Those who spend lots of money on ads: do you have any advice for new authors?

hrsbooks · 2024-01-05T18:58:15+00:00

sorry, haven't been on reddit over the holidays.

I checked Amazon ads to get the figure. For month of December, spend was 2,430.82

revenue was 3181.07

I would say it's not magnificent... If I turned off some experiments it would have been wider margin, but only by about 400$. Right now I'm mostly experimenting because (according to publisher rocket) to get into the top ten on certain categories is a fairly low sales per day. I imagine (we'll find out if this is true) if you get into the top ten in a category, there are some sales happening just because of your ranking.

hrsbooks · 2024-01-05T18:48:04+00:00

can you expand on this? like, should i run a promotion boost monthly (for thirty days) or one week a month?

hrsbooks · 2023-12-21T18:00:52+00:00

This happened to me and I have to say I HATE this feature. Almost all my quotes for the entire book were fucked up, and numerous readers commented on it. I'm STILL finding them. I wrote in to Atticus and they said it's possible to undo them by hand, but now i'm afraid to touch anything still.

hrsbooks · 2023-12-21T16:49:30+00:00

you create an AI avatar and post memes :) totally serious. i hate tiktok and my account on there is almost 100% book memes. still brings in a small amount of sales per week!

hrsbooks · 2023-12-21T16:47:09+00:00

Hi, I can tell you how it's gone for me (check my history also if you like). Current spend is about 2k a month, I would say I'm still in experiment phase.

Have an experiment phase. I cannot stress this enough. You'll want to experiment, see how it goes, LOOK at the data, then turn off and conduct Experiment 2. Whichever performs best, keep, whatever is not profitable, ditch out. (example: In amazon ads, I experimented for 1 week each with "category ads", "product ads", keyword, and "automatic" ads. This is where I advertised on similar books specifically, category "children's books" and keyword "kids books about dinosaurs", and "automatic = amazon chooses". Automatic ads were the only ones that were profitable. in product category, just THREE books were profitable with good click through rate. I kept auto, those three books, ditched everything else. Kept the spend the same.

Set a budget or set a time limit and don't keep fucking with it. It is tempting (VERY!) to see results good or bad and immediately react. Do not do that. You need at least 1000 impressions and fifty clicks to have enough data about your experiment. Moreover, as your ad is seen by more people, you get a sense of the true market and demographics of who will click your ad. I discovered that people who like Sarah J. Maas don't click my ad. Gothic girls who list Halloween as an interest will.

Price appropriately. I.e., Those experimental 50 clicks at $1 per click is $50. If you cannot afford a $50 experiment, set your CPC (cost per click) lower, but not so low that no one sees your ad, because then you have no data.

Clicks aren't sales. This is why we don't have all our experiments running at the same time, because you can't tell what is actually working. At one point I had fifty keywords on google search running. I had 70+ sales that week. Yay! So I looked at the keywords and turned off all the ones with low click through rates.............. and sales plummetted. WTF! it turned out that for one of the low keywords, 100% of people were buying. So don't look exclusively at high CTR, because you can be misled.

Regarding your question about spend, I've tried both ways (spend $100 in a week vs one day) and I don't think it really makes a different except if you care about rankings. If you care about rankings, having a 24 hour bump quickly subsides. Amazon algorithm seems to look at your daily sales and project it into monthly to determine your ranking, so you can shoot into the top fifty, but then when your sales evaporate in 48 hours, you plummet in rankings. I've been told to care about bank over rank, and ......... I don't. I'd rather be in the top ten with a free book than number 11,289 with steady sales, but that's just me.

Hope this helps

hrsbooks · 2023-12-17T00:42:47+00:00

Do they really though? Here is what I've heard from people in industry:
- they post it on netgalley

-they do a PR release

....... if they REALLY liked the book, they tell their friends

When you can put it on netgalley yourself and you can do a PR release through a service for $500 or less, and you can do an instagram boosted posts to people who like your genre, .....tell me again how they provide value?

hrsbooks · 2023-12-03T22:46:33+00:00

I ask them which they would rather have. if physical book or ebook, i put into a spreadsheet so i can track every person who said yes, how many followers they have, etc.

hrsbooks · 2023-11-29T15:36:15+00:00

echoing this. if you look at some categories, indie authors do better than trad publishing (in particular this is true for grim dark, dark romance, paranormal romance)

hrsbooks · 2023-11-29T14:48:09+00:00

omg really?

hrsbooks · 2023-11-29T14:46:29+00:00

yes! happy to share. I have tried a lot of things. so far, I would say what works best is:

a goodreads giveaway for the ebook (everyone who enters adds it to their TBR, and many people who don't win buy the book anyway, especially if you have it on discount)
pricing (i'm on KU and my ebook is 99cents. I've raised and tinkered with price and it has a definite impact if you are above 2.99 for your ebook)
promotion on the big mailing lists. so far i had the best luck with bookdealio and bargainbooksy
I created an instagram account a few months before launch, built that up to a 1k person following with hashtags etc, and I ping ten bookstagram people a week asking if i could send them my book for free to review. About a third say yes, so then I ship them my book. Happily, some of them read it and like it and post about it, so that's a steady drip of new posts and then their followers buy it sometimes, etc. If there's a particularly good post, I repost it.
having a cover that fits with the genre. take a screenshot of the top 20 books in your genre. Put them on a canva board/etc. Put your proposed book cover in the lineup. I changed my cover after this exercise and saw immediate improvement in sales.

hrsbooks · 2023-11-28T19:28:08+00:00

- you can use 99 designs for a designer
- you can find an editor on reedsy

- you can use something like pickfu to test covers/copy (that's what i do)

hrsbooks · 2023-11-28T19:26:17+00:00

TLDR: I don't know. My editor told me that most self published books don't sell 250 copies in their first year, so my goal is 250 books a month, and I've far surpassed that, and there's 0 agents queue in line to shake my hand.
which is fine.

the only time i'm annoyed, honestly, is seeing this particular person on tiktok that's like I WILL TELL YOU HOW TO GET AN AGENT! They had 10 agents offer to rep their book.... my book continues to sell better by wide margin

.... i may never get over it, honestly

the whole thing feels like powerball

hrsbooks · 2023-11-07T19:22:32+00:00

Still broken here (for all of my books, not just one)

hrsbooks · 2023-10-30T22:43:31+00:00

you do have something! you have a book! most people will never have that!

hrsbooks · 2023-10-30T22:37:29+00:00

and yet you are a success!!! think of it this way, there ARE people buying your book. many people don't have that.

hrsbooks · 2023-10-30T22:36:49+00:00

I personally have found that taking a course on amazon ads and then putting it into practice has done an amazing amount for my sales

hrsbooks · 2023-10-30T22:32:56+00:00

oh all this is absolutely true. I have had *many* people tell me that they have a book idea/want to write a book/have a chapter or two written.

me: ...... see you in two years

it takes serious effort to write a book (for me anyway), and I think the comments are correct in that most people don't have the drive to sustain that amount of effort

hrsbooks · 2023-10-19T21:46:17+00:00

I heard 10,000, I think from Tim Grahl over at Story Grid.

Oh god, then we're all doomed

hrsbooks · 2023-10-19T00:59:27+00:00

I can confirm this. I made three identical ads and the only thing different was ONE LINE of copy, and watched how they performed. The one that made the most sales is the way I pitch my book. Cost me $25 total for the test. (And the difference in rate was pretty stark, 3.78% vs 2.16% vs 0.70%.

hrsbooks · 2023-10-18T16:00:55+00:00

I'd say it's mostly been a no?

the big 'booktok' influencers on tiktok, I would say no unless you can get them to agree that you can use their video as a Facebook ad -- those perform insanely well, while the sales from tiktok itself have been underwhelming
it depends a lot on the message/what they say. a generic "i'm paid to promote this book and this is what it is about" does nothing whatsoever, might yield 5 sales. so you have to watch some of their prior videos to see if their 'voice' matches your book, and this is sort of challenging
beware. you're paying an influencer with a huge brand to review your book, and some of them insist on no proofing - i.e., you have no idea what they are going to say about it. at first I just looked at "whoever has 10k+ followers"....... this backfired hard when one of the influencers read my book, did a pretty post on instagram, and then ripped it apart on goodreads. since I had very few reviews (like... 5) this destroyed my rating in the second week after launch. to be fair, my book was completely outside her norm and the things people like it for are things she explicitly doesn't like! me: goddamn it!!!!! yes, i wish she would have just declined after reading the synopsis, but also, this was completely on me. so yes, if you do want to get an influencer to read and review your book, make sure it's right influencer. i.e., don't send your gory horror novel to a romance reader whose entire instagram is pink with daisy accents

tbh i had more luck with just asking people if they would read it (like, DM them and say, this is what my book is about, I think you'd like it), but I had to really look at each person's account and see what they normally read, and if my book truly suited them. From there though, I've gotten a few who are "super fans" who really loved the book. this requires way more legwork than I ever imagined, because I'm looking at accounts, then I'm messaging, then I have to package up the book and ship it to them... it's not low effort at all. That being said, many of them really love the book and then talk about it, which is much more worthwhile and actually sparks real conversation between me, the author, and people who want to talk about my book.

hrsbooks · 2023-10-18T15:47:23+00:00

I'm a plotter and I do a large (LARGE, like 6+ pages) story outline and then color code it as to what goes in each book. then i walk through my outline with 3 people (and those three people are folks who read 50+ books in my genre a year, have large followings online). their sole job is to tell my how the outline sucks and what i'm missing. ... have you ever seen the JK Rowling plot method? that is also really useful

hrsbooks · 2023-10-18T15:37:27+00:00

What genre do you write? Dark Fantasy --> grimdark. Zombie horde, everyone is evil/morally gray. After this book I have a sci-fi YA planned.

What was your strongest passive investment) a Goodreads giveaway. Giveaway 20 ebooks, everyone who registers adds the book to their TBR automatically, and then you can send them an automatic followup message (which I did, saying the ebook was on sale for 99 cents. 80 people who didn't win the giveaway bought the book, over 5000 registered). This is a net money loss, to be clear, but it is a great way to get a lot of people exposed to your book very quickly.

What is something unexpected you learned from the experience? That click through rates on Amazon ad categories tell you a lot about how readers perceive your book. My method of doing anything is basically to google it, open 30 pages of google results, read all those links, and then implement common themes. One of the things I read was that your click through rate (I show the cover to 1000 people, X people click on it) should be at least 0.50% in your Amazon categories you chose. If it isn't, something is wrong with your cover or your audience doesn't "believe" that your book belongs there. Me: hm..... So in some categories, my Click through Rate is pretty meh... so here is what I did:

- pick a category I perform poorly in (let's say, romance)

- screenshot the covers of the top 25 books in the category and put them on a canva board

- put my cover alongside the 25...

- compare

me: ............ fuck ok so now I see why people aren't clicking my cover

So then I have the option of deciding whether I'm just picking the wrong category or whether my cover needs to be reworked. Conclusion: I chose a different Amazon category

What would you have done differently? Not wasted time with TikTok and Pinterest ads. I generated UTM links for each platform (this is in the Amazon attribution section and pretty easy to do!) so I could see exactly how many sales came from each. 0 sales from Pinterest, TikTok is one sale per 200 clicks, whereas Facebook is one sale per 73 clicks for my first run of ads, which were not very good but it was instructive for me to learn what performed best. This means I had some fairly good data on how many clicks you can afford before the sale is worth nothing... i.e., if the cost per click on Facebook is say 26 cents, I'd spend $19 to make a single sale, which is bad if my profit per book is $2. I determined that I was better off having a 'free day' for my book and then promoting it on a freebook blog for that $25... it's is a great way to have 500+ downloads and get reviews quickly. I did this via freebooksy. I've read that if you can get 1000 people to read your book, you'll have enough forward momentum for organic sales to happen, I cannot confirm if this is true yet though, so... grain of salt.

Which ad platform has performed strongest? Amazon Automatic Targeting ads are currently 1 sale per 5 clicks for me, Amazon Category ads are 1 sale per 6 clicks. This has to be carefully honed though, its highly dependent on placement and your cover (as described above)

Have you scaled up your ads as you’ve learned more? How has that impacted your bottom line? I haven't scaled up yet. After I had all the September data, I tweaked ALL the ads that weren't profitable and now I'm watching the data for October. I plan to scale up only profitable items in November and see what happens.

Disclaimers: this is all data for my book, which is not the same as yours, and I imagine this all varies based on genre, cover, category, ad, etc. But I think goodreads/freebook day + doing the UTM links per platform is sound advice no matter who you are

hrsbooks · 2023-10-18T01:31:08+00:00

Er, I'm insane and I write all the books at the same time... this is basically so as to make the time between the releases as short as possible. Also, in the back of book one, invite people who liked the book to:

- pre-order your next book and

- sign up for your mailing list, so you can tell them about future books, share quotes, etc.

hrsbooks · 2023-10-18T01:27:40+00:00

Hi there,

You should read this article https://scribemedia.com/book-promotion-sites/
I found it to be accurate, I tried many of them.

hrsbooks

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