that can be ten of your book covers filling a carousel from the same single ad (I've seen that with my books.)
Doesn't have to be the same series.
Huh. Is this how the big name authors fill the carousel with all the copies of their books? I remember Belle Andre having the first couple of pages of the carousel. I just assumed they were running ads on each book. Make that campaigns.
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It's only been available for a week, so probably not. I'm too lazy to add a blurb to all my ads, which is how I found it.
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Any practical limit to the number of books you add?
I guess I'll need to try this.
Any idea if you can specify the series page asins?
I've seen series pages show up in the left-hand list, but they're marked ineligible.
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You have to select the ad type with no custom text/blurb. It doesn't show all the books at once, it just picks random covers and shows one whenever you win the bid. Sometimes that can be ten of your book covers filling a carousel from the same single ad (I've seen that with my books.)
Doesn't have to be the same series.
Holy crap! Ya learn something new every day. Grin
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This is good news for my western series. You DO learn something new every day. Thanks.
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Ams ads are simply too complicated for me, apart from not being able to afford them. The consensus seems to be that BookBub is the only ad form worth the money. I've only had one BookBub, and it certainly was worth it. :icon_cool:
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At first, I was terrified of PPC ads. It's one thing to spend a few hundred dollars on mailing list ads during a sale. To potentially spend three figures a day? That's a huge jump.
But the month where I started Facebook ads was also the month where my income tripled. It wasn't my first five-figure month. But it was the point where five-figure months became my norm. I still have peaks and valleys, but my "baseline" is higher.
I've built up my ad spend over time.
I'm still apprehensive when I start new ads on backlist books or hard to sell books. But I always view things as a test. I'm going to give this series a week (or two) of Facebook ads at this budget. I might make a profit. Or I might lose all that money. The key is to keep the spend at something you're okay risking and to keep tweaking until you are making a profit.
AMS doesn't work well for me for most things, but it works great for one series.
Facebook works for most of my books, but some of them just don't convert.
And this one book with a tiny audience... it actually does okay with AMS, because I can hyper-target the keywords.
Advertising takes a lot of time, yes, and it takes skill. Which you build via practice and experimentation. You do need to have some money to risk, but it doesn't have to be a lot of money.
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Thanks, Simon, I'm giving it a try - on the day I was about to abandon AMS altogether and go back to sacrificing goats to win sales (at least I get a good meal out of that).
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Clarity of purpose and reluctance to spend are appropriate.
You can advertise to build or maintain brand awareness. Or you can advertise to launch an new book/series. Or you can advertise to increase or maintain sales. Etc.
The first two reasons wouldn't necessarily result in immediate sales.
Most writers discussions of advertising seem to revolve around 'I spent x; I received x +/- y; therefore I have made a profit or loss of x+/-y.' Usually there is some opinion about what sales would have been without advertising.
I think this is misconceived as a way of thinking. Sales gains from advertising are uncertain, even if there has been a history of sales gains. Circumstances change, sometimes without you being aware. The actual spend may also be unpredictable. The implication is that you should require a margin (appropriate margin depending on your circumstances) to consider that risk worthwhile - eg a spend of x requires a sales increase of 2x (or I will stop advertising or change strategy).
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I have a rule of thumb, which is this: I take my average sales per day for the week before I start advertising (let's say $100 per day to make the example nice and neat)
If I'm spending $25 per day on ads, I'd like to see my average sales from that point be around $125 per day. If it's still 100, or worse, even less, then I'll assume the ads aren't working.
That takes calculating the long-term effects of the ads out of the equation, and I can convince myself I'm not losing money.
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With the rule of familiarity, or what ever it is called, I am prepared to wait longer than a week. I calculate my royalties every morning and check it against the ad spend for that book. Royalties > ad spend, I'm happy. I do look at the individual ads and individual keywords and cull things that aren't getting sales after $10 or so spent, or 10 clicks with no sale. I'm not wildly successful by any definition so I'm not preaching this as gospel, just food for thought.
Not saying everyone has to do it this way. But I do suggest looking at your royalties and not the sales they give you on the AMS dashboard, that doesn't take the Amazon cut out of the sale and makes it look better for the author/publisher than it really is.
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I let my ads run today and they hit $63 USD for the 24-hour period. Five mins ago that dropped to $37 all of a sudden, as Amazon presumably removed bogus clicks.
I've not seen that happen before. Maybe they take out clicks where a reader is just browsing dozens of books using the 'sponsored' carousel without buying anything? Or maybe they're machine-generated clicks, or some author trying to crush all the competition by clicking competing ads whenever they see them.
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I figured I would be called paranoid if I told this story but I was getting very good placement on the overall number one book a month or so ago. I had almost 100 clicks with no sales. This is on an ad/book that I'm doing exceptionally well with (conahura, knock wood). I killed the ad and a similar thing happened with a very popular book in the genre, older book, but very high placed. I killed that ad as well. It really just didn't feel right given what I am seeing with my other ads (I run a lot very small ads, I find it easier to keep tabs on that way.) I thought of competition clicking. I'm keeping a closer watch on things now.
I can't see Amazon giving us back money spent for customer just browsing and not buying, but I'm all for it if they are listening. Fabulous idea!
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Note that I didn't contact them or complain or anything. I'm just guessing at the way they might have acted based on the help below.
If you hover over the question mark above the Spend column you'll see this:
Spend
The total click charges for a campaign.
Note: Once identified, it may take up to 3 days to remove invalid clicks from your spend statistics. Date ranges that include spend from the last 3 days may be adjusted due to click and spend invalidation.
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Good to know.
I didn't contact them or complain either, it just felt wrong and I didn't like the direction the ad was heading in so I shut it down.
I don't download the data into spreadsheets, and I can't see any easy way to keep track of spends from a couple of days ago, so I guess I will just be happy if I end up more profitable at the end of the month.
I don't click on ads for sponsored books, author courtesy. :) I open up a new window and search.
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I don't click on ads for sponsored books, author courtesy. :) I open up a new window and search.
Oh yes, same here.
Everywhere else I have adblock, but it's disabled on Amazon so I can see my own ads when necessary.
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You can now promote multiple books in a single Sponsored Product campaign with Amazon Advertising. This means you’ll be able to:
• Advertise different formats of the same book
• Promote similar books using the same set of keywords
• Add books to existing campaigns
I started looking at combining some of my ad campaigns by doing this, until I thought a little more about it. By doing this, you lose the italicized blurb that's part of your ad. Now, the question would be, how much of a difference does that blurb make in your advertising? I would think that someone that leaves that blurb out is relying solely on their cover and title to get a potential reader to click on the ad.
I'm going to have to think about this a little more. Obviously, I could run some A/B tests to see which works better.
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I've been leaving the blurb out for a while now. The ads activate very quickly if you leave it off (pretty much processed automatically.)
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Do you think it makes a difference? Ad copy or no ad copy that is. I will admit when I found out that you couldn't do ad copy in the UK or Germany it was a hmmm moment for me. But I still haven't gotten into the UK AMS.
Side note - I saw what probably was one of those multi book ads last night, on a thriller page.
Page 3 - 2 books
Page 4 - 5 books
Page 5 - 3 books
It certainly got my attention. I think it could be a really good thing to add to a launch, if it is the next in a series, or in the same genre. Neither of which apply to me.
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If the cover matches the genre you're targeting, I don't think it matters.
I'll try duplicating my ad with no blurb and multiple covers, making it book one with a blurb. Then I'll run it with the same settings and see how it converts.
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If the cover matches the genre you're targeting, I don't think it matters.
I'll try duplicating my ad with no blurb and multiple covers, making it book one with a blurb. Then I'll run it with the same settings and see how it converts.
As someone who doesn't do ads, but who sees them, I haven't noticed the text ever tempting me. It's always the cover, author, etc. Most of the time, the text just turns me away. Not many people can do tempting ad text. Probably cuts down on clicks though, if that's what a person wants (and sometimes it is, I'm sure!). :D
Good luck with this experiment. I'll be watching for your results!
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I stopped a few months ago. I made a very slim profit from the ads I was running until the cost per click went up and my ads stopped spending. I upped my bids and a slim profit went to a slim loss and I stopped running ads and started looking for alternatives.
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I'm doing a test at the moment, with 21 books on the ad, using auto targeting, and a $20 spend, with a 75c bid, and the down option on.
In over a day of being live, they've spent $1.80. And it's had a tad over 2,000 impressions, with zero other stats.
Looks like a total waste of time to me.
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I would guess showing five books on one page of the sponsored ad carousel will drive the impressions up pretty quick.
I wonder what readers will think of it over time. It's not offering them a lot of different (to them) options. Will they tune it out eventually?
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I'm doing a test at the moment, with 21 books on the ad, using auto targeting, and a $20 spend, with a 75c bid, and the down option on.
In over a day of being live, they've spent $1.80. And it's had a tad over 2,000 impressions, with zero other stats.
Looks like a total waste of time to me.
You have to activate the hidden columns. (e.g. Clicks, CTR, CPC)
Click the Columns V button to the left of the date selector, then choose Customise Columns, and add those three at the very least. Next, I suggest removing portfolio, start date, strategy.
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What a stupidly designed page. :HB :rant :doh:
So getting some info, but all it does is highlight even more the lack of successful bids.
75c is as high as I will go these days. Above that is just ridiculous.
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It's only a bid, not the actual price paid (usually). I'm bidding 75c on a different category but the average of my 11 clicks is only 50c.
Have you calculated your sell-through percentage and the amount you earn each time someone buys book 1 in any one of your series?
For example, I know that every time someone buys Peace Force, on average I will earn $9.80 profit. (Based on the average readthrough from one book to the next, and the royalty on the three books in the series.) For page reads on the same series, it's $6.30, but that data is very new and subject to change.
So, I can afford to spend almost $10 to get one sale of Peace Force, and I'll still break even. Not going to do that, obviously, but even if I spend $2 for 3 clicks leading to one sale I'm almost $8 ahead.
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What a total waste of time.
Almost no impressions overnight, didn't even spend a $1, and both sales and reads totally tanked. No idea if there is any causality, but its a serious sign that AMS is a total broken joke.
:dizzy :shrug :tap
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If you're prepared to throw $20 at it, why not try a bid of 95c and see what happens for 24 hours?
Also, are you using manual targeting or auto? If manual, how many keywords?
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If you're prepared to throw $20 at it, why not try a bid of 95c and see what happens for 24 hours?
Also, are you using manual targeting or auto? If manual, how many keywords?
Auto. I'd never tried that before.
All the bids which got a click were less than 75c. Going up to 95c, wouldn't appear to change it. My gut tells me all you get for less than $2 bids, is the dregs end of KU books, or ranks below 500k.
I used to use manual with 950-1000 keywords. But my list is way out of date. Might be worth a try though, since anything current is going to be commanding $2+.
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I figured I would be called paranoid if I told this story but I was getting very good placement on the overall number one book a month or so ago. I had almost 100 clicks with no sales. This is on an ad/book that I'm doing exceptionally well with (conahura, knock wood). I killed the ad and a similar thing happened with a very popular book in the genre, older book, but very high placed. I killed that ad as well. It really just didn't feel right given what I am seeing with my other ads (I run a lot very small ads, I find it easier to keep tabs on that way.) I thought of competition clicking. I'm keeping a closer watch on things now.
I can't see Amazon giving us back money spent for customer just browsing and not buying, but I'm all for it if they are listening. Fabulous idea!
I had this happen recently as well on two different ads. It was very strange. On one of them about half the clicks have since disappeared but that was still a lot of clicks with no sales.
Fortunately I keep a pretty close eye on my ads which I can do because I don't run many. For a long time I only ran one. Now I am running two.
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If you're prepared to throw $20 at it, why not try a bid of 95c and see what happens for 24 hours?
Also, are you using manual targeting or auto? If manual, how many keywords?
Auto. I'd never tried that before.
All the bids which got a click were less than 75c. Going up to 95c, wouldn't appear to change it. My gut tells me all you get for less than $2 bids, is the dregs end of KU books, or ranks below 500k.
I used to use manual with 950-1000 keywords. But my list is way out of date. Might be worth a try though, since anything current is going to be commanding $2+.
I don't believe that's how the bidding works. You have to bid higher than those above you in the carousel, but the actual cost of the click is usually lower than the bid.
So, if 99% of people are bidding 75c, because it's a nice round number, you can bid 76c and get ahead of them.
In my experience, Auto ads can take a day or three to fire up. It's like Amazon is deciding where to show them
I've had an auto ad hit the spend limit three days running, and yesterday it wouldn't even start showing ads.
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Submitted a new add.
99c bid. $25 day.
996 keywords, but not containing anything new.
18 books, being my best covers only.
Sponsored, down only.
Give it a few days and see what happens.
Each time I do this, it gives me a totally different average. Damned tab crashed twice trying to paste in 1000 keywords, and each time I got a different bid suggestion. I don't think Amazon has a clue what to recommend. They just pluck a number out of a bot's arse.
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I don't use down bidding because in my experience, and this may or may not apply to other genres, Amazon hasn't a clue about what people are likely to buy.
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I don't know whether it's just me and my frugal ways, but I can't seem to get over the fear of wasting money on ads.
Me too -- I'm the Scrooge McDuck of the book advertising world.
Also, keyword analysis confuses and frustrates me. Heck, my books don't even fit neatly into categories, I'm not sure my covers are genre-appropriate -- add all that into the mix, and it's hard to decide and spend on keywords.
Most of the above points are why 'wide' suits me best, and this will likely be my last 90-day stint in Select.
My most successful ad was for my Zap Anxiety book -- but only at first -- I set it to auto with ridiculously low bids, and it sold well for the first week (of ads) then fizzled out.
I've got a few ads starting today for the UK market -- first in each series and set to auto. I'll try some manual targeting too -- based on authors and book titles -- probably.
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I figured I would be called paranoid if I told this story but I was getting very good placement on the overall number one book a month or so ago. I had almost 100 clicks with no sales. This is on an ad/book that I'm doing exceptionally well with (conahura, knock wood). I killed the ad and a similar thing happened with a very popular book in the genre, older book, but very high placed. I killed that ad as well. It really just didn't feel right given what I am seeing with my other ads (I run a lot very small ads, I find it easier to keep tabs on that way.) I thought of competition clicking. I'm keeping a closer watch on things now.
I can't see Amazon giving us back money spent for customer just browsing and not buying, but I'm all for it if they are listening. Fabulous idea!
I had this happen recently as well on two different ads. It was very strange. On one of them about half the clicks have since disappeared but that was still a lot of clicks with no sales.
Fortunately I keep a pretty close eye on my ads which I can do because I don't run many. For a long time I only ran one. Now I am running two.
I went back and checked the ad I archived and it still has the 90 clicks showing on it. So maybe they were real clicks, maybe the bots were fooled, or maybe they didn't check it.
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I don't use down bidding because in my experience, and this may or may not apply to other genres, Amazon hasn't a clue about what people are likely to buy.
Do you use fixed bids?
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I don't believe that's how the bidding works. You have to bid higher than those above you in the carousel, but the actual cost of the click is usually lower than the bid.
So, if 99% of people are bidding 75c, because it's a nice round number, you can bid 76c and get ahead of them.
I always bid round numbers, ending in 5 or 0. Thanks for the tip Simon. Note to self - duh.
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Damned tab crashed twice trying to paste in 1000 keywords, and each time I got a different bid suggestion.
Yeah, I had that happen, too. You have to split your keyword lists into two or more lists. I just started a set of ads with 1206 keywords, so I broke that down into two ads with 603 keywords each and it worked fine. This keyword list was based off the YASIV website and twelve authors. That leaves me plenty of room to go back and add another author if I like and their YASIV findings without having to start any new campaigns.
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This is making my head hurt. I've just launched one ad with auto targeting covering five books. Low daily budget $6 and low bid $0.31 cents. I always bid on the number at least one up from a round number. People don't like a number like 26 but I've used it successfully in the past. I'll report back.
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Damned tab crashed twice trying to paste in 1000 keywords, and each time I got a different bid suggestion.
Yeah, I had that happen, too. You have to split your keyword lists into two or more lists. I just started a set of ads with 1206 keywords, so I broke that down into two ads with 603 keywords each and it worked fine. This keyword list was based off the YASIV website and twelve authors. That leaves me plenty of room to go back and add another author if I like and their YASIV findings without having to start any new campaigns.
Thanks, Glenn. I was trying to remember YASIV.
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All I get on Yasiv is the pics of the books linked by all the lines. Is there someway to download a list from there?
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All I get on Yasiv is the pics of the books linked by all the lines. Is there someway to download a list from there?
I take nearby titles and enter them into KDP Rocket (okay, Publisher Rocket)
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All I get on Yasiv is the pics of the books linked by all the lines. Is there someway to download a list from there?
There's a list on the right side. It does include book covers, but also has the titles and subtitles. Unfortunately, the list doesn't include author's names. I haven't figured out how to export it. I just copy and paste it into a Word doc and spend time deleting the images.
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It also shows all the categories a given book is in, which is incredibly useful.
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It also shows all the categories a given book is in, which is incredibly useful.
You can also sort the book list by rank.
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All I get on Yasiv is the pics of the books linked by all the lines. Is there someway to download a list from there?
You don't see a page that looks like this? If not, there is probably a setting somewhere that isn't turned on the way it should be.
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There's a list on the right side. It does include book covers, but also has the titles and subtitles. Unfortunately, the list doesn't include author's names. I haven't figured out how to export it. I just copy and paste it into a Word doc and spend time deleting the images.
Cut and paste them into a spreadsheet, using the Paste Special - Unformatted Text (LibreOffice). If you're using Excel it's Paste Special - Text. Viola! No pictures. It also makes it easy to resort and get rid of the 24 products point here part of the line.
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There's a list on the right side. It does include book covers, but also has the titles and subtitles. Unfortunately, the list doesn't include author's names. I haven't figured out how to export it. I just copy and paste it into a Word doc and spend time deleting the images.
Cut and paste them into a spreadsheet, using the Paste Special - Unformatted Text (LibreOffice). If you're using Excel it's Paste Special - Text. Viola! No pictures. It also makes it easy to resort and get rid of the 24 products point here part of the line.
Oh, thanks so much for that. Saves a lot of work. Off to try it.
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All I get on Yasiv is the pics of the books linked by all the lines. Is there someway to download a list from there?
You don't see a page that looks like this? If not, there is probably a setting somewhere that isn't turned on the way it should be.
That's what I get. Thanks for the tip on excel.
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All I get on Yasiv is the pics of the books linked by all the lines. Is there someway to download a list from there?
You don't see a page that looks like this? If not, there is probably a setting somewhere that isn't turned on the way it should be.
That's what I get. Thanks for the tip on excel.
Just tried Glenn's tip and it works great. Now I'm culling same series from the list.
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So I just cancelled the latest ad. It spent the day cap, plus a bit, and the day's money is well DOWN.
The whole system just feels like a scam to me.
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I started my ad on Oct 3 and with page reads and a couple of sales, I've actually made $2.02. Now that could translate into Starbucks money, except since I added some keywords a week ago, I haven't had a single click. I had 12 clicks for about 1100 impressions, and now nothing. Totally flat line.
Not worried. I was going to start another ad anyway. At least I'm not losing money and I still have my $2.02. No enough for Starbucks, but I can get two cups of McD's coffee with my senior discount. :littleclap
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My brand new ad shows 0 results of any kind so far.
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So I just cancelled the latest ad. It spent the day cap, plus a bit, and the day's money is well DOWN.
The whole system just feels like a scam to me.
Sorry it didn't work for you. Can you check the rank for that book to see if there are any new borrows?
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Sorry it didn't work for you. Can you check the rank for that book to see if there are any new borrows?
None. If anything, the rank slipped back in spite of 11 clicks.
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I just watched yesterday's Self Publishing Show on Youtube and they interviewed Amanda Lee. She was talking about her advertising and she is pretty much, exclusively AMS. What I found interesting is that she said she starts a campaign and then just lets it go. She doesn't play with it, she doesn't adjust it or anything like that. She just sets it and forgets it.
She said she doesn't do much of anything with Bookbub or Facebook ads. Her main advertising avenue is New Releases and at the rate she releases books, I can see why it works for her. She also said she spends about $5000 a month on advertising, which I would assume is mostly AMS.
She also said her daily routine is a table at Starbucks for about three hours. That's about how long it take for her to get 9000 words done. She is my new hero. Sorry Stephen. :icon_redface:
If you didn't see the show, here it is. Now, I'm off to Starbucks. :cool: (Next week is Jeff Wheeler)
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I'm doing one last trial, totally differently. Just curious as to what will happen, although probably nothing will.
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Am I spending too much for the results I'm getting? Yes, almost certainly. Do I believe writing more novels pays off better than ads in the long run? Yep.
But I can work on ads when I'm not able to write for one reason or another, and it's a productive use of my time.
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I just watched yesterday's Self Publishing Show on Youtube and they interviewed Amanda Lee...her daily routine is a table at Starbucks for about three hours. That's about how long it take for her to get 9000 words done. She is my new hero.
Ah, so Starbucks is the key! That explains my paltry success - I'm allergic to coffee. But now I can shake off my writing blues, give three cheers for Amanda and get back to :writethink:.
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Ah, so Starbucks is the key! That explains my paltry success - I'm allergic to coffee. But now I can shake off my writing blues, give three cheers for Amanda and get back to :writethink:.
I don't drink coffee either, but they do have other drinks, such as hot chocolate. I just got back and three hours and one hot chocolate later, I'm 3000+ words further along in my WIP. :cheers
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Ah, so Starbucks is the key! That explains my paltry success - I'm allergic to coffee. But now I can shake off my writing blues, give three cheers for Amanda and get back to :writethink:.
I don't drink coffee either, but they do have other drinks, such as hot chocolate. I just got back and three hours and one hot chocolate later, I'm 3000+ words further along in my WIP. :cheers
My inspiration was Panera. Spinach/Artichoke souffle, hot tea with lemon and two hours of writing. Don't think I'll ever reach 2K/hour, but I can do about 1200/hr.
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I'm trying something new, which is to add all my humorous novels to the best-performing ad, and then pausing the other ads for those particular novels.
So, three series in one ad, instead of one good ad for one series and two meh ads for the other two.
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So far, my new ad has had 30 views. That's pathetic. OTOH, it hasn't cost me a dime, since with a paltry number of views there haven't been any clicks, either.
I can't work at cafes. The chairs are too hard, and the long drive to get to one isn't worth it. Just like swimming for exercise for half an hour but having to drive an hour for the experience, the cafe thing doesn't compute for me.
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So far, my new ad has had 30 views.
My current test still isn't a day old yet, but has had 1800 views, and 4 clicks, costing me 90c. 12 books, dynamic, $20 a day, but only 20c bid.
I'm going to leave it going for a few days and see if it goes anywhere.
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I'm very frustrated with AMS and feel like it's a bit of a money pit. There was a recent article by Written Word Media claiming authors thought AMS was more effective than BookBub ads. For one reason or another, I really like BookBub better. I like creating ads and I like their wide reach.
I sold about 17 books through AMS during a major promo, but the minute I charged as much of a latte for my new book, I heard the sound of silence. It's the silence that made me give up on AMS last time.
The problem I have with ads is that the moment you get a sale, you jump up and down and figure "oh, it's working" grint. So then you keep going with it. And then you lose more. It's a bit like gambling for me. Well, the gambling's gonna stop. For now anyway.
(Incidentally, I'm a total newbie here on writersanctum and this is my first post so please forgive any problems with my signature (just put it up today!).)
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Following Simon's lead, I created an ad that encompassed three novels (Chronicles of Wyndweir) that I started 48 hours ago. I paused The Tales of Garlan, which is the prequel to the Chronicles. I paused it with 27K impressions and 11 clicks and $2.81 in spend and no sales, but a couple of borrows. Definitely not something to get all excited about.
The new ad, after 48 hours, has 7500 impressions, 8 clicks, about three or four borrows, but no sales yet. Spend is a $1.94 on that ad. This tells me I should hit 100K impressions in a month, 120+ clicks and spend about $30. So, in terms of impressions, clicks, CTR and CPC I'd say I'm happy with the new ad. I'm thinking in the next day or so I'll do the same thing with my Cold Shivers Nightmare ads and see how those work.
Understand that my budget is only $2 per day per campaign. The Chronicles portfolio has four ads in it, so that is a budget of $8 per day between them. I think I really need to fine-tune my blurbs. That is one thing that concerns me about this method of advertising. The potential buyer has only your cover thumbnail and title to go on when they see the ad. If they get to the book's page and the blurb doesn't grab them, they will click away and it will be a wasted click paid for.
Now, as Chris Fox would say, I need to get back to the writing. :writethink: :haironfire
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I spent the whole day tweaking the title font on ten novels and three omnibus editions. Still fine tuning and perfecting, as always...
I'm also expanding my bookbub cpc ads, because I managed to get one creative to convert better than most I've tried in the past.
And yes, the blurbs on the product page are key. I'll buy an interesting-sounding book with an average cover, but I won't buy a beautiful cover with a dull blurb. (Leaving aside the writing in the first chapter, which is a whole different matter.)
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Heh. If anyone's keen to leave the little league of AMS and step into the pirahna pool that is BB CPC ads... here's my experience.
I've been running a campaign with a 75c CPC rate across four countries (UK/US/CA/AU). I set a $40 budget and told them to spend it over a week.
Well, the clickthrough was pretty good so I cloned the ad, changed the bid to a higher amount, and told them to spend $50 as quickly as possible.
I think it took 4 minutes.
90% of the clicks were UK readers. I scored 7 sales at $3.99 each, and no idea on borrows.
However, each of those $3.99 sales is worth $16.27 in average readthrough royalties on this particular series, so by all accounts I'm $114 up, minus the $50 spend.
(Just kidding about AMS being little league, but wow, can it take a while to spend the budget there.)
ETA: the stats were lagging and they just added a huge number of impressions and clicks.
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Heh. If anyone's keen to leave the little league of AMS and step into the pirahna pool that is BB CPC ads... here's my experience.
I've been running a campaign with a 75c CPC rate across four countries (UK/US/CA/AU). I set a $40 budget and told them to spend it over a week.
Well, the clickthrough was pretty good so I cloned the ad, changed the bid to a higher amount, and told them to spend $50 as quickly as possible.
I think it took 4 minutes.
90% of the clicks were UK readers. I scored 7 sales at $3.99 each, and no idea on borrows.
However, each of those $3.99 sales is worth $16.27 in average readthrough royalties on this particular series, so by all accounts I'm $114 up, minus the $50 spend.
(Just kidding about AMS being little league, but wow, can it take a while to spend the budget there.)
ETA: the stats were lagging and they just added a huge number of impressions and clicks.
Bookbub does really good for international sales. I had a recent run of $25 profit in Australia for one of my titles. As you know, you can't track whether the sale was from Bookbub or elswhere, but where else could it be from Australia? That being said, that ad ran me $100. So that's 25% profit. Measly, and fits the title of your post. It's also interesting to note that the minute an ad gains traction in one country or another, it seems to build on itself. Is it from people telling others 'bout it? Or is the bots sending it the same direction? Don't know.
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...
I've been running a campaign with a 75c CPC rate across four countries (UK/US/CA/AU). I set a $40 budget and told them to spend it over a week.
Well, the clickthrough was pretty good so I cloned the ad, changed the bid to a higher amount, and told them to spend $50 as quickly as possible.
I think it took 4 minutes.
...
ETA: the stats were lagging and they just added a huge number of impressions and clicks.
Since you are getting such a good reaction, would that be an indication that a CPM campaign at a low bid (say $7/1000) would be more profitable?
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I just watched yesterday's Self Publishing Show on Youtube and they interviewed Amanda Lee (notthatamanda Grin). She was talking about her advertising and she is pretty much, exclusively AMS. What I found interesting is that she said she starts a campaign and then just lets it go. She doesn't play with it, she doesn't adjust it or anything like that. She just sets it and forgets it.
She said she doesn't do much of anything with Bookbub or Facebook ads. Her main advertising avenue is New Releases and at the rate she releases books, I can see why it works for her. She also said she spends about $5000 a month on advertising, which I would assume is mostly AMS.
She also said her daily routine is a table at Starbucks for about three hours. That's about how long it take for her to get 9000 words done. She is my new hero. Sorry Stephen. :icon_redface:
I'm not Amanda Lee. I'd appreciate it if you edit your post to clarify that. Also, for the record, I prefer Dunkins.
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Cruller Donuts!!!!! Now you made me hungry!
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I'm not Amanda Lee. I'd appreciate it if you edit your post to clarify that. Also, for the record, I prefer Dunkins.
Actually, that's why I included NOTthatamanda in parenthesis.
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Okay, I misunderstood. Thanks.
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(Incidentally, I'm a total newbie here on writersanctum and this is my first post so please forgive any problems with my signature (just put it up today!).)
Welcome to the site. :cheers
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(Incidentally, I'm a total newbie here on writersanctum and this is my first post so please forgive any problems with my signature (just put it up today!).)
Welcome to the site. :cheers
Thanks! Happy to be here.
Had some trouble with my signature this morning and Timothy Ellis promptly fixed it. Grin
I am TOTALLY into your guys' emojis, by the way :dance: :ws
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For whatever it's worth, which isn't much but that's never stopped me before, I started two ads last week a couple days after publishing my latest book. Also, for whatever it's worth, when I published my latest, I went ahead and put it in Select as well as all of my other books. They've all been out of Select since around January, so I figured it's only 90 days and I can see if my previous books get any benefit from the new release. The new book is priced at $4.99 which, given its length (250k words), I figured that was a reasonable price.
Anyway, both ads are for the same new release. One is with Amazon's auto targeting and the other uses keywords I picked. So far, I don't think there are any impressions on the auto ad. Mine has around 90 but no clicks. So, kind of a bust either way. I wish I was better at picking keywords. I used my knowledge from past PPC ads as well as information I read in the thread but clearly I've lost whatever magic touch I thought I used to have.
I have a low budget, under $6/day, and I don't have high bids either. Been burnt on high bids before, so I'd rather bid low and let my ads display on page five or wherever. Maybe that's a bad strategy but the opposite hasn't worked so I figured I'd give it a go.
I'll let the ads run a few more days to give them a chance but I'm not optimistic so far, which is a bit disappointing as I figured this book might do better than previous ones so I wanted to do ads to give it a fair shot.
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How do I change the status of an ad to archive? And if I do that, will it still show on the list or will it drop to the bottom?
I tried following Amazon's instructions but they lead nowhere.
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You go to the campaign, go to campaign settings on the left. Under the active/pause button there is an archive campaign in blue. Click that, it will ask you to confirm.
Seeing archive campaigns in your dash is dependent on how you are filtering them for active status.
You can filter all but archived, enabled, several options, just save the one you pick or it won't take it. You can always look through archived campaigns again, I think you just can do anything with them, I haven't tried, but that was my impression.
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You go to the campaign, go to campaign settings on the left. Under the active/pause button there is an archive campaign in blue. Click that, it will ask you to confirm.
Seeing archive campaigns in your dash is dependent on how you are filtering them for active status.
You can filter all but archived, enabled, several options, just save the one you pick or it won't take it. You can always look through archived campaigns again, I think you just can do anything with them, I haven't tried, but that was my impression.
Perfect. Thank you.
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Inspired by this thread, I've just started my first series AMS ads - I suck at advertising, and find it difficult to get AMS to spend my money, although I do think the very limited effort I've put in so far has been helpful in keeping my books from sinking into telephone number rankings.
Will be interested to see how this goes.
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Good luck.
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After four days, my first multi-title Amazon ad with automatic targeting has produced 56 impressions and nothing else. I'm not going to pause it just yet, but I have started a new multi-title ad with all the same parameters: 5 titles in the series, $6 a day budget, 0.31 keyword bids (broad), and a couple hundred keywords plus 45 negative keywords to keep the people wanting "Christian" and "free" books from seeing the ad. No blurb copy. I have a separate ad for the first book (now called the prequel) in the series; these two ads are for the others and they include two pre-order titles.
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I've just paused the auto-targeting multi-book ad test. In one week it only received 166 impressions.
By contrast, the new version with manual targeting and about 275 keywords has nearly 25k impressions already after four days and is credited (by the super slow Amazon ads dashboard) with one sale.
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It's funny, because I had an auto-targeted ad that went wild each day, spending my budget and more, while the manual targeted ad did next to nothing.
Right now I'm running a whole mix of different ads.
When I was a kid I used to play darts, and sometimes AMS feels just the same only now I have a blindfold on.
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I've just paused the auto-targeting multi-book ad test. In one week it only received 166 impressions.
By contrast, the new version with manual targeting and about 275 keywords has nearly 25k impressions already after four days and is credited (by the super slow Amazon ads dashboard) with one sale.
Was the new version also a multi-book ad?
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I've just paused the auto-targeting multi-book ad test. In one week it only received 166 impressions.
By contrast, the new version with manual targeting and about 275 keywords has nearly 25k impressions already after four days and is credited (by the super slow Amazon ads dashboard) with one sale.
Was the new version also a multi-book ad?
Yes, it's the same ad, and I didn't write any ad copy for it, so it's really a true test of the auto targeting versus my own choice of keywords. Targeting for western romance ought to be relatively straightforward, too, so no idea why Amazon basically didn't run the first version.
It took 20 clicks to get that 1 sale with the second version and that's worse than I ever get with my other ads. The ones that work, that is. As Simon says, it's a dartboard.
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My ads end tonight. As of right now, my auto-targeted ad had 2 impressions and nothing else. My manual targeted ad had 361 impressions, 1 click and no sales. The book has had one sale so far and that was due to the mailing I sent out to my list this morning.
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My ads end tonight. As of right now, my auto-targeted ad had 2 impressions and nothing else. My manual targeted ad had 361 impressions, 1 click and no sales. The book has had one sale so far and that was due to the mailing I sent out to my list this morning.
Oh, bummer. You're so funny, too. There's got to be an audience for your books. Maybe you should hand sell!
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The only auto targeted ads I've ever had that got any amount of impressions was my category ads. Looking at a multi-book ad I started a week ago, it has just over 31K impressions, 30 clicks and no listed sales, but a few borrows that I would attribute to it.
Looking at the guts of that ad, the Auto Category campaign has well over 15K impressions and 10 impressions. The other three campaigns in that portfolio split the remainder of the impressions and clicks and they are all manual, keywords and authors.
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The campaign ended with 394 impressions, 1 click and no sales.
Still only the one sale so far but, on the plus side, that means that 6% of the people on my list that (reportedly) opened the message bought it.
My ads end tonight. As of right now, my auto-targeted ad had 2 impressions and nothing else. My manual targeted ad had 361 impressions, 1 click and no sales. The book has had one sale so far and that was due to the mailing I sent out to my list this morning.
Oh, bummer. You're so funny, too. There's got to be an audience for your books. Maybe you should hand sell!
Thanks.
I really thought this one would sell too, especially around Halloween time since it involves wizards, vampires and aliens.
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I've decided to run a few tests on ad effectiveness. Instead of running simultaneous ads on all my series starters, I'm going to cycle between them over several days. If the ads are working, then the book currently being targeted should get the most borrows and sales, right? And if the others begin to flag over the days they're not being advertised, on 'their' ad day they ought to get a jump.
(Yesterday I fired up an ad on a series starter which I'd neglected for a week. Overnight it became my most-read title, and I can't believe that's all due to the blurb I updated yesterday.)
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I killed my second multi-book test. It got 36k impressions but only one sale and ACOS was 262%. Ouch. I might revive it when both my newest books release, strictly for visibility instead of sales. Viewed in that light, it is a cheap ad venue. Otherwise, meh.
I suppose I should have waited until the weekend--prime buying time--was over, but some days it just seems as if Amazon is picking my pocket. Emotional decisions are as valid as any others.
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Thank you all for the chance to see what you've tried with AMS but nothing seems to work for me, and certainly not to the (well, modest) scale I'd hoped. So I'm bailing on AMS after much effort, money and frustration to focus on re-upgrading my keywords. If that helps boost sales, may take another crack at AMS.
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I've decided to run a few tests on ad effectiveness. Instead of running simultaneous ads on all my series starters, I'm going to cycle between them over several days. If the ads are working, then the book currently being targeted should get the most borrows and sales, right? And if the others begin to flag over the days they're not being advertised, on 'their' ad day they ought to get a jump.
(Yesterday I fired up an ad on a series starter which I'd neglected for a week. Overnight it became my most-read title, and I can't believe that's all due to the blurb I updated yesterday.)
Can I ask what you mean by fired up? Was it paused, did you add keywords, did you increase bids? I ask because if I pause and restart an ad, or start a new one, it does not take off overnight. Takes a couple of days to even start getting some traction. Also if anyone knows where you can buy some patience, send me a link.
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Sorry, I meant launched.
I do tend to start ads with higher bids than I'd like to, and then I wind them back as they start to spend all my money.
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Well that is still useful. I'll be starting a bunch of ads tonight so I will deliberate the "higher than I like" option. Do you find the actual cost per click lower than your bids or is it all over the place depending on everything else?
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Usually it's lower, yes. Maybe try one of those ads with the higher than usual option, but be prepared to rein it in (or set a low budget). I've noticed stats can take hours to update, too.
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That's a good idea. I usually set my budget high, but if I do high bids and set a lower budget, it will alert me. Thanks.
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Do you guys fluctuate the bid for only a few hours? In other words, try a large bid of $50 for 1-2 hrs, then bring it back to $5? Anybody see a benefit of this, or is Amazon already on top of this with their algorithms?
I tried it a few times without much luck during peak hrs, but I did notice a slight increase in clicks (no sales).
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I tend to go in at the upper end of the suggested range and dial it back to the midpoint (or lower) once the impressions are ticking over.
But I'm getting lots of clicks and no sales on my middle-grade series, so maybe I'm not the best to ask!
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At the risk of sounding completely out of touch (which I probably am), how does one set up a multi-book ad? I've longed to be able to do something like that for years, and when I saw references to them here, I thought, "Wow, I missed that memo." I then went to my AMS account and tried to set up a multi-book ad, but I see no references to such a thing, and as soon as I add one book to a new campaign, I get, "You have added the maximum number of products."
Clearly, I'm missing something.
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You have to select the option without ad copy.
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Thanks! I'll have to try that.
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Do you guys fluctuate the bid for only a few hours? In other words, try a large bid of $50 for 1-2 hrs, then bring it back to $5? Anybody see a benefit of this, or is Amazon already on top of this with their algorithms?
I tried it a few times without much luck during peak hrs, but I did notice a slight increase in clicks (no sales).
You mean budget right, not bid? No I haven't but I have heard that I higher budget makes the algos think you are more serious about it. I kind of believe that is true, but I think there are other criteria that are more important. Just my prawny opinion.
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I tend to go in at the upper end of the suggested range and dial it back to the midpoint (or lower) once the impressions are ticking over.
But I'm getting lots of clicks and no sales on my middle-grade series, so maybe I'm not the best to ask!
Ii though middle grade was completely impenetrable thanks to something taxpayer something Scholastic. So don't feel too bad. ;)
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I tend to go in at the upper end of the suggested range and dial it back to the midpoint (or lower) once the impressions are ticking over.
But I'm getting lots of clicks and no sales on my middle-grade series, so maybe I'm not the best to ask!
I started an experiment on the 1st, where I dropped all of my campaigns from .30 cents to .20 cents across the board. My impressions have dropped, but only by about 10%. I fully expect impressions to get back to where they were before the drop once the ads have been running for a few days and start getting some traction.
I misspoke. I dropped all the campaigns, EXCEPT for the author ads. Those I left at .30 cents. If I get 30 impressions in a day on the author campaigns I feel like they've had a good day. But, the category and keyword ads have all been dropped.
One thing I have noticed since going to the lower bids near the end of September is, I seem to be selling quite a few more paperbacks. Not sure what that's all about. And the paperbacks have the worst looking blurbs of the two types.
Is anyone else having a problem getting their paperback blurbs to show with the formatting you put in? I use the Author Central dashboard to do my blurbs and the ebook blurbs look fine, but the paperback blurbs lose all their formatting and get jammed into one long paragraph.
Curiouser and curiouser.
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Yeah, middle grade is a wash, but I loved writing the books and I am very, very stubborn.
Also, my then-publisher didn't want the series because they said the first was aimed too much at boys instead of both genders, which they believed cut the potential market in half. (The first book features two boys saving a space station together, with the help of a female technician. Book two has a boy and a girl saving the space station together. Book three has two boys going camping alone together, AND they don't even have to save a space station. With book four I managed to get a whole bunch of kids together to... save the space station.)
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I tend to go in at the upper end of the suggested range and dial it back to the midpoint (or lower) once the impressions are ticking over.
But I'm getting lots of clicks and no sales on my middle-grade series, so maybe I'm not the best to ask!
I started an experiment on the 1st, where I dropped all of my campaigns from .30 cents to .20 cents across the board. My impressions have dropped, but only by about 10%. I fully expect impressions to get back to where they were before the drop once the ads have been running for a few days and start getting some traction.
I misspoke. I dropped all the campaigns, EXCEPT for the author ads. Those I left at .30 cents. If I get 30 impressions in a day on the author campaigns I feel like they've had a good day. But, the category and keyword ads have all been dropped.
One thing I have noticed since going to the lower bids near the end of September is, I seem to be selling quite a few more paperbacks. Not sure what that's all about. And the paperbacks have the worst looking blurbs of the two types.
Is anyone else having a problem getting their paperback blurbs to show with the formatting you put in? I use the Author Central dashboard to do my blurbs and the ebook blurbs look fine, but the paperback blurbs lose all their formatting and get jammed into one long paragraph.
Curiouser and curiouser.
I found that targeting categories only shows book (ie paperback) categories, not kindle ones. So, if you advertise against categories, you're targeting paperback buyers.
I have an email in to KDP support about this, because on the UK site you can target kindle AND book categories.
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One thing I noticed in categories is that if I set a price minimum, it would totally disregard the kindle price limit I set if the paper format or audio was higher than the limit, it would display it there. But maybe I am missing something because I wasn't able to target by format. I'll have to check tonight if they changed something. I tried product ads, eg, focusing on a specific hardcover book, but those almost never get impressions.
DG - does Amazon make more $ off your paperbacks than the ebooks? That's one of my theories, that the algos like ads for products they'll make more on.
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One thing I noticed in categories is that if I set a price minimum, it would totally disregard the kindle price limit I set if the paper format or audio was higher than the limit, it would display it there. But maybe I am missing something because I wasn't able to target by format. I'll have to check tonight if they changed something. I tried product ads, eg, focusing on a specific hardcover book, but those almost never get impressions.
DG - does Amazon make more $ off your paperbacks than the ebooks? That's one of my theories, that the algos like ads for products they'll make more on.
It isn't likely that a print book would make Amazon more than an ebook does, since with print KDP must deliver a physical manufactured book and an ebook is just an upload. Amazon has lots of servers and probably the Kindle division "pays" an insider rate for server use.
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It's not so much the algos, as the fact I can't even find the kindle categories to begin with. Even browsing the tree view (before entering a search term) won't show kindle books.
I ended up selecting a few bestselling kindle books as targets, but I had to use their ASIN because searching for kindle editions in targeting doesn't show anything either.
I wondered whether it's because my kindle editions all have paperbacks associated with them. Maybe I should create a test ad for one of my shorts, which doesn't.
And, as mentioned, it works fine on the UK site and DE sites, where ebook and kindle categories can be searched for and specified. Therefore I'm pretty sure it's not user error.
Will wait to see what the KDP people say.
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Love the dartboard analogy - I don't play darts, so if I could even hit the board, I think I'd be doing well ...
I'm really not doing much advertising, but just had a weird thing today on the UK store - just set up a series ad for my first (complete) series and apparently have sold 8 books in that series today - all later books in the series. Based on the rankings, looks like they're all from the UK store. This is more sales than I've had for a while!
The UK ads dashboard isn't showing a huge number of impressions, so this could be other weirdness happening, but could also be the ad. Who knows?!
Happy with the sales, either way. :icon_mrgreen:
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DG - does Amazon make more $ off your paperbacks than the ebooks? That's one of my theories, that the algos like ads for products they'll make more on.
I don't know. On one of my books, for example, the ebook price is $3.99 (AMZ royalty would $1.20) and the paperback price is $12.99 (AMZ royalty would be $5.20). But, it's always been this way, ever since Amazon folded CreateSpace into their little fiefdom. The paperbacks have only recently, as in the past couple of months, started selling. I'm running no Bookbub ads or Facebook ads right now, so everything is AMS.
I'm thinking Simon might be on to something, but there is a problem with his suggestion. My category ads, such as with Cold Shivers Nightmare, have eight categories targeted. Some categories are ebook only and some are paperback only. Such as:
Occult Fiction = ebook only
Occult & Paranormal = paperback only
Paranormal & Urban Fantasy = both
Of course, I don't think it really makes a difference. Most of the paperbacks I've sold over the past couple of months, that get attributed to an AMS category campaign have been through an ebook category. I don't think readers care much about what category the books are listed in as long as they can find either an ebook or a paperback, depending on their tastes.
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I know we're overrun with advice books these days, but I think Robert Ryan has a fresh take that is guided by his experience in PPC.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZXV4MVZ/ (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZXV4MVZ/)
His advice is to target only ASINs of ebooks if you want to sell ebooks because the regular keyword targeting puts your ebook ads in front of print buyers. They don't click, and if they do they don't buy. Amazon notices this and interprets it as low relevancy.
Edit: Changed ISBNs to ASINs
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It's not so much the algos, as the fact I can't even find the kindle categories to begin with. Even browsing the tree view (before entering a search term) won't show kindle books.
I ended up selecting a few bestselling kindle books as targets, but I had to use their ASIN because searching for kindle editions in targeting doesn't show anything either.
I wondered whether it's because my kindle editions all have paperbacks associated with them. Maybe I should create a test ad for one of my shorts, which doesn't.
And, as mentioned, it works fine on the UK site and DE sites, where ebook and kindle categories can be searched for and specified. Therefore I'm pretty sure it's not user error.
Will wait to see what the KDP people say.
I had to have a look, I'm able to search categories, eg, put in Young Adult fiction and got a list to pick from.
A search on Historical Fiction gave me audible choices and book choices but no ebooks.
Under products, I put in the Hunger Games and got some suggestions that didn't say the format at all (weird) and some that said paperback.
I searched The Storyteller and the kindle editions came up.
Well I'm interested in what they say, though I'm pretty soured on product and category ads for the most part.
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I know we're overrun with advice books these days, but I think Robert Ryan has a fresh take that is guided by his experience in PPC.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZXV4MVZ/ (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZXV4MVZ/)
His advice is to target only ISBNs of ebooks if you want to sell ebooks because the regular keyword targeting puts your ebook ads in front of print buyers. They don't click, and if they do they don't buy. Amazon notices this and interprets it as low relevancy.
I gave up on product ads, using specific ebooks because I got next to no impressions on those, despite bidding high. I let them sit there for months and only killed them when I was shutting down ads for those books for other reasons.
That's not to say that RR's theory is incorrect, I don't know, I'd be interested to hear if anybody has made product ads work, cause I certainly didn't break that code.
Right now I'm just running product ads on my large print edition, still getting almost no impressions, but it's not costing me anything.
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His advice is to target only ASINs of ebooks if you want to sell ebooks because the regular keyword targeting puts your ebook ads in front of print buyers. They don't click, and if they do they don't buy. Amazon notices this and interprets it as low relevancy.
I don't really see that as being the case. If you have both ebook and print available and they both show up on the same product page, most buyers are sophisticated enough to know they can click on the Paperback button and get a paperback and vise versa. I've never seen anyone complain they thought they ordered a paperback and got an ebook instead.
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I think you're right but in my case I don't have audio, and most of my books aren't in print (working on it) so I really don't like paying for clicks on those formats. If someone's in the market for an audio book, they aren't buying anything from me.
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I'm reading both Ryan's books at the moment - thanks to whoever suggested those.
Targeting specific ASINs has done nothing for me. I think I'd have to add about a thousand to get enough hits, and to me it looks like the Amazon algo only shows my book on the first dozen (in descending numbers of impressions) and then zero for all the rest.
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I think you're right but in my case I don't have audio, and most of my books aren't in print (working on it) so I really don't like paying for clicks on those formats. If someone's in the market for an audio book, they aren't buying anything from me.
I have audiobooks on most of my first-in-series, but the bidding on audiobook product pages is way higher than for ebooks and paperbacks. Presumably large publishers are advertising there.
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Then it's even more perplexing than that in the categories they put my books on audio pages. Why not take the audio bids from the people who have audio books.
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Then it's even more perplexing than that in the categories they put my books on audio pages. Why not take the audio bids from the people who have audio books.
Interesting. I know that when I'm setting up a category campaign, I see the category that will be targeted and just above that, it tells me if a search for something like Suspense will be in the Audible, Book or some ridiculous category such as /Automotive/Motorcycle & Powersports/Powersports Parts. Like you, I have no Audibles right now and I'm not looking to market to the motorcycle parts crowd. I've been known to click on a category without paying much attention, only to find I've targeted the Audible category and have to go back and Remove it.
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Maybe that's something that changed, or something I missed, or misunderstood. I know I was always frustrated when checking the 10 digit codes on the search terms report and an audible book came up. I'm not doing a lot on categories now, one or two clicks a day usually.
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Update on the last ad, which is still going, much to my surprise.
28500 views, with 40 clicks costing $7.37. Zero sales.
But the interesting thing is, several of the books are doing better, and while overall daily money isn't much better, it's also not dropping which at this point in my cycle, it normally would.
The thing is, I'm not sure Amazon have a clue about sales from an ad. It looks to me like people click the ad, then they wander about the series slider to see all the books, go to an earlier series if they're joined and wander about there, and finally either land at the beginning of the whole thing, or the book they originally clicked on, or it's book 1.
And all through this, Amazon has totally lost track of any connection between the eventual sale, and the original ad click.
Hence the stats for low click ads have no sales data at all.
Like collecting read data in KU, Amazon appear to be clueless as to what is actually going on from ads.
But for the moment, my small ad is getting views, and my daily money is holding, and occasionally spiking.
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Good to hear.
I ran my test and the book I dropped from the ads lost 30% of the page reads yesterday, while the one I boosted more than doubled.
Don't forget it can take up to 2 weeks for sales figures to show on the dash. Personally, I ignore all the orders/sales side of the stats and go by increases in page reads and sales in my own figures.
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Supposedly they track everything the ad clicker buys for two weeks and credits any sales over those two weeks to those ads. Emphasis on supposedly.
I have seen the phenomena you are taking about, more sales than they are crediting the ads for. I don't know how it works either. One of my very first sales was credited to a keyword that didn't have any clicks on it. I run the search term report daily, and the ad spend every morning, subtract my royalties and make sure I'm in the black every day. If the ads are helping me make more money, I'm happy, even though I really want to know how the system works.
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I'm very firmly in this camp, being deeply reluctant to spend money on advertising. That said, of the two books I've so far self-published (following on from a primarily trad pub career), I think maybe a sixth to a seventh of my overall sales can be tracked to ads, which in my case are just about exclusively AMS in the UK and US. In raw numbers, that's an overall spend since March 2018 of £320 for sales of just over £700. And, of course, that sales figure is for the total price, rather than my slice of the income, so while I've probably made a profit, it's not really much of one for the amount of effort involved.
(I should add here that the above figure is purely Amazon UK. I've barely sold more than a handful of books in the US via advertising in that same time period, and when I say a handful, I mean a handful.)
I've tried spending more in the past - pennies, compared to some of the numbers being tossed around here - but every time I did it didn't prove worth it. I got no extra sales, just more expensive no-sale clicks. I've got decent covers, and spending more on the covers with each new release to get the best quality art I can afford.
So, yeah, reluctant. Mind you, every now and then I read about some guru or other who's handling a whole range of AMS accounts for authors and helping them make money. There are paid advertising promotion services that can supposedly be useful, and help improve sales significantly, but I can see people here and elsewhere are generally leery of them, either because their effectiveness is questionable or because they're insanely expensive.
One in particular, Books Go Social, I've thought of signing up for, but something keeps pulling me back at the last moment (I'm interested in their Amazon ads services and Netgalley access, much less interested in their Twitter accounts and email lists, which they push quite heavily but which, according to some anecdotal evidence I've gathered, are no use). But they're not too expensive, so I may yet give them a go.
Mind you, the fact that advertising accounts for just a sixth or seventh of my overall sales suggests that organic sales on Amazon are a gold-lined pipeline all in themselves. You can perhaps raise visibility using ads, but perhaps, in the end, it really comes down to compelling writing, a cool idea and a good cover.
I keep thinking of a friend who's got a dual trad and self-publishing career (he works for a games company). A while back he put the first in a new series out and due to various life events was unable to give it any support or promote it in any way whatsoever. When he was finally able to check how it was doing, some time after its release, it was in the top five thousand or so on Amazon.com with zero promotion and raking in stupid amounts of money.
The only real rule is that there are no rules.
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I've just started advertising a pre-release on FB, Bookbub and AMS. I'm not after preorders as such, I just want people to recognise the cover. (As a side benefit, after 24 hours it's already #5 top new release in its category on Amazon UK. That's the sort of visibility I was after.)
Also, it's highly targeted so I don't screw my also-boughts. (I just spent 3 hours of my writing time today picking out more targets for the ads)
I've half-convinced myself that a click on Bookbub is almost always a sale, whereas yesterday on AMS I had 23 clicks on the ad for a middle-grade paperback and saw only 3 sales from it. (It's a paperback though, so figs won't come through for 3 days anyway.)
On Facebook I'm advertising the book's page on my own website, with links from there to product pages in various countries. Can't link them to sales though, as they're preorders.
Unless I jump from one ad platform to another I won't know which is working better than the other two, and at this stage I'm happy to just share my ad budget between them.
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I'm playing about with AMS ads again. After a few weeks of a general ad, composed of my series starters, most got pretty well ignored, but one of my series starters got more attention, so now I'm focusing an ad just for that series.
For everything else, I need to redo my covers yet again, without cash. I have no idea how I'm going to swing this.
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I haven't been successful in ads with AMS, Bookbub, or Facebook (except for limited times) in years. Still, with each new series, I try. I'm trying now with AMS and only earning about 2/3 of what I spend. The keyword costs are too high. No luck yet with BB, despite following Gaughran's approach laid out in his book, but I'm still testing alternatives. And I'm looking forward to wasting more money on Facebook soon.
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I was just about to reduce the budgets of my ongoing ads when I did a quick check of the KDP sales dashboard (not the AMS) and the ad billing on the ads dashboard. I was pleasantly surprised. The net money earned is three times what I've paid out in ads so far this month. I guess I'll leave them be for a while. I've never had a loss month with the ads, but sometimes it has come awfully close.
I'm doing a Kindle Countdown in two weeks and will pump up the ad budget then to see if I can pull in some new readers as the next book in the series also launches. Some people suggest pausing the Amazon ad during a Countdown. What say you all?
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Do some calculations. If you will lose money on your current rate of conversion, if the book is 99 cents (I'm assuming) will your read through make up for it? It's not an absolute but it will give you some idea. What do you usually spend on a Freebooksy and how many sales do you think you can get spending the same on AMS? Then watch the budget carefully.
You could also just bid really low and hope the algos like it enough to place it, but I wasn't ever successful bidding low for romance. Too much competition for the slots.
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As a writer who has chosen to spend more time and my limited resources on writing rather than promotion, when the AMS adds became unaffordable last Spring, I stopped them. Since then, I have done modest adds on fb and others. My best results have been with Printest paid adds. I used them on my latest release, the second book of my WW2 Alt History trilogy, After The Rockets Fell, with good results. As a test, I stopped them for two weeks and the sales dropped significantly.
I consider the Printest paid adds to offer the best value for me.
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I consider the Printest paid adds to offer the best value for me.
What is Printest?
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https://www.pinterest.com/ People make virtual boards. Like if you are redecorating your living room, you put stuff on your living room board. Furniture, paint color, curtains. It can be for anything though. I've actually found my books on people's boards for their TBR list. No idea how the ads work. I don't use it, but I probably should, at least for decorating. I have carpet samples in the house right now.
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https://www.pinterest.com/ People make virtual boards. Like if you are redecorating your living room,
He's yanking his chain, Amanda. He spelled it wrong. grint
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Got it. Another d'oh for me. Time for a donut.
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Got it. Another d'oh for me. Time for a donut.
Don't you mean Doh!nut? grint
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As long as it's 7000 calories and zero nutrition you can spell it however you want.
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I don't know whether it's just me and my frugal ways, but I can't seem to get over the fear of wasting money on ads.
Partly it's because there's no tangible benefit. If I spend on a cover, or an audiobook, or editing, I get something in return. On the other hand, when I put money into advertising there's this nebulous idea that it SHOULD benefit book sales, but the hard data never backs it up. Any extra income will be spread over several days, weeks or months, and I can't point to a bunch of sales and say 'THEY were thanks to the ad'.
It's even trickier now I'm in KU, because page reads aren't shown on the AMS dash.
As an example, I'm running one auto-targeted AMS ad which ran up US$25 in costs yesterday. (I saw the amount rising and for once I decided ... stuff it, let's see what happens.) That generated 43 clicks.
The ad is for a first in a series of ten novels, so it could take a month or more for some of the people who clicked the ad to read their way through the entire series.
And here's the thing: if just 2 of the 43 people who clicked my ad DO read the entire series, that's a $15 profit.
Every business bone in my body is screaming at me to spend that much and more on ads every single day, but my brain just won't let me. I see the amount I owe AMS rising and put the brakes on.
Just to be clear, I've never spent more in ads than my incoming royalties. I'm not talking about putting myself into debt, just an unwillingness to put larger sums into advertising, even though it probably would pay off.
I'm new to the board, haven't read the entire thread, am just responding to the OP.
You are absolutely right to be loath to spending money on ads.
Long story short, ads have no provable payoff in sales. This is a little known secret in Big Five publishing. Paid ads are a small portion of the promo rollout of a big book.
So how do they sell? That's a long discussion... but it's a complicated process that adds up to word of mouth and sheer luck. Catching a wave. Making buzz. Selling to Hollywood. The whole nine yards.
But ads? Not really. And if it doesn't work for them, why should it work for us?
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I don't know whether it's just me and my frugal ways, but I can't seem to get over the fear of wasting money on ads.
Partly it's because there's no tangible benefit. If I spend on a cover, or an audiobook, or editing, I get something in return. On the other hand, when I put money into advertising there's this nebulous idea that it SHOULD benefit book sales, but the hard data never backs it up. Any extra income will be spread over several days, weeks or months, and I can't point to a bunch of sales and say 'THEY were thanks to the ad'.
It's even trickier now I'm in KU, because page reads aren't shown on the AMS dash.
As an example, I'm running one auto-targeted AMS ad which ran up US$25 in costs yesterday. (I saw the amount rising and for once I decided ... stuff it, let's see what happens.) That generated 43 clicks.
The ad is for a first in a series of ten novels, so it could take a month or more for some of the people who clicked the ad to read their way through the entire series.
And here's the thing: if just 2 of the 43 people who clicked my ad DO read the entire series, that's a $15 profit.
Every business bone in my body is screaming at me to spend that much and more on ads every single day, but my brain just won't let me. I see the amount I owe AMS rising and put the brakes on.
Just to be clear, I've never spent more in ads than my incoming royalties. I'm not talking about putting myself into debt, just an unwillingness to put larger sums into advertising, even though it probably would pay off.
I'm new to the board, haven't read the entire thread, am just responding to the OP.
You are absolutely right to be loath to spending money on ads.
Long story short, ads have no provable payoff in sales. This is a little known secret in Big Five publishing. Paid ads are a small portion of the promo rollout of a big book.
So how do they sell? That's a long discussion... but it's a complicated process that adds up to word of mouth and sheer luck. Catching a wave. Making buzz. Selling to Hollywood. The whole nine yards.
But ads? Not really. And if it doesn't work for them, why should it work for us?
There is wisdom in that, but if ads don't work at all for the Big Five, why do they keep using them? Clearly, they must have some impact, or they'd stop using them, wouldn't they?
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I don't know whether it's just me and my frugal ways, but I can't seem to get over the fear of wasting money on ads.
Partly it's because there's no tangible benefit. If I spend on a cover, or an audiobook, or editing, I get something in return. On the other hand, when I put money into advertising there's this nebulous idea that it SHOULD benefit book sales, but the hard data never backs it up. Any extra income will be spread over several days, weeks or months, and I can't point to a bunch of sales and say 'THEY were thanks to the ad'.
It's even trickier now I'm in KU, because page reads aren't shown on the AMS dash.
As an example, I'm running one auto-targeted AMS ad which ran up US$25 in costs yesterday. (I saw the amount rising and for once I decided ... stuff it, let's see what happens.) That generated 43 clicks.
The ad is for a first in a series of ten novels, so it could take a month or more for some of the people who clicked the ad to read their way through the entire series.
And here's the thing: if just 2 of the 43 people who clicked my ad DO read the entire series, that's a $15 profit.
Every business bone in my body is screaming at me to spend that much and more on ads every single day, but my brain just won't let me. I see the amount I owe AMS rising and put the brakes on.
Just to be clear, I've never spent more in ads than my incoming royalties. I'm not talking about putting myself into debt, just an unwillingness to put larger sums into advertising, even though it probably would pay off.
I'm new to the board, haven't read the entire thread, am just responding to the OP.
You are absolutely right to be loath to spending money on ads.
Long story short, ads have no provable payoff in sales. This is a little known secret in Big Five publishing. Paid ads are a small portion of the promo rollout of a big book.
So how do they sell? That's a long discussion... but it's a complicated process that adds up to word of mouth and sheer luck. Catching a wave. Making buzz. Selling to Hollywood. The whole nine yards.
But ads? Not really. And if it doesn't work for them, why should it work for us?
There is wisdom in that, but if ads don't work at all for the Big Five, why do they keep using them? Clearly, they must have some impact, or they'd stop using them, wouldn't they?
I said that it was a small part of traditional publishing promo roll out, not that they don't use it at all.
If it's a small part of traditional book publishing, there is no reason to believe it should be a large part of indie publishing promo.
Yet I see so many self-publishers thinking that advertising is what will separate them from the pack, and result magically in sales. I wish it were so. But it's not.
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Results seem to vary a lot. I've never had much success with ads, but there are people on this board and elsewhere who report that they do.
It's true that indies lean on ads more than the Big Five. I think that's partly because our options are more limited. When a trad bestseller has a new release, he or she gets a lot of press coverage, talk show appearances, rumors of Hollywood deals, etc. Indies get none of that except under very unusual circumstances.
Perhaps I'm missing something, though. Is there a tactic the Big Five use that we could make more use of, other than advertising? I think it would be easier to wean people off advertising so much if there were an alternative to it.
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I used to use AMS when I was exclusive, but it just felt as though the amount I had to spend was always creeping up.
I went wide and now I do the odd freebie list (bookbub, ENT, freebooksie etc), but mostly focus on giving away my first in series on Facebook.
I pay $0.09 a click right now and am adding 200-300 people to my list a month.
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Results seem to vary a lot. I've never had much success with ads, but there are people on this board and elsewhere who report that they do.
It's true that indies lean on ads more than the Big Five. I think that's partly because our options are more limited. When a trad bestseller has a new release, he or she gets a lot of press coverage, talk show appearances, rumors of Hollywood deals, etc. Indies get none of that except under very unusual circumstances.
Perhaps I'm missing something, though. Is there a tactic the Big Five use that we could make more use of, other than advertising? I think it would be easier to wean people off advertising so much if there were an alternative to it.
The technique they use is the overwhelming power of an important influencer. If Oprah touts your book, you are guaranteed sales.
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True. I have zero ability to get national publicity for any of my books, and so ads really are all I can do to alert their potential readers of the books' existence. Everything else involving publicity is extremely labor intensive and I have neither the time nor the energy to attempt it.
Also I must admit that Amazon ads have worked for my books. They aren't as good today as they were a few years ago, perhaps. They do cost more. But in a crowded store, they do their job and get my books some attention.
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Results seem to vary a lot. I've never had much success with ads, but there are people on this board and elsewhere who report that they do.
It's true that indies lean on ads more than the Big Five. I think that's partly because our options are more limited. When a trad bestseller has a new release, he or she gets a lot of press coverage, talk show appearances, rumors of Hollywood deals, etc. Indies get none of that except under very unusual circumstances.
Perhaps I'm missing something, though. Is there a tactic the Big Five use that we could make more use of, other than advertising? I think it would be easier to wean people off advertising so much if there were an alternative to it.
The technique they use is the overwhelming power of an important influencer. If Oprah touts your book, you are guaranteed sales.
But that's the point I was trying to make. When the last time Oprah touted an indie book? For the most part, we don't have access to that kind of influencer.
It's all well and good to say that indies rely too much on advertising, and you're right to say that it isn't always as effective as we think it's going to be. But it doesn't sound as if you have a viable alternative to suggest.
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But that's the point I was trying to make. When the last time Oprah touted an indie book? For the most part, we don't have access to that kind of influencer.
It's all well and good to say that indies rely too much on advertising, and you're right to say that it isn't always as effective as we think it's going to be. But it doesn't sound as if you have a viable alternative to suggest.
Yes, the help of a powerful influencer would be grand, but in the meantime, we have ads. No they are not as effective as having a powerful influencer in our corner, bu t they do work ... and may hopefully get us enough attention to have an influencer notice us.
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Back when I was young and stupid a couple of internet-cycles ago, I wandered into Mark Dawson's SPF group on Facebook and opined that Facebook ads were likely useless because people on social media don't read books. Colorful language ensued. :hehe
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Realistically Oprah will plug 12 books a year. I didn't hear about the one she put on the Apple book club in November until this month and I was eagerly awaiting the book club to start. Even if she plugged a new book every day is she going to pick a science fiction book? Urban fantasy? Alternative history? There's an old saying, "What happens when you don't advertise? Nothing."
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Results seem to vary a lot. I've never had much success with ads, but there are people on this board and elsewhere who report that they do.
It's true that indies lean on ads more than the Big Five. I think that's partly because our options are more limited. When a trad bestseller has a new release, he or she gets a lot of press coverage, talk show appearances, rumors of Hollywood deals, etc. Indies get none of that except under very unusual circumstances.
Perhaps I'm missing something, though. Is there a tactic the Big Five use that we could make more use of, other than advertising? I think it would be easier to wean people off advertising so much if there were an alternative to it.
The technique they use is the overwhelming power of an important influencer. If Oprah touts your book, you are guaranteed sales.
But that's the point I was trying to make. When the last time Oprah touted an indie book? For the most part, we don't have access to that kind of influencer.
It's all well and good to say that indies rely too much on advertising, and you're right to say that it isn't always as effective as we think it's going to be. But it doesn't sound as if you have a viable alternative to suggest.
Sorry, we're talking past each other now.
Oprah has never touted an indie book and there's little chance she ever will.
I didn't say I had a viable alternative. In fact, I'm saying that the vast majority of us will not sell very many books. I'm not trying to be a downer. I'm just being realistic and offering my response to the OP, who is quite right not to want to spend hard earned money on something that won't pay off.
I intend to advertise. As some here have attested, advertising has resulted in some sales.
But my point simply is this: everyone here not so secretly wants to sell thousands of copies of books. I sure do. And it ain't advertising that's going to do it.
I have already said what I think works, but I'll say it again: luck, catching a wave, and having some powerful, influential voice say, "This is good, read it."
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But that's the point I was trying to make. When the last time Oprah touted an indie book? For the most part, we don't have access to that kind of influencer.
It's all well and good to say that indies rely too much on advertising, and you're right to say that it isn't always as effective as we think it's going to be. But it doesn't sound as if you have a viable alternative to suggest.
Yes, the help of a powerful influencer would be grand, but in the meantime, we have ads. No they are not as effective as having a powerful influencer in our corner, bu t they do work ... and may hopefully get us enough attention to have an influencer notice us.
I don't think that's the way it works. I think that in order to get an influencer to notice your work and care about it, you have to demonstrate to him/her in some way that your book will be useful to their image.
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True. I have zero ability to get national publicity for any of my books, and so ads really are all I can do to alert their potential readers of the books' existence. Everything else involving publicity is extremely labor intensive and I have neither the time nor the energy to attempt it.
Also I must admit that Amazon ads have worked for my books. They aren't as good today as they were a few years ago, perhaps. They do cost more. But in a crowded store, they do their job and get my books some attention.
"labor intensive"
This is so true. When I think of the famous writers of my childhood, they spent an awful lot of time burnishing their brand on TV. Their brand being their name.
That is very time-consuming.
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Results seem to vary a lot. I've never had much success with ads, but there are people on this board and elsewhere who report that they do.
It's true that indies lean on ads more than the Big Five. I think that's partly because our options are more limited. When a trad bestseller has a new release, he or she gets a lot of press coverage, talk show appearances, rumors of Hollywood deals, etc. Indies get none of that except under very unusual circumstances.
Perhaps I'm missing something, though. Is there a tactic the Big Five use that we could make more use of, other than advertising? I think it would be easier to wean people off advertising so much if there were an alternative to it.
The technique they use is the overwhelming power of an important influencer. If Oprah touts your book, you are guaranteed sales.
But that's the point I was trying to make. When the last time Oprah touted an indie book? For the most part, we don't have access to that kind of influencer.
It's all well and good to say that indies rely too much on advertising, and you're right to say that it isn't always as effective as we think it's going to be. But it doesn't sound as if you have a viable alternative to suggest.
Sorry, we're talking past each other now.
Oprah has never touted an indie book and there's little chance she ever will.
I didn't say I had a viable alternative. In fact, I'm saying that the vast majority of us will not sell very many books. I'm not trying to be a downer. I'm just being realistic and offering my response to the OP, who is quite right not to want to spend hard earned money on something that won't pay off.
I intend to advertise. As some here have attested, advertising has resulted in some sales.
But my point simply is this: everyone here not so secretly wants to sell thousands of copies of books. I sure do. And it ain't advertising that's going to do it.
I have already said what I think works, but I'll say it again: luck, catching a wave, and having some powerful, influential voice say, "This is good, read it."
Yes, i did misunderstand your intent.
It's true that the average indie author sells few books, and that for some, advertising yields meager results at best. It apparently does better for others. Personally, I can move books that way, but I seldom end up with a positive ROI.
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Back when I was young and stupid a couple of internet-cycles ago, I wandered into Mark Dawson's SPF group on Facebook and opined that Facebook ads were likely useless because people on social media don't read books. Colorful language ensued. :hehe
Hmmm? Interesting. I just started his course and I am going through the Facebook portion of it right now and since the 27th of December, I'm running at about 84% ROI. Take that for what it's worth.
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Oprah has never touted an indie book and there's little chance she ever will.
Oprah touts whatever she's paid to tout. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Back when I was young and stupid a couple of internet-cycles ago, I wandered into Mark Dawson's SPF group on Facebook and opined that Facebook ads were likely useless because people on social media don't read books. Colorful language ensued. :hehe
I’m guessing you have changed your mind bearing in mind your post, but I definitely don’t agree with your younger self!
Facebook is the cheapest way to get readers eyes on your book and to get them on your mailing list to push the rest to.
On the last 7 days 480 people clicked my link and around 300 joined my mailing list and it cost me $35
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Back when I was young and stupid a couple of internet-cycles ago, I wandered into Mark Dawson's SPF group on Facebook and opined that Facebook ads were likely useless because people on social media don't read books. Colorful language ensued. :hehe
I’m guessing you have changed your mind bearing in mind your post, but I definitely don’t agree with your younger self!
Facebook is the cheapest way to get readers eyes on your book and to get them on your mailing list to push the rest to.
On the last 7 days 480 people clicked my link and around 300 joined my mailing list and it cost me $35
Yes, my younger self was brash and stupid. Definitely a change of mind. It's been a journey since then!
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Back when I was young and stupid a couple of internet-cycles ago, I wandered into Mark Dawson's SPF group on Facebook and opined that Facebook ads were likely useless because people on social media don't read books. Colorful language ensued. :hehe
I’m guessing you have changed your mind bearing in mind your post, but I definitely don’t agree with your younger self!
Facebook is the cheapest way to get readers eyes on your book and to get them on your mailing list to push the rest to.
On the last 7 days 480 people clicked my link and around 300 joined my mailing list and it cost me $35
Yes, my younger self was brash and stupid. Definitely a change of mind. It's been a journey since then!
Ha! I think just we’ve all been on that journey!
For me, it was realising that spending as money to sell on single platforms where the reseller holds all the customer information is not a good long term business strategy.
I went wide and now put all my effort into getting fans on a mailing list and writing more books.
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Facebook is the cheapest way to get readers eyes on your book and to get them on your mailing list to push the rest to.
On the last 7 days 480 people clicked my link and around 300 joined my mailing list and it cost me $35
Yes, but, how many of them actually bought a book?
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Facebook is the cheapest way to get readers eyes on your book and to get them on your mailing list to push the rest to.
On the last 7 days 480 people clicked my link and around 300 joined my mailing list and it cost me $35
Yes, but, how many of them actually bought a book?
That's my experience with Facebook. I can get readers to engage in various ways (over 55,000 people have liked my author page, most of those have also followed it--for all the good that does these days, and ads always get high levels of engagement). However, book sales from FB are a trickle at best, at least for me. I will say that some people who started out as FB followers ended up as real fans, but that was a long process. It's difficult to quantify how many sales have resulted.
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Oprah has never touted an indie book and there's little chance she ever will.
Oprah touts whatever she's paid to tout. Nothing more, nothing less.
So maybe an indie writer should make her an offer. grint
Still doesn't disprove my basic point. She has influence.
I was only using her as a prime example. There are others. Reese Witherspoon has a book club now. There's a ballerina named Isabella Boylston with 317K followers on Instagram who runs "Ballerina Book Club." Her followers are rabid and I'm sure that a recommendation from her is good for a few thousand sales at least. I'd be happy with that.
There must be others.
I'm not against advertising. I'm simply saying it has a very limited place in book sales.
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Oprah has never touted an indie book and there's little chance she ever will.
Oprah touts whatever she's paid to tout. Nothing more, nothing less.
So maybe an indie writer should make her an offer. grint
Still doesn't disprove my basic point. She has influence.
I was only using her as a prime example. There are others. Reese Witherspoon has a book club now. There's a ballerina named Isabella Boylston with 317K followers on Instagram who runs "Ballerina Book Club." Her followers are rabid and I'm sure that a recommendation from her is good for a few thousand sales at least. I'd be happy with that.
There must be others.
I'm not against advertising. I'm simply saying it has a very limited place in book sales.
Considering Oprah's wealth, I doubt very much that she touts anything because of being paid to tout it, and I would speculate that an author trying to get her attention has to first write a book that catches her interest. Maybe if you said, "I'll give a million dollars to charity if you mention my book" and if it was a charity she liked, she might mention your offer. But mention your book? That would be a negotiation. I'll bet she's already turned down similar offers.
People think everyone can be bribed. It isn't true.
But as noted, some celebrities have large, avid followings, and a word from them will sell a lot of books. You can be sure that many authors are knocking at their doors.
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Considering Oprah's wealth, I doubt very much that she touts anything because of being paid to tout it, and I would speculate that an author trying to get her attention has to first write a book that catches her interest. Maybe if you said, "I'll give a million dollars to charity if you mention my book" and if it was a charity she liked, she might mention your offer. But mention your book? That would be a negotiation. I'll bet she's already turned down similar offers.
People think everyone can be bribed. It isn't true.
But as noted, some celebrities have large, avid followings, and a word from them will sell a lot of books. You can be sure that many authors are knocking at their doors.
I only agreed with that point in jest - of course, I don't think that Oprah runs a cash quid pro quo. But it's a given that she promotes books that will help her image. I hasten to add that there's nothing wrong with this.
That said, I shouldn't have agreed, even in jest. The suggestion that Oprah is unethical was wrong.
{Fixed the quote. t.}
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Yes, but, how many of them actually bought a book?
I have no experience using Facebook to get mailing list sign-ups. I do use BookFunnel and StoryOrigin. I find that for full-priced books, every 2.5ish BookFunnel / StoryOrigin subscriber is worth 1 organic subscriber. They -DO- buy. However I have to romance them. I usually give them a free short story and then send them to their favorite vendor to download a free novel. I point them to other free short stories periodically. I send them funny snippets from my works in progress.
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I don't think that's the way it works. I think that in order to get an influencer to notice your work and care about it, you have to demonstrate to him/her in some way that your book will be useful to their image.
I've had "influencers" pick up my work while it was on sale and recommend it. They weren't Oprah level influencers, but book reviewers with decent followings. They helped a lot when it came to getting BookBub ads that got me big sales down the line.
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Here's another thing that happens with ads and costs $$$.
Sometimes a ton of clicks dominate one particular vendor on BookBub ads. This happens from time to time and can hurt the ad. I'll have a ton of clicks on apple, for example, and have to shut it down because I'll quickly go over my $10/day ceiling. Are the clicks from interest or from someone trigger happy?
Recently this happened over a period of 4 days with Apple and I sold one book. Great. But that's one book 3.99 with $40 lost over 4 days. It also drew the ad away from the other vendors.
It will happen less often to me with AMS. Here it can occur with a particular phrase or author. Could be fraud, could be bots going crazy with +feedback. I dunno.
Ideas? Do you guys shut it down? And, if you do, do you turn it on again in the future?
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It will happen less often to me with AMS. Here it can occur with a particular phrase or author. Could be fraud, could be bots going crazy with +feedback. I dunno.
Ideas? Do you guys shut it down? And, if you do, do you turn it on again in the future?
That's been bandied about in here before. A competitor, either a writer or advertiser, will get click happy on your ad, first to get your ad to budget out for the day, then hopefully to get you to see your ad isn't producing and get you to discontinue it. Either way, it's to get your ad to stop showing.
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:icon_sad:
Once I even got a refund from BookBub as it was clearly a ridiculous ctr, costing like $20 in thirty minutes. They claimed it was a computer error. If it is fraudulent, there should be a way to shut it down--like block the same IP from clicking on the ad.
The weirdest thing is it can trigger the bots to drive more ads in the region and then land real sales.
When it happens, I usually stop the ad and then wait some time to restart it later.
But, anyway, I had to vent.
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Facebook is the cheapest way to get readers eyes on your book and to get them on your mailing list to push the rest to.
On the last 7 days 480 people clicked my link and around 300 joined my mailing list and it cost me $35
Yes, but, how many of them actually bought a book?
That's my experience with Facebook. I can get readers to engage in various ways (over 55,000 people have liked my author page, most of those have also followed it--for all the good that does these days, and ads always get high levels of engagement). However, book sales from FB are a trickle at best, at least for me. I will say that some people who started out as FB followers ended up as real fans, but that was a long process. It's difficult to quantify how many sales have resulted.
This is an issue with narrowing your audience to one that buys the kind of books you sell in my opinion. The tighter you make that net, the more fish you catch. I have very specific criteria I target after lots of experimentation and therefore have better results with smaller numbers.
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TBH, my head wants to explode when I even consider doing a Facebook ad. I recently paid for a FB boost; FB charged me a mere $1.03 because obviously it didn't show the post to many people. So I'm back to FB ads. Oh, my head... :dizzy
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The thing which narks me the most about FB ads, is there is no way to ensure the people who want to see your posts actually do.
They nerfed groups and pages, so only 5% of the people in them see the post on their feed.
And yet, the other 95% are the perfect advertise to people, and you can't reach them.
The way the ads are set up, the only people you can't reach, are the ones you most want to.
And that is just ridiculous.
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The thing which narks me the most about FB ads, is there is no way to ensure the people who want to see your posts actually do.
They nerfed groups and pages, so only 5% of the people in them see the post on their feed.
And yet, the other 95% are the perfect advertise to people, and you can't reach them.
The way the ads are set up, the only people you can't reach, are the ones you most want to.
And that is just ridiculous.
I'm not sure I understand. You can target FB ads to the people who follow your page if you wish. (Of course, in the old days, when pages had more organic reach, you'd hit a higher number of them without having to advertise.
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Facebook is the cheapest way to get readers eyes on your book and to get them on your mailing list to push the rest to.
On the last 7 days 480 people clicked my link and around 300 joined my mailing list and it cost me $35
Yes, but, how many of them actually bought a book?
That's my experience with Facebook. I can get readers to engage in various ways (over 55,000 people have liked my author page, most of those have also followed it--for all the good that does these days, and ads always get high levels of engagement). However, book sales from FB are a trickle at best, at least for me. I will say that some people who started out as FB followers ended up as real fans, but that was a long process. It's difficult to quantify how many sales have resulted.
This is an issue with narrowing your audience to one that buys the kind of books you sell in my opinion. The tighter you make that net, the more fish you catch. I have very specific criteria I target after lots of experimentation and therefore have better results with smaller numbers.
I wonder if that varies by genre, though. Since you write mysteries (judging from your screen name) and I write fantasy, the situation could be different. If you mean demographic groups, it's hard to know who buys fantasy books and who doesn't. And I could be missing something, but FB targeting by interest seems clunky at best. If I type in fantasy, most of the initial suggestions relate to fantasy football. (Not a hopeful sign!) Fantasy books works, but trying to get a specific sub genre is tricky. (Last time I check, for instance, urban fantasy wasn't an identified interest.) There appear to be a lot more interests connected to fantasy films and TV shows of various kinds, but people who watch fantasy aren't always fantasy readers, though I suspect that kind of targeting is better than nothing.
In other words, I can't get FB to focus narrowly enough on my genre. The fans I come in contact with are all over the place demographically. I always narrow the targeting to predominately English-speaking countries and younger age levels (though I have at least a few fans who are senior citizens). Beyond that, the fans I know of are scattered across groups rather than concentrated. I don't know whether that's true of fantasy fans in general or not, and as far as I know, there's no way to tell.
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The thing which narks me the most about FB ads, is there is no way to ensure the people who want to see your posts actually do.
They nerfed groups and pages, so only 5% of the people in them see the post on their feed.
And yet, the other 95% are the perfect advertise to people, and you can't reach them.
The way the ads are set up, the only people you can't reach, are the ones you most want to.
And that is just ridiculous.
I'm not sure I understand. You can target FB ads to the people who follow your page if you wish. (Of course, in the old days, when pages had more organic reach, you'd hit a higher number of them without having to advertise.
How?
Whenever I've tried, it comes back with exactly zero people. You try to activate it, and it won't.
The options are there to target your group or page, but they don't work. Or never have for me.
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How?
Whenever I've tried, it comes back with exactly zero people. You try to activate it, and it won't.
The options are there to target your group or page, but they don't work. Or never have for me.
There are two types of ads: Boosted posts where you create a post on your timeline, and then boost either to an audience you create or to your fans and their friends. These can be text only, or in a vertical format, or just basically ANYTHING that doesn't violate FB's rules.
The other type are targeted ads. These can be videos, slideshows, or single pictures. You create an audience by selecting their interests and narrowing their habits. For instance, you might pick people who like Robert Heinlein who also own or are interested in pages relating to Amazon Kindle.
Both types of ads work for me.
I use boosted posts for new releases. I create a post, share it, and when it stops getting clicks I boost it to all my fans and their friends. The nice thing about boosted posts is you can have more than one link. So I'll usually say, "Get the new release <link>." and then, "Haven't started the series yet? The first book is FREE <link>"
I boost them to fans and their friends because my fans, when they see the boosted post, usually comment on the post saying lovely things like "I love this series" or "I'm reading it now and it's so exciting." That gives you social proof.
I also run targeted ad campaigns mostly for the US and UK, although I am experimenting with worldwide iBooks ads right now. I am sending everyone directly to the vendor of choice.
Facebook ads are more expensive, but I find that FB viewers are more likely to buy paperbacks and to buy audiobooks. Also, since they aren't LOOKING to buy books on FB, if they click through, they tend to be very motivated. I'm advertising a permafree, but the sell-thru from freebie to first paid book with FB is the best of any advertiser.
I learned to use Facebook by picking up a book from my library. Also, I regularly Google things like "Facebook advertising in year 2020" to catch up with current trends. I tend not to follow authors teaching authors because I feel like I'll just wind up doing what every other author is doing. I have found that general advice works well for me.
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How?
Whenever I've tried, it comes back with exactly zero people. You try to activate it, and it won't.
The options are there to target your group or page, but they don't work. Or never have for me.
There are two types of ads: Boosted posts where you create a post on your timeline, and then boost either to an audience you create or to your fans and their friends. These can be text only, or in a vertical format, or just basically ANYTHING that doesn't violate FB's rules.
The other type are targeted ads. These can be videos, slideshows, or single pictures. You create an audience by selecting their interests and narrowing their habits. For instance, you might pick people who like Robert Heinlein who also own or are interested in pages relating to Amazon Kindle.
That's the general, but not the how.
I'm looking for exactly how you include your group and page people in an ad. The exact steps.
As I said, each time I've tried it, it results in a zero target number.
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How?
Whenever I've tried, it comes back with exactly zero people. You try to activate it, and it won't.
The options are there to target your group or page, but they don't work. Or never have for me.
There are two types of ads: Boosted posts where you create a post on your timeline, and then boost either to an audience you create or to your fans and their friends. These can be text only, or in a vertical format, or just basically ANYTHING that doesn't violate FB's rules.
The other type are targeted ads. These can be videos, slideshows, or single pictures. You create an audience by selecting their interests and narrowing their habits. For instance, you might pick people who like Robert Heinlein who also own or are interested in pages relating to Amazon Kindle.
That's the general, but not the how.
I'm looking for exactly how you include your group and page people in an ad. The exact steps.
As I said, each time I've tried it, it results in a zero target number.
If you have fans following your page, it works.
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In other words, I can't get FB to focus narrowly enough on my genre. The fans I come in contact with are all over the place demographically. I always narrow the targeting to predominately English-speaking countries and younger age levels (though I have at least a few fans who are senior citizens). Beyond that, the fans I know of are scattered across groups rather than concentrated. I don't know whether that's true of fantasy fans in general or not, and as far as I know, there's no way to tell.
You need to target a specific author and then hope to God they come up as an Interest in the list. You and I as fantasy authors, could try to target someone like Jeff Wheeler and see if he comes up. Sometimes, FB acts like they've never heard of the author. I also write horror and tried to target K. F. Breene. She is #37 is ALL of Amazon Kindle store right now and she's a mystery to FB. I can't target her in any way. About the only authors I can target are the likes of Stephen King or Dean Koontz, but then I end up with an unwieldy audience in the tens of millions.
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If you have fans following your page, it works.
No, it doesn't.
If I only specify people on the page, I get a zero audience.
It demands you add in extra criteria, and then that becomes the ad, not the people I wanted to send it to.
Age group? Irrelevant.
Geographic location? Irrelevant.
Interests? Have liked my page or joined my group. Nothing else is relevant.
That's my criteria, and it's always a zero audience. My numbers are not large, but they are tangible.
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If you have fans following your page, it works.
No, it doesn't.
If I only specify people on the page, I get a zero audience.
It demands you add in extra criteria, and then that becomes the ad, not the people I wanted to send it to.
Age group? Irrelevant.
Geographic location? Irrelevant.
Interests? Have liked my page or joined my group. Nothing else is relevant.
That's my criteria, and it's always a zero audience. My numbers are not large, but they are tangible.
Errr ... works for me, Mate. Can't help you.
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Errr ... works for me, Mate. Can't help you.
So if you have a page with 500 likes, you get an audience of 500 for the ad?
If so, exactly what options do you click?
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Errr ... works for me, Mate. Can't help you.
So if you have a page with 500 likes, you get an audience of 500 for the ad?
If so, exactly what options do you click?
Did you watch the tutorial I posted? You can select people who like the page and their friends.
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Did you watch the tutorial I posted? You can select people who like the page and their friends.
Yes. And it gives me an audience of Zero. Then demands I add geography and age and interests in order to get a number. So I get a general ad, and no-one who liked my page gets sent the ad.
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You have to add geography. Otherwise you're paying to show your ads to people in countries where there's no Amazon (like Brazil ... soon. Hah.) I recommend USA, UK, Aus, Canada and no more.
Then you have to specify age, such as 25-60, because you really don't want to be showing ads to 17 year olds who may have no means of buying.
Finally, if you have less than about 10,000 likes (I think it is), FB will usually warn you the ad will barely be seen, and will ask you to widen interests. That's why 99% of the indie authors I try to target won't show on FB. Even big names.
Personally, I target trad-pubbed authors in the same genre, plus the genre. Then in a separate filter I specify people interested in Kindle (not employees, or the category which guesses they MIGHT have a kindle)
Finally, I go for CPC instead of CPM with a limit per click, not per view. (Google that - the process just changed again.)
It's definitely not for the faint-hearted. I would suggest Bookbub CPC ads before attempting FB - at least there you can target other indies easily.
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You have to add geography. Otherwise you're paying to show your ads to people in countries where there's no Amazon (like Brazil ... soon. Hah.) I recommend USA, UK, Aus, Canada and no more.
Then you have to specify age, such as 25-60, because you really don't want to be showing ads to 17 year olds who may have no means of buying.
Finally, if you have less than about 10,000 likes (I think it is), FB will usually warn you the ad will barely be seen, and will ask you to widen interests. That's why 99% of the indie authors I try to target won't show on FB. Even big names.
But that's not what I want.
I just want to make sure everyone who liked my page and joined my group sees my post. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
All I want is a guarantee those who've said they want to see my posts actually do. I'm happy to pay for it.
That's all I want.
If that ad is not big enough for FB, then stuff them. It's not about ad size. It's about posts being read by people who ask for them.
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Facebook is the cheapest way to get readers eyes on your book and to get them on your mailing list to push the rest to.
On the last 7 days 480 people clicked my link and around 300 joined my mailing list and it cost me $35
Yes, but, how many of them actually bought a book?
That's my experience with Facebook. I can get readers to engage in various ways (over 55,000 people have liked my author page, most of those have also followed it--for all the good that does these days, and ads always get high levels of engagement). However, book sales from FB are a trickle at best, at least for me. I will say that some people who started out as FB followers ended up as real fans, but that was a long process. It's difficult to quantify how many sales have resulted.
This is an issue with narrowing your audience to one that buys the kind of books you sell in my opinion. The tighter you make that net, the more fish you catch. I have very specific criteria I target after lots of experimentation and therefore have better results with smaller numbers.
I wonder if that varies by genre, though. Since you write mysteries (judging from your screen name) and I write fantasy, the situation could be different. If you mean demographic groups, it's hard to know who buys fantasy books and who doesn't. And I could be missing something, but FB targeting by interest seems clunky at best. If I type in fantasy, most of the initial suggestions relate to fantasy football. (Not a hopeful sign!) Fantasy books works, but trying to get a specific sub genre is tricky. (Last time I check, for instance, urban fantasy wasn't an identified interest.) There appear to be a lot more interests connected to fantasy films and TV shows of various kinds, but people who watch fantasy aren't always fantasy readers, though I suspect that kind of targeting is better than nothing.
In other words, I can't get FB to focus narrowly enough on my genre. The fans I come in contact with are all over the place demographically. I always narrow the targeting to predominately English-speaking countries and younger age levels (though I have at least a few fans who are senior citizens). Beyond that, the fans I know of are scattered across groups rather than concentrated. I don't know whether that's true of fantasy fans in general or not, and as far as I know, there's no way to tell.
Yeah, you're probably right Bill that genre plays a large part. I know that the demographic that buys my books is predominantly on facebook.
For ads... forget targeting people on author names etc. Never worked for me.
What works is finding out the demographics of the kind of person who buys your books. For me that is women between the ages of 50-70 who are normally retired or working part-time and read a LOT. Targeting that group on facebook gives me low cost ads (around 9c a click), and gets them on my mailing list where I can push new books at them.
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You have to add geography. Otherwise you're paying to show your ads to people in countries where there's no Amazon (like Brazil ... soon. Hah.) I recommend USA, UK, Aus, Canada and no more.
Then you have to specify age, such as 25-60, because you really don't want to be showing ads to 17 year olds who may have no means of buying.
Finally, if you have less than about 10,000 likes (I think it is), FB will usually warn you the ad will barely be seen, and will ask you to widen interests. That's why 99% of the indie authors I try to target won't show on FB. Even big names.
But that's not what I want.
I just want to make sure everyone who liked my page and joined my group sees my post. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
All I want is a guarantee those who've said they want to see my posts actually do. I'm happy to pay for it.
That's all I want.
If that ad is not big enough for FB, then stuff them. It's not about ad size. It's about posts being read by people who ask for them.
What happens if you post something to your page, then click the 'promote this post' button? Doesn't that allow you to choose people who liked your page (only) and then specify how much you want to spend?
I've only done 2 sponsored posts like that, so perhaps someone else can chime in.
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What happens if you post something to your page, then click the 'promote this post' button? Doesn't that allow you to choose people who liked your page (only) and then specify how much you want to spend?
As I said, it comes back with a zero audience.
Makes me wonder though if FB ads has a minimum people threshold. If your page has say less than 500 people in it, it becomes an unviable ad, so returns zero.
It maybe works for people with a lot larger like count.
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You still have to specify a region. I think you can specify 'world' if you really want everyone.
My page has 960 likes, apparently, and I just tried boosting a post and setting up the various options. It would have worked, except I cancelled.
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Timothy, I have a mere 185 followers/likers, call 'em what you will, on my FB author page. I can Boost a post for £15 and (FB reckon) reach up to 8000 people. The last time I tried this, they didn't ask any supplementary questions, they just took my money and told me more people had seen it.
No way to analyse anything, but it wasn't a sales post and I've no idea if it did any good - but it's another option. (If you can get it in Australia.)
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Timothy, I have a mere 185 followers/likers, call 'em what you will, on my FB author page. I can Boost a post for £15 and (FB reckon) reach up to 8000 people. The last time I tried this, they didn't ask any supplementary questions, they just took my money and told me more people had seen it.
No way to analyse anything, but it wasn't a sales post and I've no idea if it did any good - but it's another option. (If you can get it in Australia.)
Have you checked if those 185 actually saw it? Because I doubt it.
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Have you checked if those 185 actually saw it? Because I doubt it.
It won't tell you how many people were followers and how many people were their friends. If she just boosted to her followers, the number reached would be closer to how many of her followers saw it, but would not be exact because whenever a follower likes or comments a post, their friends / family are more likely to see it.
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I suppose I ought to question why FB only spent $1.03 on my post boost a month ago, but I find it hard to care. FB advertising has never worked for me.
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I'm glad the conversation turned to FB ads. Amongst all the frustration, they seem a better option to me than AMS, which appear to be indecipherable and expensive.
So question: when you boost a FB ad, does FB care about the image you've created for the post? Because with FB ads, although it's relaxed the criteria somewhat, FB analyses and "approves" the ad and, in particular, the image. Are the criticisms, etc., about "too much text" and so on applied to boosted FB ads?
By the way, as an aside, in the good ol' days (or bad, depending on your POV) advertising by Big Five was more of a back-scratching exercise than any attempt at effective adverts. Books reviews in Literary columns, mentions at book festivals ... any kind of organic, name-dropping, promotion by print or television media was all discreetly dependent on how much money was spent on buying advertising space.
An exception - to which I fell slightly victim - was when Bryce Courtney switched publishers for a huge amount of money, and suddenly his books and advertising were everywhere in an attempt to recoup ROI. Piles of 'em in petrol stations, supermarkets ... you name it. Late nineties? There wasn't a cent of budget left for promoting the publisher's other new releases ... including mine and some colleagues.
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I'm glad the conversation turned to FB ads. Amongst all the frustration, they seem a better option to me than AMS, which appear to be indecipherable and expensive.
So question: when you boost a FB ad, does FB care about the image you've created for the post? Because with FB ads, although it's relaxed the criteria somewhat, FB analyses and "approves" the ad and, in particular, the image. Are the criticisms, etc., about "too much text" and so on applied to boosted FB ads?
I'm having a lot more success with FB ads than I am with AMS ads at the moment. As for text in an image, I would just say, don't. There plenty of room above and below the ad to say whatever you want. FB will approve you ad with text in the image, but I suspect they throttle it if you choose to ignore their warning about it.
Also, I would never advocate "boosting" a post. I have never seen an post I boosted bring anything worthwhile. If your just looking to get your post in front of a few more eyeballs, it can work, but to use it to sell books, it doesn't appear to work. Just create a stand-alone ad and run that through the Ads Manager.
Here is the current ad I'm running right now. No text in the image and short and sweet blurbs.
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Slick ad.
I'm not on Facebook but I will chime in to say AMS is increasingly awful lately.
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Thanks for the thread and I did find some helpful tidbits.
My first novel was just released (first a series).
I took Kindlepreneur's free AMS course https://courses.kindlepreneur.com/courses/AMS and started several campaigns using his strategy - so I will see how that goes.
With only 10 sales in 10 days with no advertising, I need to do something.
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Thanks for the thread and I did find some helpful tidbits.
My first novel was just released (first a series).
I took Kindlepreneur's free AMS course https://courses.kindlepreneur.com/courses/AMS and started several campaigns using his strategy - so I will see how that goes.
With only 10 sales in 10 days with no advertising, I need to do something.
FWIW, that course is dated and shallow.* It's still valid info. But AMS has undergone huge changes over the last 12 months. These changes have resulted in AMS strategy becoming more complex as competition has increased.
It's like learning to play checkers. The basics are simple. But while learning, new rules have been enacted allowing lateral jumping and triple-kinging. These new rules have led to complex strategies like The Pincer Move, The Stronghold Gambit, and The Hungarian Offense. lol
So while most AMS advertisers are still doing the simple "bid on authors and titles and hope for the best" strategy (hello 2017!) the smart money is doing much more.
* That's not a hit against Dave. His 5-day course isn't meant to be comprehensive.