Marketing Island of Stone

Things are still moving along with the Slaying of the Bull (book 1 of the Tocharian Gospels Series). I am on page 545 of 584 of my final read-through- almost there! I will then do a final pass through spell-checker and Grammarly (very helpful tool) just to make sure I didn’t miss anything too obvious, and then it’s off to my readers for feedback. The great thing about e-publishing on Amazon is that even if you find something later, you can go back and fix it, but I want to be sure things are as polished as possible. I learned some valuable lessons from the unveiling of the Island of Stone. I had so many separate file versions of the book, by the time I pressed publish, an old version sneaked through. I also made the mistake of making some edits right into the publishing tool when I was checking for the format correctness, which I won’t do again.

I’ve entered the Island of Stone into the marketing game, a whole other skill-set I have to learn. As I mentioned yesterday, I am just dipping my toe in at this point to test the waters, but I am reading a lot and learning a lot. There are fundamentally two options when you market through Amazon. You can make everything automated (for beginners like me), or you can dive into the details- and there are a lot of details (this is for the advanced users).

To start, I am running a mostly automated campaign to get some data. I’ve struggled with the concept of keywords, and this is an excellent way to gather information on which keywords people use to get to the Island of Stone. Obtaining these data can be helpful in many areas, but namely, I will be able to see the best performing keywords for my novel that I can focus attention on during future marketing campaigns. The level of complexity is daunting, though. There are budgets and bid amounts, targeting settings, bid strategies, placement bids, etc. You can either have Amazon select keywords or choose your own to get your ad in a search result. You set a daily budget and then a default bid. When a potential customer clicks on your ad, you are charged for that click by your bid amount up to your daily budget amount. To get an ad on a page, and get a placement, you have to bid for that spot. You can set this so that your bids go up and down dynamically to make your ad more competitive and can fine-tune this to increase your bid by a higher percentage for specific spots.

That paragraph is probably confusing because it is a complicated system that I don’t completely understand, but I’m learning. It would be awesome if I could just put my work out there, people would buy it, and everyone would be happy (as long as they liked it), but that is being naive. You have to spend money to make money in this game, just like in life. I’ve discovered that every aspect of this journey is more complicated than I initially thought, but that is a good thing. It rewards those that put in the work, and that adds a bit of integrity. I am willing to do the work because I love it! My wife keeps telling me each night as I am hunched over the computer writing, that I should relax, and she’s probably right (she usually is), but I love it, and I can’t stop doing it. Writing fiction is something in my life that I am so passionate about that I would rather do it than anything else. Sure it’s hard work, but at the same time, it’s a pleasure. Many people search their whole life for that balance, and I am ecstatic that I found it.

Cheers!