Change

I think it’s time to change up the ads I’ve been running on BookBub. Since I lowered the price in February, I’ve been running pretty much the same ones. There’s one for all the world but the UK and another for just the UK that shows the price in pounds. Seems like they’ve pretty much run their course and I need something different. Plus, they’re both generated using the functionality of the site itself, which is fine, but I can make better looking ads using Canva. Beyond changing the ad itself, I can also change the audience. BookBub allows you target people who follow certain authors, and it’s been awhile since I played around with that. That’s my task for today.

Striking Out

Another ad promotion, another strikeout. That’s two complete whiffs this week. As I said previously, at least I’m figuring out which campaigns work and which don’t. The hard way. Every Monday morning my publisher gets the data for the previous week’s sales and I think this time it’ll be the lowest in over a month. I suppose that’s not horrible, but again, I’m looking forward to the big blast with “guaranteed” sales next Thursday. That campaign will run for 12 days and target different groups of eBook readers on different days, like Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Android, Apple, etc. What I take that to mean up front is that theoretical sales won’t be concentrated on one day so I’m skeptical about how much it’ll impact sales ranking. Guess we’ll just have to see.

Bump?

Not sure there was a bump from the ad promotion for First yesterday. I don’t think there was, but I can’t be sure since I also had a lot of hits on one of my BookBub ads and the sales rank jumped later in the day. That timing tends to make me think it was the ad I ran, rather than the promo. Not sure what time they sent out their email blasts, but I do know my book was on their website early in the day. I have promotions running with other sites tomorrow, next Tuesday, and the big one next Thursday. I went ahead and pulled the trigger on that one, which guarantees a certain number of sales or they issue a prorated credit. They say that 92% of books reach the target. I’m hoping that one works and vaults First to the top of the charts. There must be some tipping point where books start selling with what I’d call maintenance advertising, but that point seems far off. Or, of course, publicity from being made into a movie or series. In the meantime, I have to resort to ongoing advertising to make any sales at all.

Routine

After several weeks of really good sales from really good promos, last week was back to routine. Seems like my BookBub ads struggled a bit and of course one of the email blasts I tried ended up not doing anything. This week I have promos for First running on Tuesday and Thursday. It’ll be interesting to see how those go since I expect some goodness from at least the one tomorrow. Then there’s one more a week from tomorrow, after which point I’ll need to decide what to do next. I entered it in a couple more contests, but those don’t announce winners until May and June. I did enter Next Time in a contest where they announce finalists on the 18th. I don’t have high hopes for that since all I could send at the time was the manuscript in pdf format, which I now know had a couple of errors in it. That was right at the end of 2023 with the deadline on 31 Dec. It didn’t even have a cover yet and I probably should’ve saved the entry fee. Lesson learned.

Expected

As I expected, the email and web promotion from the other day resulted in no noticeable sales. I read an interesting snippet from an article yesterday that advised combining all your promotions into a day or just a few days. Their reasoning was to vault your book up the bestseller lists with all the purchases occurring in a short timeframe. That makes sense, but the downside of that is being able to discern which ones were effective and which were a waste of money. Yes, I’d like to see my book at the top of the Space Exploration category on Amazon. I’m still working on that. But I’ve been tracking which ad campaigns I’d use again and those I wouldn’t. I’m treating it as not just selling more books, but preparing for the release of Next Time. That’s when I’ll use what I’ve learned and will combine the most effective to get the most impact on sales and rankings.

Blasts

Yesterday I spent time researching additional sites that send email blasts advertising books. I had some really good success with that a couple of weeks ago and would like to recreate that several more times. I signed up for one that will take place this week - today, actually. This is probably the one I expect the least out of, but figured it was worth a try since it’s inexpensive. I’ve submitted info to two other sites. One has to be approved and then paid for, while the other has been paid for and I’m awaiting confirmation they can put it up next week. As before, I’m trying to keep these separate so I can determine what effect, if any, there is on sales. While I wait on results, I got the revised proof yesterday for Next Time and I need to go through that again. Looks like the errors I found are fixed and this should be a short turnaround for approval.

Merge

Once again, an idea came to me while I was out running, this time a couple of days ago on Saturday. I have two book ideas in mind for the sequel to First: the one I’ve been writing and the other I’ve outlined but not written anything yet. As I mentioned in my last post, the one I’ve been working on seems chaotic in that I’m writing from ideas rather a particular destination I have in mind. And I’m not sure it’s telling a story worth telling. As I jogged along the path the other day the thought came to me: why not merge the two ideas into one book.

Certainly, this isn’t a revolutionary thought. It might not even be a good one. However, my brain immediately started thinking of ways to make it work. That’s a good sign. When the brain is engaged in the flow of ideas, it starts spending cycles on those ideas. Maybe that’s called creativity, I don’t know. Whatever it’s called, I’m going to explore that possibility and see where it takes me. Maybe nowhere. I can take what I’ve written so far, merge in the story ideas from my outline of the other, and trim out parts of both, hopefully making a better whole.

Killing Time

I’ve been writing to kill some time between approving/rejecting proofs and waiting to kick off the campaign for Next Time. I’ve gone back to the story I liked best so far for the sequel to First. Right now it seems a little chaotic and what I’ve written will take some tightening up, but at least I’m getting some words on the page.

In other news, I need to decide what to do with the price point for First. Right now the eBook is selling well at $0.99 but it’s also not making me any money as ad expenditures are outpacing sales revenue. That’s fine for the moment, since I want to get the book out there and more visible, but it’s not a long-term strategy. One idea is to raise the price in a few days since it’s almost been a month of the discounted price, and then lower it again in conjunction with the new book release, probably in May. The problem is that I don’t want to crash the momentum I’m seeing. Sometimes the best thing to is…nothing.

Numbers

As I mentioned last week, I signed up for an email blast that seemed to work. When I got the report on Monday on number of books sold last week, it was the most since First was released. Who knew that dropping the price and advertising like that would work out? I’m pleased with the sales of the last three weeks.

The book also seems to be doing well in the UK. I’ve been targeting BookBub ads that show the reduced price toward that market and the trending reports show that it’s keeping steady with sales every day. Let’s keep that trend going, my overseas friends.

The other thing I’m trying this week is the US targeting. In BookBub you can choose readers of similar authors, meaning your ad is more likely to be clicked on since theoretically those readers share the same interest. For the past few months I’ve used roughly the same batch of authors, but this week I selected about 7-8 authors I hadn’t included before. The first couple of days didn’t go well, meaning the CTR (click-through rate) was low, so I’ve changed the ad copy. The great thing about this approach is I can try multiple ads at no extra cost other than paying when someone clicks on an ad. It also helps narrow down whether the issue is the ad or the readers of the authors I’ve targeted. Heck, maybe they don’t share the same interests. This is how you find out.

The Proof

I finished proofing Next Time this weekend and I’m glad I did. As I mentioned in the previous post, the eBook will be read by more people than the hard copy. Sad to say, I found two errors that needed correction. Sure, I contemplated leaving them since both were very minor, but putting out a product with known flaws would gnaw at me. The first was a similar error I found in the First manuscript, which makes me think I need to be sure and check for this situation next time around: an extra space after a period at the end of a paragraph, causing the closing quote mark to drop to a line by itself. I totally missed it during my numerous manuscript reviews and even in the print copy proof, probably because the human eye and brain are in a conspiracy. The second error I found was a complete miss of a possessive, another instance where my brain filled in the missing apostrophe-s. I’ll feel better getting these errors fixed. Can I guarantee the book is now completely free from errors? Goodness, no. It’s about as close as you can get without paying someone to proofread your book, though. I know, all the experts say to not do it yourself, but I have a feeling I read through my manuscripts more times than a lot of other authors, including reading it aloud at least once. That seems to do the proofreading trick.

eBook Proof

I got the eBook proof for Next Time yesterday and am now going through it. So far, so good. I could load it onto my Kindle Paperwhite or onto my phone so I can read it in the Apple Books app, but instead I’m using the Kindle Previewer. It emulates - what else? - a Kindle interface and lets me read through the book. It’s a pretty nifty free program that allows me to change the font size and test everything, including the ToC links to make sure they work as intended. I could just flip through it quickly, but since this is the version more people will read, I feel like I should make sure it looks good all the way through. I might still copy the .epub file to my phone to see how it looks there. Heck, I even have a first-gen iPad I could fire up and try it on. That’d be worthwhile to make sure the old tablet still works.

Email Blast

I signed up (and paid) to be included in an email blast by another site, different from the one I used last week. Also different were the results. First received a noticeable uptick in sales on Monday. In fact, they put it higher up in the Amazon rankings than anytime in the past, even when it debuted last October. Not sure how many copies that translates into, but the takeaway is that this time around was more effective and I’m getting copies into the hands of readers. The book cracked the Top 100 in its category. I have a feeling it went higher than what I saw, but Amazon’s rankings systems seemed to crap out most of the day and it wasn’t until evening that I saw results. Regardless, I’m happy with this email blast and will use it again for Next Time.

Sequel

As I mentioned last week, I spent some time scoping out the sequel to First. I’ve had a couple of ideas and even wrote a few chapters for one of them but got distracted by other things. Plus, I’m not sure it was working the way I intended. I think I have a good concept this time around. It’ll allow me to totally change the setting for most of the story and bring in some surprises and twists at the end. It also allows me to use a different narrator and add a totally new point of view to the First universe. One thing I’ll have to do is make the narrator’s voice is distinctive. I mean, that should always be the case, but I don’t want it to come across as a new book with Lewis narrating, just with a different name. That part will be challenging, but that’s what makes writing interesting. If I don’t set up some sort of challenge for myself then it becomes effortless. And what’s the fun in that?

Effectiveness

I’d bought and read a deal a few weeks ago about marketing your self-published book, which I think I mentioned at the time. It recommended a couple of mailing lists where an author can pay to have their book included in an email blast by the list owner. I signed up for two in order to try them out. One went out on Wednesday and judging by the results, had no effect whatsoever on sales. I’m not terribly disappointed since it was a minimal investment, but it would’ve been nice to see a little bump. I purposefully spaced that one several days from the other mailing list in order to know how each one worked, or didn’t. Pretty smart, huh?

What has been effective is changing up my ads. I think I’ve run five different ads this week on BookBub and it’s helping me find out what’s more effective. There’s one I’ve been running all week in the UK that is targeted specifically to readers there with the original price and discounted price in English Pounds in the ad. It’s doing pretty well as far as clicks. And I just found this out - I thought I had no way of seeing UK sales rank because of reporting limitations on Amazon, but it turns out I do. On my Amazon Author page I can change the region dropdown to display the UK trends. Wow, I learned something new today. And the sales ranks there are encouraging.

Finally, I’m up to 25 reviews on Amazon, with a 4.4 average rating. I’m very grateful for that, and to the people who’ve left written reviews.

Metadata

To quickly define terms, metadata is the info the publisher puts out about your book that populates the online stores. Things like the category of the book, search terms, and even stuff like the book description and author bio. A lot of it is set at the time a book is published and not changed after that.

When I published First, I submitted a book description and the publisher jazzed it up. At the time it seemed okay, albeit a little like an AI had gotten its hands on the description, so I let it go. TBH as time passed by I liked it less and less, and started to wonder if it was the reason I could get clicks on the ads I’ve been running but not as many purchases as I’d expect. To be fair, I don’t really know what the clicks to purchases ratio should be, but I always thought it could be better. I have a couple of big ad campaigns this week and next and it seemed to be the right time to change the book summary. I did that on Monday and it propagated to Amazon by yesterday. I like this bit of metadata much better and now we can see if it makes a difference. Fingers crossed.

Pause

I was thinking yesterday evening about the book I’m currently writing that’s meant to kick off a series. I like the concept I have, but as I’ve mentioned before, I still feel like there’s something missing. Which makes me think it’s time to pause the story and go back to something else. I have a couple of stories started for the sequel to First, so maybe I should revisit those and see what lights a fire in my brain. Although I’m not sure how deep into it I want to get since Next Time will be coming out in the next few months and I’ll need to concentrate on that. Today I’ll do some more deep thinking and see what I can come up with.

Missed

I’ve been so busy with ads and socializing the awards from earlier this week that I missed posting here yesterday. I usually blog here on a M-W-F schedule but it never crossed my mind. Anyway, what’s going on around here? I’m still messing with ads and yesterday split out an ad that goes to US, UK, Canada, and Australia readers. The one I made its own version is for UK and shows their currency instead of US dollars. So far it seems to be reasonably successful as far as clicks go, but the proof will be in the actual sales.

As far as other distractions, I entered a couple more contests and packaged up the books yesterday and mailed them. I realize this is not news, but my trip to the post office was excruciating. They are THE model of government inefficiency. I stood in line for a few minutes, gave up and tried the self-service and was rewarded with an experience so bad it made me go get back in line, and then had to endure another twenty minutes of waiting and dealing with an especially indifferent clerk. My favorite part was when the address for one of the packages didn’t show as valid. I had to ask if I could go ahead and mail it anyway, receiving a shrug. I know I’m not the only one to complain, but oh my gosh. Oh well, life goes on.

Doings

It’s been a busy couple of days. After the awards notification on Monday, I spent yesterday morning (during my normal writing time) socializing the news on various social media platforms. I also created a new ad to run on BookBub and got that out there. It also coincided with dropping the price of the eBook to try and drive more sales and visibility. I figure that’ll be useful in the run-up to the release of Next Time.

In other news, I submitted the proofs for Next Time on Monday. The timing worked out since I was able to change some text on the back cover and the blurbs page to include phrases like “award-winning author” and such. Before Monday I wouldn’t have been able to do that. So yes, it’s been busy. But the good kind of busy.

Award

First is an award-winning book! The Reader Views list came out this morning and my book won a Silver Award in the Science Fiction category. They’re the ones who gave me such a great review recently, and I’m thrilled to have a book that earned some recognition. You better believe I’m going to socialize the heck out of this award. Very exciting!

EDIT: Actually, First won two awards in the competition! In addition to the Silver in Science Fiction, it won a Regional Award. I didn’t notice the second nod until I was searching the awards page for BookBaby, the company I used for publishing, to see if any other of their books made the list. Looks like I’m the only one. Double-exciting!

Ongoing

The proofing of Next Time is still in progress. I’m a little past a third of the way through it, and so far I’ve discovered one typo, which I’m very grateful to have found, and two word choice changes to avoid repetition. These changes add a little bit to the cost, but they’re worth it in order to put out a quality product. In the meantime, I ran the cover art past my sisters and they all liked it, another good sign. I don’t know how much of the manuscript proofing I’ll get done over the weekend, so it might end up going into early next week. We’ll see.