Advertising
The short version:
Without advertising your book will go nowhere. The only thing that has somewhat worked for me is Amazon advertising; however the costs are prohibitive (approx. 10 times the royalties received).
The long version:
What have I tried?
Amazon advertising, Google web advertising, digital billboard advertising, Amazon affiliate links, and driving sales directly through my website.
Amazon Advertising
There are various types of Amazon ads. I’ve focussed on three types: lock screen ads, sponsored products and keywords.
Lock screen ads appear on a person’s Kindle lock screen if they have opted-in to advertising. The adverts are based on their reading and browsing history. I’ve found these to be quite effective.
Sponsored products focusses on general search categories. I find this fairly effective. My ads target 7 categories:
Teen & Young Adult Science Fiction
Dystopian Fiction
Dystopian Science Fiction
Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction
Genetic Engineering Science Fiction eBooks
Genetic Engineering Science Fiction
Keywords drills down even further to individual search terms. My ads target 34 specific search terms like ‘apocalyptic’, ‘’dystopian’, gender roles’, and ‘corporations’. This has mixed results.
In all cases the advertising runs as an auction. You set a maximum ‘bid’ - the amount you are prepared to pay for your ad to be shown to a person browsing in these categories or searching for these terms. You get charged if someone clicks on your ad, regardless of whether they make a purchase. Your ‘click through rate’ describes the proportion of clicks that convert to a sale. Much of the time, winning bids are reasonable, around 15p. You are competing against everyone else though, so sometimes you will need to bid £1.50 or more to get your ad shown. I’ve also seen bids much higher than that. I suspect this happens when big publishers are dumping money to promote a new release from a well-known author. Effectively pricing-out the little guys for weeks at a time. As it stands, my advertising cost of sales on Amazon is over 1000%.
Google web advertising
I don’t have much to say about Google. It works along similar lines to the Amazon keyword ads. I tried it for a few months and it resulted in zero sales. I guess the advantage of Amazon over Google is that you are serving ads to people who are actively browsing for books, rather than browsing the web more generally.
Digital billboard ads
You know those obnoxiously bright digital billboards that are popping up everywhere? The ones on the side of buildings, bus stops, in malls, and anywhere else they can jam them; that burn their ads into your retina as you walk past? Well there are so many of them it is now possible to buy ad space on them for a similar cost to running Amazon ads (the exact costs vary based on the location and popularity of the boards). I recently ran a trial across 20 boards in my local area. The process was pretty frustrating and I didn’t see my ad display at all. Even when the app was telling me it was running right in front of me. As far as I can tell the billboard ads didn’t result in any sales. By the way, those things are pretty sinister. They are tracking your eye movements to decide whether you’ve engaged with the ad…
Affiliate links / driving sales through my website
These have so far been completely ineffective. Part of the reason I write this blog is to get eyes on the product. I’m only getting about 50 views per month which are not translating into sales.
‘Organic sales’
Without advertising, my book languishes around number 5,000 in the Amazon sales rankings for its category. If I spend about £30 - 50 a month on Amazon advertising, I can get it up to around number 1,000. The holy grail of any advertising campaign would be to get the book high enough up the ranking to generate sales on its own. If you can get into the top 10 pages of search results, people will see your book regardless of whether you advertise, and then that becomes a self-sustaining chain reaction. I would have to dump a serious amount of money into advertising to achieve that.