Why I'm Done With Paid Ads To Sell Books
A Literal Literary Loser Lays Off
Back in January, I wrote how a $75 e-mail blast from LitNuts for my Figure Skating Mystery Series (5 Books in 1) netted exactly… one book sale (maybe; who knows where it really came from).
At the time, I mused:
LitNuts boasts 35,000 subscribers. But how many of them are mystery readers? If we assume the standard distribution at LitNuts is the same as among all readers, then only 30% are fans of the mystery genre. That shrinks the audience to 10,500 right off the bat. Of all mystery readers, 62% read in the suspense category, which includes cozy mysteries like mine. So, even if we calculate generously, that still lowers the number of potential interested readers to 6,510. And then, the big question: How many of them are interested in figure skating?…. That’s what I think the problem is with any non-targeted marketing approach. I sold more books to an audience of what I suspect was no more than 1000 or so hard-core skating fans who followed Dick Button’s Twitter than to an alleged 35,000 who had no interest in my subject or my genre.
So for April 2024, I swung in the other direction. I paid $200 for a banner ad to appear on the Golden Skate Fan Forum. I would be addressing skating fans directly.
But how many of them bought books? How many of them read mysteries? I don’t know. All I know is that, for the month of April, I sold three copies of The Figure Skating Mystery Series, for a total of $19.97.
I invested $200 and made back less than $20. (And that’s before the percentage I share with Ice Theatre of NY, who provide the videos for the enhanced e-books.)
I made the advertising arrangements with Golden Skate months in advance. But then, a few weeks before the promotion was scheduled to begin, I was invited by my friend, Kyra Davis, to join her and three other cozy mystery authors for a 5x5x5 promotion, where we would each give away one of our books for five days, and promote our fellow authors all week long.
Sure, I thought. That will be an interesting contrast. Promoting the $9.99 compendium at the same time I’m giving away Murder on Ice, the first book in the series.
The 5x5x5 campaign cost me nothing but the labor of writing, sending out, and promoting a new post every day. So how did I do with it?
For April 2024:
I gave away 1,134 copies of Murder on Ice.
I sold 3 copies of Murder on Ice.
I got 474 page reads for Murder on Ice.
I got 163 pages reads on Book 2 in the series, On Thin Ice, and sold one copy.
I got 1 page read on Book 3 in the series, Axel of Evil, and sold one copy.
I got 318 page reads on Book 4 in the series, Death Drop, and sold one copy.
I got 45 page reads on Book 5 in the series, Skate Crime, and sold one copy.
(Don’t ask me why the page reads didn’t go in order of books published.)
Since the sales and page reads all started after the 5x5x5 promotion, I am going to attribute it all to them.
So, for a promotion that cost me nothing but labor, I earned a total of $16.74.
Which is why here is where I officially announce that - unless I change my mind - I am done with paying for promotion. At least for this series of books.
All 5 were originally published by Berkley Prime Crime, for an advance of $5000 each (minus agent commission). At this point, even with past paid promotion efforts, I am still in the black overall.
But I can’t keep going at this rate. Clearly, I am either advertising with the wrong companies or to the wrong people, or all the figure skating fans bought my books in the first heady round of post Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan mania and new ones just aren’t being minted fast enough to keep my sales afloat.
When a free promotion earns you almost as much as a paid one, it’s time to call it quits.
I am open to further suggestions of how I might advertise this particular series but, for now, I’m just going to leave it to organic discovery and move on to promoting my novels in other genres.
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Speaking of organic discovery and moving onto other genres, the latest in my Soviet historical fiction videos, below: