Google Adwords Update

I stopped the Google Adwords Express campaign a month ago, and found no drop in sales. When I tried restarting the campaign, it was far more expensive. Whereas before the cost-per-click was around 20-30 cents, now it is over $1 per click for the same ad. In addition, I found minimal change in sales. I believe that the ads helped to develop initial organic growth, and now they are too expensive to continue using.

As a result, I'm running campaigns on various book promotion websites. I plan on doing these promotions in a "throw a bunch of noodles on the wall and see what sticks" approach. I'll keep you posted on the results!

Runic Awakening on Sale!

The Runic Awakening ebook is on sale on Amazon.com for $0.99 for a limited time only! The sale will run from January 9th to the 15th.

I've also run a promotion on BookBongo.com, and I'm looking to run more promotions on sites like Indie Author News. I'm interested in how effective these kinds of sites are; I'll let you know how it works out, as usual!

Call to Action!

I've been having issues with in-text images on Amazon KDP for Runic Revelation. I have four jpg's in the middle of the book. They showed up on the KDP previewer and in the HTML and MOBI files I tested. So naturally I published the book. Imagine my surprise when I tested the book on my Samsung Galaxy 6 Kindle app, and found that the images didn't show up!

After a bit of research, I realized that I must not have inserted the images into my docx document...I had copy-pasted them. So I inserted them and tried again...with some success. This time, the images showed up on my Kindle reader, but not on my Samsung Kindle app. I've tried just about everything, but they still don't show up. Quite frustrating!

At this point, I put a link to an email address on my Amazon description page for the book in a call to action for my readers to let me know if they're having issues with images not showing up. If I can't fix this in a reasonable time-frame, I may have to remove the images altogether. They're not essential to the book, but I do use images quite a bit in the third book, so it would be advantageous for me to find a solution.

If anyone has an issue with the images in Book 2, please email me at author@runicseries.com.

Bookdaily Promotion

As I mentioned in the last blog post, I tried Bookdaily.com to help promote Runic Awakening. BookDaily has a website where they feature your book for free, allowing people to read a sample of it and purchase it by clicking a link to Amazon or other online book stores. They also have a paid promotion for about $50 per month, where they email an excerpt of your book to their readership. They offer statistics on the promotion; the details of my promotion for November were:

  • 46,698 emails sent to their readers promoting my book. 
  • Of those, 1,305 emails were opened by their readers. 
  • Also, 103 readers read my excerpt on the BookDaily site (part of free promotion). 

That means about 2.8% of BookDaily's readership actually opened the excerpt email. This seems like an awfully low percentage. But what about sales, you ask?

Well, looking back at Amazon's sales dashboard, the days where the BookDaily email excerpts were read - all 1,305 of them - showed lower than normal sales. Meaning the promotion had no appreciable effect on sales.

I've since cancelled any further promotion with BookDaily. While I can't say how effective the site is for other authors, it definitely was not effective for me.

A Few Updates...

I'm nearly finished with book 2 in the series, Runic Revelation! It's been quite a productive few weeks, despite the upcoming holiday. The final editing process is 80% complete, and the next step will be formatting the book for ebook and paperback.

The third book in the series, Runic Vengeance, has a nearly-complete book cover. I'll post the cover soon, and once book 2 is done, I'll be working hard to get book 3 out by February of 2017.

I've also added Runic Awakening to Librarything.com and Bookdaily.com.

Runic Revelation Update - and Runic Vengeance!

Book 2 in the Runic Series, Runic Revelation, is nearly complete! One more read-through with a few touch-ups and it will be ready for formatting and submission to Amazon KDP. As with Runic Awakening, it will be available in paperback and ebook formats, and will be available free through Kindle Unlimited.

The cover for Runic Vengeance, the third book in the series, is nearly finished. As it is a bit longer than the other two books, I suspect it will take a few months to be ready for prime-time. I'll post updates as I go, and update the bar graphs on the home page showing my progress!

Google AdWords Express

An update...I abandoned Facebook ads and Amazon campaigns, and tried Google AdWords Express. There are two options for google ads...the Express version and the full-featured version. I elected to use AdWords Express because it is user-friendly, and the full-featured version is more for marketing professionals, which I most certainly am not! I chose to try AdWords because I got a $100 credit by creating a commercial website through Squarespace. I had nothing to lose, so why not try it?

Well, I'm happy I did. I created a simple ad targeting specific phrases, like ebook, new book, etc. Google allows you to set a maximum average daily budget, and a total monthly maximum. It also tells you what people like you are spending on their campaigns, so you can gauge how you compare with the competition, so to speak. I started with $10 a day, and let it run. The results were nearly instantaneous...double the daily sales, and far more Kindle Unlimited page reads, at a cost of about 25-30 cents per click, less than Facebook and Amazon.

I'll be honest, I was taken aback by this. From what I had read, people were saying that Google's ads were too expensive compared to Facebook and Amazon. This certainly isn't my experience. I'm not sure that I'm brave enough to increase my marketing budget further...not yet, anyway...but I plan to continue to use Google AdWords Express.

Marketing Update

After nearly two weeks, I've reviewed the stats from each ad campaign (Amazon and Facebook) and came to the following conclusions...

Facebook averaged out to about $0.50 per post engagement (a like, click, or share). Mostly likes, very few link clicks for purchasing the book. For link clicks, it was enormously inefficient, averaging over $15 per link click.

Amazon was very cost-effective, as no money is spent unless someone clicks your ad. For $5, over 30,000 people saw the ad, and over a dozen link clicks.

Goodreads also supports an author dashboard, and you can cross-promote with your facebook page and website, and sync your blog if you have one. Goodreads also allows you to do ad campaigns similar to Amazon.com.

It's still unclear after all of this if the ad campaigns are at all helpful. After turning them all off for a few days, ebook sales and Kindle Unlimited page reads have been relatively steady per day. So far, I'm not convinced that they're worth it. I guess the take-home message is that ad campaigns through Facebook and Amazon haven't led to increased readership for me...at least not with my limited marketing budget.

Web site updates!

I've updated the web site to include progress bars for each of the books in the series. So far there are four books, the first of which is already available on Amazon. The second and third books are already written, but need some polishing before they're ready for prime time.

I'm currently working on the fourth book, and am about a fifth of the way through the first draft. I'll be updating the progress bars for each book as I go, so keep an eye out!

A Marketing Experiment

As a self-published author, learning about marketing has been an eye-opening experience. There are a lot of options available. Facebook promotions for this website were the first I tried. With $10, I reached 773 people and got one person that clicked on the ad. Facebook had estimated that the post would reach 1300-3000 or so people, so its estimate was a bit off. Also, there's no way to know if that one click resulted in a sale. Not exactly a great result, but perhaps I need to better target my audience. I'll keep experimenting!

Amazon, on the other hand, allows for two basic types of paid advertisements. You have to be enrolled in KDP select to use them:

Product display ad: 
Minimum $100 budget. Display ads on Kindle homepages, product searches, etc. Cost per click is usually $0.15 to $0.20, and you're only billing for the clicks you get.

Sponsored products ad:
Displays ads on search results and product detail pages. You can choose a budget per day and how many days to run the ad campaign. Again, you're only billed per click.

I chose to run both. Amazon keeps track of the sales from the campaign, so you can see if the campaign is actually profitable. It's pretty robust, and I'm interested to see the results!

Runic Awakening Paperback Version

The paperback version of Runic Awakening is now available on CreateSpace:

https://www.createspace.com/6616591

It will be available on Amazon.com by next week. CreateSpace was very user-friendly.

A note to self-published authors choosing between Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace for your paperbacks...KDP auto-generates a barcode on the back cover of your book, even if your cover artist already has a barcode image placed. This results in a double-barcode...took me forever to figure out why this was happening! So be sure to get a cover image that doesn't have a barcode on it if you're going through KDP. Right now, it seems like CreateSpace is the better option, as it supports expanded distribution. And your book will end up on Amazon anyway in a few days, so nothing lost!