This Little Author Went To Market-(Ing)

A Literal Literary Loser Reveals How Much I Lost

Exactly a year ago, on January 11, 2022, I wrote a post about how, after almost thirty years as a professional writer, I’d finally broken down and decided to pay for book marketing.

As promised, I am now back to report on how it went. (On a related note, see my post: I Make the Book Marketing Mistakes - So You Don’t Have To.)

The book in question is “The Figure Skating Mystery Series (5 Books In One).” It features all five of my traditionally published figure skating mystery novels, “Murder On Ice,” “On Thin Ice,” “Axel of Evil,” “Death Drop” and “Skate Crime,” though now in electronic format and enhanced with videos by Ice Theatre of NY as a key part of the story.

When the 2020 Winter Olympics were rescheduled for February 2021, I figured it was an ideal time to promote a figure skating mystery. (My 2014 campaign, which cost me no money but a great deal of time and effort, proved a success.)

In addition to the usual Facebook, Twitter and Instagram engagement, I made two major financial outlays.

I paid $300 for an ad in the online February issue of “International Figure Skating Magazine,” and $1000 to sponsor a video on YouTube’s Figure Skating Fan channel entitled “Top 10 Scandals on Ice.” The latter has over 65,000 subscribers and, as of now, that particular video reports 1.5 million views.

So how did that translate into sales for me? Here are the stats:

For Amazon, in 2022, I sold:

129 copies of “The Figure Skating Mystery Series” ($9.99)

57 copies of “Murder On Ice” ($0.99)

5 copies of “Axel of Evil” ($3.99)

4 copies of “On Thin Ice” ($3.99)

2 copies of “Death Drop” ($3.99)

1 copy of “Skate Crime” ($3.99)

I also had:

8,035 KENP Reads of “Murder on Ice”

1,283 KENP Reads of “On Thin Ice”

1,089 KENP Reads of “Axel of Evil”

960 KENP Reads of “Death Drop”

(There were 0 “Skate Crime” KENP Reads, but that’s because it took me months to figure out Amazon had taken it out of the program for some reason, without notifying me.)

So what did that mean, money-wise? After Amazon took their cut on each sale, the totals earned were:

“Figure Skating Mystery Series” = $844.88

“Murder on Ice” = $52.91

“Axel of Evil” = $18.40

“On Thin Ice” = $16.45

“Death Drop” = $9.53

“Skate Crime” = $2.56

So from a cash outlay of $1300 (not counting the hours of other promotion work), I earned = $944.73.

I also sold 13 “Figure Skating Mysteries” on BN.com for a total of $90.87 bringing my combined earnings to = $1035.60.

(As a side-note, all of the above isn’t even mine to keep. I share a percentage with ITNY due to their videos being included in the enhanced ebooks.)

On paper, this would put me $264.40 in the hole at the end of the year. (Actually more, due to the ITNY percentage.)

The only reason I didn’t finish the year in the red is because I have multiple other self-published titles, ones I did not pay to promote, which made enough money to cover the shortfall and leave me with an overall profit. And, one could argue, that the video will get new views now that the 2023 figure skating season is underway, and potentially generate more sales. In the end, at least the YouTube promotion might end up paying for itself. (The IFS ad only ran for the month of February last year.)

But in the interest of transparency and helping others make their own marketing decisions, I wanted to share my numbers.

Let me know what you think - did I make the right call?