Finished new goodie bags for subscribers!

Mike GristMarketing, Story Art, Writing Leave a Comment

I mentioned earlier I was going to add new bonus art for subscirbers to my email newsletter list, at the end of both Soul Jacker and The Saint’s Rise.

I did it! It took ages. I made them with the benefit of some templates, some photoshop work by yours truly, and by sticking in some of the artwork I’ve had made for both series over the years.

PLUS – I have an artist now working on a map of The Saint’s Rise, which will go into that goodie bag, then some schematics for Soul Jacker, which will go into that bag.

It’s quite exhausting mentally to come up with maps and schematics. I had to redraw the Saint’s Rise map a few times, and refer back to the book, to get it pretty much right. I suspect my geography might be out of kilter with some parts of the book, but that’s fine – mapmaking was hardly a perfect art back in fantasy medieval times!

If you’re already on my mailing list I’ll send these out as bonuses around the time each book gets its Bookbub push :).

Soul Jacker review from Pat Mills!

Mike GristMarketing, Soul Jacker, Writing Leave a Comment

I am over the moon – having just secured a blurb review of Soul Jacker from my first established author in the SF space – Pat Mills (and his wife Lisa)! Pat is considered the godfather of British comics, and created 2000AD which was where Judge Dredd got started!

Awesome.

I am tickled pink. Here’s the full blurb:

“Superb – a Fantastic Voyage into the soul. Grist has produced a taut, clever cyberthriller that messes with your mind. Blending hard science, metaphysics and high-octane action, Soul Jacker had me gripped from the start. If you’re a fan of Stephenson and Gibson, and you love interweaving narratives that keep you guessing, you must read Soul Jacker.”

Wowzers. I have splashed it on the Amazon page liberally. A real milestone for me, and what a vote of confidence! Thank you Lisa and Pat!

Sweet new book pages

Mike GristMarketing, Soul Jacker, Writing Leave a Comment

Phew, spent a good few hours today micro-managing the Soul Jacker trilogy book pages into existence. They look about 10x cooler than previous book pages I’ve made. At some point I’ll get around to doing this for all my books.

New style:

It looks cool and it works really nicely on mobile as well – which is how most people will see it, if they click through from their ereader.

Old style:

There’s not really any ‘style’ here, it’s just straightforward. Not cool in the slightest, and not intuitive on mobile.

Having the book on a black background makes it really pop. Check them here:

New newsletter giveaways

Mike GristMarketing, Story Art, Writing Leave a Comment

Since I started out writing I’ve been giving away a free book as a gift to get people to sign up to my newsletter list. Has it worked well? I have no idea – I have no stats on this, but I’m not sure it was ever all that likely to work. Why?

  • I always gave away a book in a different genre. When people finish my fantasy books, they get offered The Last, a zombie apocalypse. Same for when they finished Mr. Ruin. It’s a different thing.
  • I always gave the same book! So even if they are finishing book 1 of The Last series, the free book I’m offering was probably book 1 The Last! Not a lot of takers for that, I expect.

So, maybe something more directly related to the book in question is better. I’ve heard other people give out-takes from their books – in the case of romance, the steamier scenes. Mark Dawson gives a confidential character assessment of his thriller hero.

So why not that? I’m thinking about both The Saint’s Rise and Soul Jacker here, both of which are going to get major traffic as their Bookbubs happen. How great to hook the folks who read them with something that’ll pull them into each respective world more deeply?

I already have loads of art. For Soul Jacker I can:

  • Strip the titles from old book covers and offer them as art – including a map of the brain/maze, the godships, Mr. Ruin himself.
  • I’m also looking to get some schematics drawn up by an artist, of the Molten and Solid Cores, and of the Bathyscaphe sublavic. I think these would be awesome fun – and really hook readers in to sign up.

As for The Saint’s Rise:

  • I already have art made years ago of all the main characters – I just included it at the end of the book as bonus content, but why not make them sign up to see it?
  • I could get a map made of Sen’s city – something I’ve been thinking about for ages.

This is all extra work. If there way any time to do it, though, it’s right before twin Bookbubs. Maybe I can collect a few thousand email addresses of engaged fans – definitely worth fostering that relationship. Maybe worth the effort. Also – fun.

Here are my rough sketches of the art I want turned into sweet schematics:

Writing Update 2019 week 9 & 10

Mike GristMarketing, Networking, Weekly Writing Update, Writing Leave a Comment

Another two weeks gone by, and it’s looking like that’s my natural rhythm for these updates. Lots of things going on as ever these days:

In overview, I’m still buzzing with the Bookbub promotions. I haven’t done any pre-promo for The Saint’s Rise yet, which is in 2 weeks, so I will get on that tomorrow.

Rather, I’ve been busy setting up the Soul Jacker promo – and putting final touches to the text of book 1. It now stands at around 70,000 words in length – I trimmed a lot in response to editorial feedback. It now blazes along.

I also came to conclusions about my month-long Facebook ad experiment, the reported on that to my Indie Author group last Tuesday. It was received well – I wish I’d had better news to share, with a big success of ROI, but there’s no shortcut to success. I’ve since turned off most of the ads, leaving only the Saint’s Rise one to run at $5 a day.

I turned a few AMS ads on again to see if I could make that work.

Keywords

One passive marketing thing I’ve done with the Soul Jacker launch is to add keywords using KDP Rocket. I knew ages ago that you could add lots of keywords to a book, but mostly couldn’t be bothered.

With a big launch coming though, it makes sense to try and get visibility on more searches – so I added lots more, as well as requesting KDP add me to 5 additional categories. I should be able to rank #1 in at least one of them, which always looks good. Hopefully Hot New Releases, great pre-orders for book 2, and the whole thing keeps rolling nicely. Spillover to past books would be good too, but I don’t especially expect that.

Timetable

All this Soul Jacker stuff should be done by the end of March. I want to focus on writing thriller 3, for a launch around June/July, though it’s likely I’ll get bogged down in April with monitoring and fine-tuning ads for Soul Jacker, what with books 2 & 3 following on soon after.

It’s exciting. It gets in the way of writing fresh stuff, of course. Here’s my To Do list before launch:

  • Finish final readthrough and polish of books 2 & 3
  • Make paperbacks of books 2 & 3 (takes ages!!)
  • Set up pre-promos for The Saint’s Rise
  • Maybe put out Last Mayor books 7-9 as a boxset. It really won’t take long.

London Book Fair

This week is London Book Fair! I’m not going though, really. I’ve never been to the daytime Book Fair – I’m not convinced it’ll be a profitable use of my time. 2 years back I went to the drinks at the Alli/SPF party, and that was great – loads of fun networking to be done, meeting loads of interesting people.

Last year I went to the SPF separate party, and it was pretty meh. I met all the same people I’d met previously, doing the same things, and was left wondering what I was doing there. It’s a bit like the First Monday Crime thing – when we go to the pub afterward, the obvious target is to try and get some facetime with the more successful authors, though I’m never really sure to what end.

They’re not going to help me. I’m not going to help them. They don’t know about marketing. I don’t know about their books. Everyone’s looking out for the next more interesting person to talk to.

I don’t feel this way at all about our Indie Author meetups, or the Society of Authors Novelists meetup. Maybe those are just a bit better balanced, with everyone looking to both share what they’re doing and hear about what other people are up to.

Well, I’m going to the ALLI drinks on Thursday. We shall see! Jerome and I will chat about what we can do to further develop the Indie Author group. I’m not sure what there is we can do (ALLI already exists), but I like the idea. Hopefully can also meet some interesting new people and have good chats.

The Anomaly by Michael Rutger – book review

Mike GristBook / Movie Reviews, Reviews Leave a Comment

For 20 years I’ve been reading books by the author variously known as Michael Marshall Smith and Michael Marshall, beginning with his sci-fi triumvirate of Only Forward, Spares and One of Us – three mind-slappingly entertaining thrillers – and moving through his Straw Men series as well as various creepy standalones.

Now he’s writing under a third pen-name, Michael Rutger, and the first book is The Anomaly. As soon as I saw it, I picked it up. I still have those early MMS SF books on my shelf, despite having lived in Japan for 10 years – I took them with me both going and coming back. So I came to The Anomaly with plenty of baggage.

It opens kind of slow and steady. We’re introduced to Nolan, a conspiracy/occult theorist with a youtube channel show, who at first blush appears kind of a loser/drip. He failed in his Hollywood job, his wife dumped him, everybody (even his film crew) think he’s kind of a laughing stock. He’s all washed-up, constantly going out to these sites where supernatural phenomena allegedly occured and looking for them, only to find nothing.

Yet pretty soon we get to see Nolan is none of these things. Yes, he has a ribald mocking relationship with his crew, and yes he is aware there’s some exploitation going on in all his failed searches for some evidence that the truth is out there – but he’s also kind of a bad-ass. He is incredibly knowledgeable, and speaks engagingly both on and off-camera about the deep research and flaws in scientific thinking surrounding the places he goes to visit. When an accompanying reporter digs in and insults him, he digs right back.

He is not a wimp. He has a backbone, and beneath the surface-level kookiness and veneer he exploits for his show, he really is asking interesting, informed questions about the things we do not know. I got to really like him quite quickly – he’s unapologetic about his out-there views. He can back up everything he says with facts. He’s not afraid to go toe-to-toe with anyone.

The story of The Anomaly is about Nolan’s latest planned adventure with his crew – he’s discovered this 100-year-old record of a secret cave embedded in the wall of the Grand Canyon, which nobody has ever since been able to find since, apparently crammed with evidence that subverts our current understanding of human origins.

Now I’m interested. It takes quite some time for the team to get to the Grand Canyon, then get down into it, then go hunting for the cave – but I was really engaged throughout. Interpersonal dynamics offer plenty of conflict – all of the above character work letting Nolan show he’s not really a washed-up loser, he’s just wearing the clothes of one. Really, he’s just a smart, competent, hard-working guy who’s fallen on a patch of bad luck.

The way MMS (Michael Rutger) feeds in real-world info through Nolan, about bizarre cave paintings and great flood records and other occult-adjacent theories, is entrancing. I would definitely watch this youtube show if it existed – kind of a wannabe Indiana Jones, putting himself out there for the sake of deeper understanding.

Then we get to the cave.

We go into the cave. I won’t say much more because that would be venturing into spoiler territory, but suffice it to say that I don’t think I’ve ever felt scared like this when reading a book. I don’t know that a book has ever really scared me. Grossed me out, sure, but actually scared?

It was delightful. As the crew press deeper into the cave, and long before anything at all happens, I was feeling tingles down the spine. It was late at night. I stopped reading.

I don’t know what magic trick the narrative worked to make me feel this way. I’ve been in dark, creepy, off-limits caves plenty of times and never felt like this. Like this is a really dangerous place where we shouldn’t go, and I almost want them to turn back. I suppose this is an effect of the characteristation Rutger has built up by that point – I cared about Nolan and his banter-filled crew. I wanted them to do well.

Then it all goes crazy. Weird things happen – MMS kind of sci-fi, puzzlebox, inexplicable things. I loved it. I raced through the puzzles, gamely trying to figure out what was going on just like the characters were. It feels a bit like an Escape Room situation, like Saw even, at times. The stakes are high. The puzzles keep stacking up. The truth gets bigger. The reversals compound…

I loved it. I want more like this from MMS. Nolan is a guy I want to root for through multiple adventures like this on the fringe of science and belief. Michael Marshall Smith has been tapping this well in fresh ways since One of Us, and I think he’s hit an incredibly rich seam here. Like Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon, with his expert knowledge of symbols, Nolan is an expert in esoterica and knowledge at the fringes. He’s an X-Files kind of guy, rootling around at the edges and sometimes stumbling upon real, creepy stuff. What will he do when he finds it?

Yes. More please. 5 stars.

Soul Jacker art + promo plan

Mike GristMarketing Leave a Comment

I thought I’d be done with all this Soul Jacker editing by the end of January, freeing me up to get on with my thrillers, but the vicissitudes of merciful fate have conspired to make the Soul Jacker launch a #prettybigdeal.

It launches March 31 at 99c. All of April will be promo time:

  • I have the Bookbub after 3 days,
  • multiple other promo sites already booked in (including Robin Reads, Fussy Librarian, Bargain Booksy, Booksends and others).
  • I’ve got potential blurbs from famous folks coming.
  • I’ve got NL swaps underway.
  • I’ve got art and targeting for FB and AMS ads.
  • I’ve got the paperback launching.

The one thing I’m not doing is a simultaneous audiobook launch. The cost is prohibitive. If it does well, maybe Podium or another audiobook publisher will pick it up and take the risk.

Today I made the paperback, and it took pretty much 4 hours to typeset and make the cover. 4 hours! Hopefully books 2 and 3 will be a bit faster, but it’s just a pain-in-the-ass process. I don’t expect to sell many in print at all – the only reason to do this is to make the Amazon page look more legitimate!

The cover is cool though:

Sweet.

I also made the banner ad to go on Facebook ads:

Eye-catching.

This is shaping up to be my biggest launch ever. That’s pretty darn exciting. I’ll keep you posted as I make covers for the sequels!

Oh, another new thing I’m doing is a bit more keyword research and optimisation, to improve organic reach. Hopefully once the book starts to climb these extra keywords will boost visibility across Amazon.


Media Review 2019 week 8 & 9

Mike GristWeekly Media Update Leave a Comment

Books

  • Dead Pines – This debut Scandi-thriller by Brit Will Dean has been the talk of the town. I briefly met Will at theFebruary First Monday Crime session and he seemed a very interesting chap – lives in a Swedish forest off-grid with his wife and kid, chops wood, freezes his waste, etc… The book flummoxed me though. His character is a deaf journalist ‘investigating’ several murders in the forest. We learn a great deal about the experience of being deaf: pillow alarms that shake you awake, recharging hearing aid batteries, putting the aids in desiccant when they get wet, hearing the tweak of Twitter alerts going out. We also get treated to a bunch of Swedish forest-dwelling weirdoes and acres of evocative description of moody Swedish skies.

But what does our heroine do? I got to halfway through the book waiting for her to do something. Sure, she goes places and talks to people and sees things, but none of these play a role in anything. She is more like a ghoulish ambulance-chaser than any kind of proper investigator.

Not only that, but she actively avoids doing things on numerous occasions, or recklessly delays taking action for no good reason. Eg – a guy jumps in the back of her truck in motion, trying to break the glass to the cab. She just about manages to shake him off, and what then? She goes direct to the police, right? The guy is still in the vicinity. If not her as a victim, someone else could be targeted, yeah? She has a responsibility. But no. She waits about 24 hours, beyond lunchtime the next day, to tell her pal at the police. Why? I absolutely could not understand this. Likewise a creepy taxi driver pulls her over in a deserted area and it’s a toin coss whether the guy rapes her or not, and what does she do? Tell the cop late the next day. In the same guy’s house she discovers he uses a high pitch mice-killing alarm that is clearly a torture to his son, because he can hear it, and who does she tell about this child abuse? Not one soul. Instead she spends her time rustling around in the woods.

I got very frustrated. The pretty writing about the forest continued, and so did the deaf schtick, but where was the story? Where was the heroine getting stuck in and directing the flow of events? It wasn’t here. She was a tourist not only in the nvestiagtion, but in the lives of everyone she crossed. I ended up skipping large chunks just to see if she ever did anything. Yes, we can infer that the stories she writes have an impact on the villagefolk, but not in any interesting way – such as getting them to come out with new information. Just to get her ostracized.

In the end – spoiler – she uncovers the killer completely by accident, chases after said killer for no understandable reason without instead running off to tell the cops, and gets herself captured. She gets the full horrifying confession from the killer, then she dies.

No, wait. She gets rescued. Of course she does. So what did she do? Just hang around seeing things. It’s not at all my idea of a thriller. Rather it’s disaster tourism.

  • The Anomaly – I’m reading this book by Michael Rutger, a pseudonym of Michael Marshall Smith, about a conspiracy-theorist/ghost-hunter type Internet TV show host who is hunting a fabled cave in the Grand Canyon. I’m only a third in, and while it was a slow start, it’s really picking up – I’m actually getting scared as they delve deeper. And nothing bad at all has happened yet! The main guy started seeming like a useless drip, but he’s not – he’s actually incredibly knowledgeable and very able to punch back at others when the need arises.

Movies

  • The Breadwinner – An animation by the makers of the Secret of Kells and the Song of the Sea, neither of which I liked. This one was better, but the degree of repetition was infuriating. When you’re padding out your movie by having the main character tell a fairy story, including lines spoken in the fairytale, then have the character in the fairytale say those same exact lines, you’ve left me cold. Why do that? It annoys me. But the overall story was fascinating, set in Taliban-held Kabul, Afghanistan, where women are prisoners in their own homes and get beaten if they step out without a man. Our heroine is a young girl who has to pass for a boy to keep her family alive when her father gets taken to prison on a petty Taliban gangmember’s whim. Sad, shocking, beautiful at times.
  • BlackKKlansman – I loved this, a fascinating story with an incredibly charismatic lead. Probably his level of success and the way he is treated in the police station – the first black police officer in his town back in the 70s – is fairy-taled up a bit just to make an even stronger contrast with the real events tacked on at the end, which include Charlottesville and other recent racist events under Trump. Powerful and also entertaining.
  • Inconvenient Truth 2 – Another call to arms from Al Gore. Good stuff, but somehow a little sad – like he is inhabiting the shell of the man he might have been, had he become president. Acting on the international stage, but at the fringes, shown respect by the major players, but not wieldign any real power. He has clearly done things, and played a role, but somehow the movie’s efforts to make him look instrumental instead make him look like he is sidelined. I don’t know what the answer is to this. I appreciate his work. I wish he had been president instead of Bush…
  • Fyre – A documentary about the Fyre festival mega-con from 2017, in which Billy (some conman guy) and Ja Rule (a rapper?) spend millions to pre-promote a music festival on a Caribbean island by getting 10 top supermodels and having a party on yacht, with photos and a single orange square placed on the social media feeds of super influencers for cash. It goes huge and viral – but has basically already spent all its money. So begins a herculean effort to hustle, blag and swindle folks out of more money to try and actually put on the festival. Here we see a case study of what Trump has done, on a smaller scale but played out to the end. Incredibly competent social media bullshitting (in getting people to pony up millions for the chance to meet famous people and do something cool) combined with utter incompetence in actually achieving logistical things in the real world. Shameless, emotionless swindling and conning that leads to an utter shit festival that gets canceled with no bands turning up, and hundreds of contractors going unpaid. Billy gets arrested and bailed, and what does he do next? Takes up residence in a 5-star penthouse and goes right back to swindling the people on his Fyre festival mailing list over new meet&greet opportunities, biling them of more millions! People are so dumb, and people are so shameless. Trump!
  • We also tried a number of movies that sucked and we had to switch off. Time Share was one, a miserable piece about turning up at your Time Share villa and having to share it with another family. Why would I want to watch that? Probably some others too but I have gratefully forgotten!

TV

  • Death in Paradise – A solid choice to watch over dinner.
  • Star Trek – Still enjoying season 2 very much.
  • Great British Sewing Bee – Really not my bag but Su seems to like it.
  • The Umbrella Academy – Pretty boring new Netflix-own superhero X-men hybrid. I like the actor from Black Sails, but they give him absolutely nothing to do here. I liked the guy from MisFits when he was in MisFits, but not here. How sad that he left a good superhero pastiche years ago, seeking better things, and only managed to land in a much worse one years later. We’re done on episode 3.
  • Russian Doll – I hated the first episode. We were done with it. Then a read a review that loved it, but described the main character as a woman who used her body as an ashtray and was pretty disgusting, getting her comeuppance. I thought – OK. So maybe I was right in my first appraisal – we’re supposed to dislike her, and then take pleasure in her dying? I guess so. I’ve now watched 4 episodes and am enjoying watching her die, and even gaining some sympathy for her along the way.

Facebook ad February – $1000 spent and 300 book sales

Mike GristFacebook Ads, Marketing, Writing Leave a Comment

My month-long experiment with Facebook ads may be at an end. Here’s the story so far:

In summary – a month back I read Michael Cooper’s book about Facebook ads, which focused heavily on the essential importance of getting good book readthrough in order to make a profit, and decided I wanted to give it a real go.

Now I have. I pushed book 1 in the 9-book Last Mayor zombie series and book 1 in the 2-book epic fantasy Ignifer Cycle. I experimented with ad copy, ad images and targeting. I watched sales come in with some dizzy highs and some disheartening lows. At times I thought I had it cracked. At others I wanted to just pull them all.

So, results:

  • Total money spent on ads – $1060
  • Total sales – 328 books
  • Total page reads – 31,000
  • Total money earned – $850
  • Profit – -$210

So, it’s a losing proposition. Not by a huge amount, it’s true. The fact is, I knew that from the first few days – it was clear I wasn’t making my money back on a day-for-day basis, but that wasn’t the point.

The point was waiting for readthrough. People buy book 1, set it aside, then at some point read it and hopefully read on to book 2 and further. When do those extra sales come in? Within a month? Within two?

It’s still possible that this investment will earn out. Readthrough should keep trickling in over the coming months, and who knows if it will lead to profit. One important thing to consider though is that the total sales above are certainly not all attributable to Facebook ads. I typically make about $200 a month just from ambient sales.

So actually it’s more like a $400 loss on the ads. That’ll be pretty hard to pay off with readthrough. And really, there’s no need to keep running ads now to see if the readthrough materializes – it’ll come in whether I sell more book ones or not. For that reason, I’m probably going to cut these ads until I know more.

Now for some breakdowns:

Ad effectiveness

Ad effectiveness has faded with time. On one day I sold 30 books – that was a heady 24-hours! It seemed for the first time that this thing might have legs. But then 8 books got returned for refunds and the wind sucked out of my sails.

Clicks have only grown more expensive since then. Engagement has dropped off. Fewer sales have been coming in, and the frequency of ad display (how many times any one FB user saw my ads) has been creeping up toward 2 times.

I tinkered with the ads. I tried new target markets, new copy, new images – but nothing topped the earliest ads. Seems I got it right first time. Briefly I was getting clicks for 11p on both ad campaigns, but very few sales, leading me to the more important metric.

It’s not how many clicks you get, it’s how many sales you get.

That’s obvious, I suppose, but the easiest metric to look at is cost-per-click. Michael Cooper focuses on it. I was getting hundreds of clicks from a pretty generic, million-strong audience, but no sales. It wasn’t targeted enough.

The Last campaign

  • Total ad spend – $530
  • Total money earned – $310
  • Total book 1 – 80 sales, 10,000 page reads
  • Total book 2 – 5 sales, 1,400 page reads
  • Total book 9 – 11 sales, 400 page reads
  • Conversion to book 2 – 6%
  • Total income – -$220

There’s quite a lot of news that looks bad here. Of course the loss is foremost, but the readthrough is appalling. Yes, again, people might not have had a chance to read book 2, but it’s not really all that far from the less clean data I already have from the last 4 years – these books don’t score a lot of readthrough.

Sigh. I could spend months reworking them to counter this. I could do that, but it won’t help the ads run better to sell book 1. I’m getting weak sales of book 1 and far weaker sales of book 2. It seems the series is dead, and no amount of CPR will revive it. I could keep it running like a zombie, but probably better to chop off its head now.

So I pulled the ads.

The Saint’s Rise campaign

  • Total ad spend – $540
  • Total money earned – $540
  • Total book 1 – 132 sales
  • Total book 2 – 24
  • Conversion to book 2 – 18%
  • Total income – $0

These stats are better, and actually make The Last stats look even worse. The Saint’s Rise is twice as long as The Last, but it’s readthrough is 3 times better even within the single month. So fair readthrough within a month is possible.

Ah, it is disappointing that the Last Mayor books don’t do better.

Anyway, The Saint’s Rise is holding it’s own, when I take into account sales on other vendors besides Amazon. $0 is not much to boast about, though – again considering that some of these are ambient sales and not directly attributable to Facebook ads. I’d have more money if I hadn’t run the ads, basically.

Conclusions

So what have I learned?

Bookbub – One important factor to take into account is that I got a Bookbub on The Saint’s Rise. I’d already applied for this multiple times, and always been turned down. Now I got accepted – and while this could be for any combination of reasons, I can’t help but think that the higher ranking the book had thanks to the FB ads played a role.

If I was Bookbub, I wouldn’t want to promote a book that was in the 100,000s in ranking. I’d want to see it was already selling. So maybe this month of $0 has led to the Bookbub – in which case, it’s a win, and maybe a future strategy for getting a Bookbub. Juice the ranking with ads in advance of an application.

Readthrough – Undeniably this is where the money is. If a book series converts well, it’s possible to make money. Maybe cliff-hangers are necessary. People need to feel compelled to read on, and The Last doesnt offer that compulsion at all. I never intended it as a series, and it probably shows.

The Saint’s Rise does end on a cliff-hanger of sorts. Major conflicts are resolved, but there’s still threat hanging. It could be this, or the quality of the books generally, or who knows.

Ad targeting – Massive million-strong audiences with great low click rates are not good – they probably won’t buy while burning through clicks. More focused 100,000-strong audiences may buy, but the cost per click will jack right up. Of course what matters is not cost-per-click, but cost-per-sale.

My best audience was for The Saint’s Rise – I picked a whole range of fantasy authors, excluding George R.R. Martin and J. R. R. Tolkien, because they are sucking in fans of the movies, and I want readers.

The Last was far harder to target. My best audience was a combination of Walking Dead fans (a TV show and comic) with Kindle readers. The trouble here is, I think many of these folks thought I was pushing an alternate TV show or comic. They clicked but didn’t convert when they saw it was a book.

I tried different copy to highlight that it was a book – and sales and clicks dropped further. Ugh. There are a few zombie authors admitted as targetable interests on Facebook, but the click costs were double what I wanted to pay – 40p plus, without a corresponding decent number of sales.

So how to target these readers? I don’t know. I tried SF great authors combo-ed with zombie movie fans and Walking Dead, I tried Apocalypse Fiction fans (basically the Hunger Games) tied with Kindle and zombie movies and Walking Dead, and just SF greats, and even paranormal fiction (like Twilight!) and none of them were better than Walking Dead plus Kindle.

Ah well. It’s tricky.

Ad copy – By far my best copy were the challenge plot blurbs. The best, which got great engagement, was the Saint’s Rise:

“Better than The Name of the Wind AND Locke Lamora!”

Fantasy fans knew these authors and argued with me in the comments. That’s good, arguing improved engagement and lots of people said the boldness drove them to buy. Good!

It didn’t work as well with The Last. The best one was this:

“Better than the Walking Dead (and definitely better than seasons 7 and 8!)”

It didn’t get engagement. It made people think it was a TV show I was pushing, maybe. Still, it was the best. I tried a few challenges that compared to more famous zombie authors, trying to get the readers involved, but that did even worse. Famous zombie authors are not famous the same way epic fantasy authors are, I guess…

After each of these I had a brief plot blurb.

The lesson is to do a challenge using comparable books/authors that are well-known and will start an argument.

Conclusions

And that is it! It has been a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs. It feels good that in 3 months I’ll get most of this money back – so it’s not a major loss. I can’t justify continuing to run The Last ads though. I could keep fine-tuning, but I don’t think fine-tuning will do it.

As for The Saint’s Rise, I may keep running them just to keep some momentum going as I approach the Bookbub on March 24. Otherwise, they’re actually a net negative. Maybe just $5 a day on US ads, to keep it ticking over.

Final thoughts for FB ad success:

Success = Great readthrough + 300,000 targeted readers + Challenge plot blurbs on famous authors/books + striking image

2 Bookbubs!!

Mike GristMarketing, Writing Leave a Comment

This is insane.

A few days ago I got approved for a Bookbub on The Saint’s Rise – a 99c wide promotion that’ll go out to over a million people on the Bookbub lists on March 24. It costs $500 but I expect to make much more than that back.

That was dizzying enough.

Now today I’ve just been approved for another Bookbub a week later! Normally you need to be 3 months apart on Bookbub promos, I think, but in this case it is a New Release Promotion. This is a new thing Bookbub are offering, and they don’t offer average stats – so there’s no way to know what kind of return I’ll get.

Yes, it’s for Soul Jacker (the rewrite of Mr. Ruin)! It’ll be on April 2, 3 days after launch, at 99c. I think it’ll be on Amazon exclusively (not entirely clear), which is great, because then I can get KU reads as well at full price. At the same time, books 2 and 3 are already available on pre-order at $2.99.

This could be huge. Two Bookbubs basically stacked on top of each other! Plus I’ve got lots of other promos to book, I’ve got blurbs hopefully coming in, and I’ve got a number of cross-promo newsletter swaps set up.

My days. What a turn-up for the books. I’ve been applying most months for three years since my last Bookbub, and suddenly two trot along at once. Cross your fingers for me…

ps – I saw Gary Lineker today, walking proud as you like through Bloomsbury. I stared but didn’t say a thing – too gobsmacked. Went right past me – inches apart.