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!

Runic Awakening Update!

Runic Awakening is almost ready for publishing! I'm working with Bookfly Design to finish the cover design, and the ebook file is complete. Just a few more edits for the print version left to do!

I knew that self-publishing was going to be a lot of work, but I still managed to underestimate just how much time and effort it would take...and how much I had to learn. Turns out that writing my books was just the beginning. Editing them, formatting the print and ebook versions, figuring out how to submit them to online publishing platforms, getting ISBN numbers for each version of each book...it was quite the educational experience. Not to mention perhaps the most important part of writing a book:  marketing!

The good thing is, now that I've done this once, it'll be easier for the next books in the series. The final drafts are nearly complete for book 2 and book 3...and I expect them to be published in December of 2016 and February of 2017, respectively. I'll keep you posted!