For all those who have self published a novel or are considering doing so, there’s one very important thing you should know: your book has a superpower. Sounds awesome, right? Until you realize what that superpower actually is: invisibility.
That’s right. Your book is invisible. No one can see it except you. So…not as awesome as what you were imagining (admit it – you thought your book could fly or shoot lasers from its title page). And let’s face it – invisibility is definitely not what any author wants for their precious newborn novel.
But that’s not the end of the story: YOU, the author, have a special power too. You are the only one on earth who can make your book visible to others. And that is an amazing power, if you can just figure out how to use it.
Below is a chronicle of my efforts thus far to make my debut novel appear in the eyes of the world.
Kindle Select/Kindle Unlimited
After some initial sales to kindhearted friends and family members – and three wonderfully detailed reviews from book bloggers – my YA novel quickly returned to its original state of invisibility, where I sadly left it for several months. I didn’t really know what to do or how to move forward, so I just let it stagnate.
Eventually, I pulled myself together and made some kind of effort by enrolling the book in Kindle Select (This is what it’s called on the author side of things. On the reader side, it’s known as Kindle Unlimited.)
Enrollment has several perks. Readers with a KU subscription can read the book for free, and authors are paid a certain amount per page read (typically about half a cent). The program also allows authors to give their ebooks away for a certain number of days per enrollment period, or reduce the price for special, short-term sales called Kindle Countdown Deals.
The one main downside is that you can’t have your ebook available anywhere else – it must be an Amazon exclusive (not a dealbreaker for me, since my ebook wasn’t published elsewhere).
With much excitement, I arranged my first giveaway. I posted on this blog that my book would be free, and promoted it on Twitter (is anyone actually calling it X?) as well. All told, eight people downloaded the book during its free days. In my mind, that was pretty good – eight more people had discovered my book and might actually read it.
A few months later I tried another giveaway, this time promoting only on Twitter. Zero people downloaded the book. It was a definite low moment for me. Apparently, I couldn’t even give my book away. Then there was the fact that my one and only KU reader made it through 158 pages, then abandoned the book, never to pick it up again, and I would never know why.
After these glaring failures, I slumped into despair for a while, and my book sales were at zero for a good 5-6 months. Eventually, I picked myself up, dusted the self-pity particles off the butt of my jeans, and got back to work fighting for my book.
The first thing I did was spend weeks researching proper categories and keywords for my novel – something that should have been done prior to publication. I’ll try to do a separate post on this because it’s vitally important.
Bargain Booksy
Once my book was as well-categorized and keyworded as possible, I decided to try pairing a Kindle Countdown Deal with a paid promotion on Bargain Booksy. Bargain Booksy sends out emails to subscribers about discounted books ($4.99 or less) in each reader’s chosen categories. The discounted books are also listed on BB’s website.
In my case, I paid $25 for my book to be emailed out to the 150,000+ subscribers in their “Young Adult” category. My book was already priced low enough that I didn’t have to reduce it further, but I dropped it to $0.99 just to sweeten the deal.
My Bargain Booksy promo email went out on a Monday (the first day of my countdown deal). One person bought the book that day. I made another two sales the following day, and one later that week. Four sales, in all, and though I didn’t make back anywhere near what I spent, it still felt better having people buy my book than giving it away for free and having no one even take it.
Despite not selling oodles of copies, I will say that Bargain Booksy was very easy to work with, and gave clear instructions on how to set the timing of the Countdown Deal so that it would match up perfectly with the promotional email.
Also, I signed up for their newsletter (they strongly encourage all authors to do so) and while I enjoy getting the daily emails featuring bargain YA books, I do wonder how many of their subscribers are actually fellow authors who signed up in the process of advertising their books.
Amazon Ads
Having gotten a taste of people actually buying my book, I didn’t want to turn back. My next foray into paid advertising was through Amazon Ads. I found an awesome tutorial which simplified the process of setting up different kinds of ads, and got to work.
My first campaign was a sponsored product ad with automatic keyword targeting and a small amount of custom text. In this model, Amazon would choose my keywords for me, I would get impressions (views) if my bid was competitive enough against other advertisers, and I would only pay if someone clicked on my ad.
I set my bid at $0.40 per click, sat back, and waited. Not much happened. My impressions were at zero, and I got impatient, so I upped my bid by five cents every day until I started getting impressions.
I think my bid was at $0.65 or $0.70 by this point, and I was getting about ten impressions per day – very low, but at the time I had no idea ten was a bad number (FYI: if you get one click per 1,000 impressions, and one sale for every ten clicks, that’s pretty good). I left it alone for a month, got no clicks (and therefore paid nothing), but felt good that at least a few people were seeing my book. It was no longer invisible.
The next month, I tried a manual targeting campaign (i.e. I chose my own keywords). This was fun because I had researched the heck out of keywords several months prior, and since you can only choose seven for your book’s metadata, a lot of really good ones didn’t make the cut. This gave me a chance to use them all and then some.
I unwisely set my default bid at $0.60, allowing it to go up to $0.90 for prime advertising real estate (e.g. the top of the search results page). Right away my impressions were in the upper hundreds/low thousands, and I started getting clicks. Sometime during that month, one of those clicks resulted in a sale. I was ecstatic – someone had discovered my book, read the description, and decided the novel was worth spending money on.
The next few months ran in a similar vein, though the spend gradually increased from $15 a month, to $20, to $25. I typically sold between 1-3 books per month through ad clicks, and was definitely in the red, but still feeling good about investing in my novel.
Things went both right and badly wrong in January. About a third of the way through the month, my sales jumped to $111.92. I thought it was a mistake. It turned out not to be.
Apparently, I had sold eight paperbacks from a single $0.75 click. This was really cool, but also confusing. Why would someone buy eight? I felt like I was missing something, something bad, but couldn’t figure out what it was. Part of me wondered if Amazon periodically buys books from its own advertisers, then resells them, all the while keeping authors addicted to ads via the sweet taste of making the occasional sale. I doubt this is the case, but wouldn’t it be a massive scandal?
No matter what the reason for the weird eight-book click, my impressions soared, as did my clicks, yet I failed to make another sale that month, landing me deeper in the red than ever before. In the end, I spent over fifty dollars on ads in January, and only made ten of it back in royalties.
Being on a very tight budget, I couldn’t afford to continue at this rate, and after a panicky and disastrous effort to quickly lower my bids, I ended up having to pause both my campaigns (the manual, and the automatic, which I had left running because it occasionally came alive and generated a few clicks, though never any sales).
I am not done with Amazon Ads, but I do need to regroup and figure out how to do it on a budget that works for me (i.e. much lower default bids). I also need to view it as a long-term investment and let things grow and build momentum slowly, rather than jacking up the bids in the first few days just to see some results.
Voracious Readers Only
Even though I sold some books through paid advertising, I felt that I could have sold more if readers had more than 3 or 4 reviews to peruse for info and opinions about my novel. In an effort to gain reviews and new readership, I did a free twenty-book giveaway on a site called Voracious Readers Only. This site focuses on connecting readers with fledgling authors, in hopes of the experience being beneficial for both parties.
Authors gain new readers (who are encouraged by the site to leave reviews), and also get to add those readers’ email addresses to their mailing lists. Readers get a steady stream of free books and the chance to help authors out by joining their mailing lists and leaving reviews.
To get the most out of my giveaway, I decided to first set up a mailing list. I signed up for a free account on MailerLite.com. They quickly informed me that sending out my newsletter from a free email address (e.g. yahoo, gmail, etc) was very bad and likely to go to spam instead of my readers’ inboxes. They recommended that I purchase my own domain and a professional email address to go with it.
Thus, what started off as a free venture ended up costing me $$$$$. When all was said and done, I owned my own website, and had a pro email address. Later, I got to thinking and decided to check the sender addresses of the author newsletters I am subscribed to. They were ALL free emails. **facepalm**
On the bright side, since I upgraded my WordPress site, you won’t have to look at those gross adds for reducing belly fat anymore. So, you’re welcome. 🙂
My experience with VRO was…interesting. Unlike Bargain Booksy, I didn’t find VRO’s interface to be user friendly. I was confused several times while setting up my giveaway, had no idea what information was going out to readers, and began to wonder whether it was even okay to put anyone’s email on my list, should I be lucky enough to get any requests.
Also, when entering info about my book, there was apparently a word count limit in the “reviews” section…however, the site didn’t let me know that. I included the three reviews I’d gotten from book bloggers (VRO asked for 3-5 reviews), but one of my reviews got cut off in the middle and there was no way to see this until after the form was already sent. I thought my form looked like a pile of crap, and worried that this was what readers were going to see.
The day of my giveaway arrived, and requests began to trickle in before the one-hour window opened, and continued all the way until the next morning, until I accumulated the promised total of 20 opt-ins. Thankfully, the communication from VRO on that day was clearer, and I at least understood that everyone who opted in had voluntarily signed up for my mailing list.
Time to get to work! I dutifully sent out copies of my ebook to everyone who asked for one, thanked them profusely, and signed them up for my newsletter. The automated Welcome message I’d set up on MailerLite seemed to go out exactly as planned. Roughly half of the readers opened the newsletter, while the rest ignored it or it got lost in their spam traps. One person immediately unsubscribed, which didn’t feel great, but I tried not to take it personally.
Still, I had a few subscribers, and that felt good. Roughly a month later, a new review popped up on Amazon from one of the VRO readers. Just a single word – “Stunning” – accompanied by a five star rating. It was definitely one of the better days I’ve had in a while. 🙂
Takeaways
- Investing in my novel feels so much better than giving up on it.
- Paid advertising DOES sell books, but so far not enough to cover the cost of the ads.
- Giving my book away in exchange for subscriber email addresses seems more beneficial than just giving it away for nothing.
- In case you missed that big purple button up there, I have a newsletter now! Here’s where you can sign up: https://subscribepage.io/gabassier_newsletter (if you’re on the fence about clicking, there’s a REALLY cute pic of my cat Black Canary on there).
- I can’t wait to save up a bit of $$ and try more adventures in advertising!
Are you an indie author trying to market your books? What have you tried so far? What works for you and what doesn’t?
as the HERO flies... 