Ad Cost

One thing to know about independent publishing is that it’s not cheap. Beyond the cost of actual publishing, advertising and promos take up a lot of money. So much, in fact, that I’m going to dial it back for the next few months. It’s been incredibly exciting to see my books at the top of the rankings on Amazon and selling well on Apple, but it comes at a big cost that’s not sustainable. As an author, you hope that your sales snowball and become self-sustaining. Even then, I think there’s still advertising and expense. But I have a finite amount of money and since I want to do some promos and ads around the holiday season later this year, I’m going to dial it way back on the ad expense. I’m also thinking of raising the price for a few months. That would likely throttle down sales, but since I’m not going to be advertising as much, maybe it’s the right time to do it. The other benefit would be that when I do start holiday sales, I can lower the price and tout the book as lowest price in X number of days. Yes, that’s an artificial approach, but go complain to your grocery store since they do the same thing.

In this week’s dose of good news, I hit 100 ratings on Amazon for First. It maintains a 4.5 score and I’m very proud of that. Even with awards and great reviews, it’s gratifying to get the pulse of readers, the people who invested a little bit of money and a whole lot of time in reading the book. I appreciate every single person who clicks on the rating and especially those who leave a written review.