Marketing Campaign #1

Brace yourselves for a rant. It’s been building since my last post. I’m at the end of my first marketing campaign. Amazon posted 10,433 ads for the Island of Stone using my carefully collected keywords and fine-tuning. That is a tremendous amount of advertisement for one week, and it is undoubtedly getting the Island of Stone out there to the world. The problem is, out of all those ads, I received a scant 39 click-throughs and a total of 3 orders (one paperback and two Kindle purchases). I may have also gotten a few Kindle Unlimited reads from the ad, but I can’t track that through the marketing tool, so there is no way to know for sure. At the end of the day today (Saturday), I will exhaust my budget. The conclusion? I’ve come out at a loss, not just on the marketing returns, but I have spent all the money I’ve earned in royalties. That is investing everything back to the book for no results.

It is incredibly frustrating, and I am trying to stay positive, but it was pretty much a whole week of watching money go out the door with just one day of excitement when I received all 3 of my orders. I tried to dig to figure out what made that one day successful so I could replicate it, but I can’t find anything different than any of the other days. With one day remaining in the campaign, I severely doubt I will receive enough orders to justify continuing. Sure, I could dump more money into the tool, and it might take off, but it is just as likely this won’t happen according to my data.  

I don’t know what I did wrong. There is a wealth of success stories online, with most people at least breaking even using the marketing tool. I followed all the advice I could find, spent all the extra time researching keywords and entering all 250 of them, and made all the small adjustments on each. Nothing changed. If I’m not doing anything wrong, then I have to concede to the fact that either the book is terrible or there isn’t an audience interested in my story. I thought that perhaps my description was the problem, but I have changed that several times with no difference. What is there now seems pretty good to me, but maybe I’m not taking the right angle? I don’t know. Currently, I offer a quick summary of the story’s basis without exposing any of the meaty details. For those that have read the book, they know that it seems like a simple story at first, but in truth, it is certainly not. There are many twists and turns, but I can’t say what they are, or I risk spoiling the story. Finding the sweet spot for the genera is also a frustration. It fits into the many niches found in thriller, mystery, horror, and fantasy (and even romance). Thriller seems to be where I get the most clicks and sales, but competition is stiff there and the ads are expensive. Well, anyway, the struggle continues. I will keep trucking along. As I make sales, I will pool the funds and run periodic campaigns using the bit I’ve learned from this disaster. Maybe in time, things will build. If you have any ideas leave a comment below or here!

It is also difficult to trust Amazon. So far, my experience is that they don’t care about their ebook authors and take money from us whenever they can. I mean, think about it. They are already making money off of every book I sell (yes, every book I sell). Then, to market their product on their website, I have to pay. You would think they would want everyone to succeed. It seems to make sense that the more books they sell, the more money they would make. I suppose they have some algorithm that determined they would make more money by fleecing their vendors. How? Amazon’s marketing tool is a pay-by-click system, so the odds are inherently stacked against the vendor as you blast through your budget just because people click on your ad (some people do this on purpose because they know it cost you money). If it doesn’t cost Amazon anything to advertise seeing it is Amazon’s site, why not make it a pay-by-purchase (meaning you only pay for the ad if it leads to a purchase, I would happily pay in this situation)? Currently, any money I make from my hard work ends up going back to this greedy jungle python. There is very little transparency, and you have to dig for any information or data. Everything is secret. It feels like you are just handing more money over to Bezos. It’s quite the racket, but is anyone shocked? As a side note, every time I log in to my vendor account, I get a pop-up asking if I want to donate any of my profits to charity. Really, Bezos? How about you give some of your cut to charity or at least make it easier for me to make a profit so that I have something to give. Sorry, I am being bitter and Bezos is probably listening. Sorry dear leader, you are great!

Slaying the Bull (book 1 of the Tocharian Gospels series) is still coming along nicely. I’m about halfway in the final edit. It’s turning out to be a good yarn. As it fits nicely into a niche genre, maybe it will be easier to market. I guess we’ll see. The journey continues!

Cheers!