Okay, Fine. Marketing.

Ordinarily, I enjoy promoting. But my experience comes mainly from promoting musical projects and websites, some of which involved a lot of other people's work. That doesn't interfere with music in any way, and really instead enhances the whole experience.

As a writer, though, you can't be writing or editing if you're promoting. Sure, you're writing blog posts, Instagram posts, comments, etc. But that is just gravy. The meat and potatoes, your books, sit by idly as you get taken further and further away from them, unless you are extraordinarily focused.

In gearing up for the release of the Radar Love audiobook, now a month or two away from completion, I have gotten many of my titles in a state where I feel comfortable pushing them a bit. 

Here's what I've found so far.

KDP and making books free for a few weekends remains a force to be reckoned with. Even without scheduled free promotions lined up on the websites that handle that sort of thing (which takes a lot of scheduling and planning, not the sort of off-the-cuff stuff I have been doing this round), it's relatively easy to get your work into a few hundred more hands.

Will they read any of it? That remains to be seen.

It can, and in my case, did lead to sales of non-free books. Plus having links in your back matter should translate into a few more long-tail sales over time. It also helps with visibility to be on Amazon's top 20 free charts for a few days, and usually results in the selling of a few copies right after the free period ends and you're still charting. You'll also likely rack up a few reads via Kindle Unlimited or whatever the program is that pays you for each page read online.

In embarking on this campaign, I tried to space things out, and group my promotions together in such a way that I could gauge results based on the general action. Each week involved a different tack.

The first new thing I tried now that I'm a "Bookstagrammer" was enlisting the services of the Indian book promoters who are prevalent there. Let me save you some time and money. Don't.

First of all, they want to sell reviews, and I can't emphasize enough how you should never do this. In fact, it took a good deal of explaining, a few times, exactly how I did not want them to do that. It's often rolled into their other services, and I had to put my foot down and say I absolutely didn't want any reviews, fake or otherwise. Because they would be fake, despite their protests to the contrary.

It doesn't matter what sort of numbers they show. 100,000 followers? You still are unlikely to see any sales. The whole scene is incestuous and scammy. Even if you successfully navigate that minefield, you are still at best pitching your work to people in India, and other indie authors. Unless you are an Indian author, I suppose, it's a dead end, and your money, however cheap some of them are, is better spent elsewhere.

You might gain some followers and likes, but even those are hollow. Avoid this area altogether, and put your resources toward what will work.

Cost: About $150 across several promotions.

The next week, I placed my book on a few low-to-mid profile book sites. More budget stuff, but at least they are targeting the right people. This generally involves a page on their site, frontpage status for some period of time, and likely some Twitter or Facebook posts.

Again, I can't say this resulted in immediate sales. But it did increase my overall visibility,  Ideally, you would do this on every site possible, over time. But I can't imagine how much that would end up costing, and doesn't have a great, direct Return On Investment.

What I did get, however, via only five or six sites, was a  more solidified Google ranking. Radar Love, sadly, competes for eyes with another book by the same name. And, of course, with the band Golden Earring themselves.

At least now, if you Google "Radar Love Book", you will have no trouble finding me. Not that anyone is going to be randomly doing that, and if they did, they would be even less likely to acquire my book based on that. Every little bit of exposure helps, though. The Goodreads page does show up halfway down the listing for a basic "Radar Love" search, and that's something. More links back to the book from more sites would in theory move this up in page rankings. Too little reward for too much work and investment.

It's also difficult to gauge if you're getting any sales from these sort of pages, unless it happens on the day it rolls out. A sale this week could be from a promotion last week. In a very real sense, you'll never know for sure. But you have to keep moving forward.

Cost: About $200 across about six pages/mailing lists.

My next area of focus was Bookbub ads. Not the giant and expensive campaigns, yet, as I'm saving them for the audiobook rollout. But small, inline ads. Erm, smaller than this blown-up view.

A good cover, I think, and decent ad copy. I'm too close to the problem to know for sure. And do Bookbub people know that the 'Anything' is a button? I'll assume so. We all know what clicking on an ad does. at this stage. But I wonder if it would be better changed. This is why you run tests with ads.

In a sort of A/B test, I ran two. Both had the same look, but different approaches to funding. No-nonsense stat reporting is one huge advantage this site has. You can really get a feel for what is working and cost-effective.

This is a combined stat, after one day of running two campaigns.

For one, I put in a bid for pay-per-click. The max is an insane $15.00, I believe. That's a click. Not a sale. But since I was trying to develop a strategy and needed results for narrowing my focus, I put in that amount. What happens is that you will actually win bids at a lesser amount. On a $15 ($20?) daily budget, the funds were exhausted with three clicks.

So, even if all three clicks resulted in sales, which they did not, it is a losing proposition. I did get two sales today, and it is possible that they were the result of this test. Unless all traffic and sales goes through your own website, at some point it becomes impossible to tell. 

That's not to say it is a total loss, in the scheme of things. That's some sixteen-hundred more serious book buyers who have heard of the title than before. And it also indicates that the ad could be improved, in my mind, and perhaps more tightly targeted toward the proper audience. I have no idea how to change it in that direction, however.

The other campaign using the same ad is one whereby you pay per 10,000 impressions. I don't know for sure how they are going to achieve that, but that is a lot of eyeballs. Likely a decent investment. It's an ongoing thing until the goal is achieved, so this one can just ride. My targeted 'similar authors' was limited to Jackie Collins and Quentin Tarantino, so that could probably use some refining as well.

I also unpaused the pay-per-click campaign to see what happens tomorrow.

So, mixed, ongoing, and inconclusive results. But this is the most sensible and effective campaign overall, even though it is not generating immediate sales.

Cost: About $140 all told. Possible two sales. Definite three clicks. A terrible ratio, but valuable info, and some decent exposure from the investment. 

I say that it is a decent investment, because in traditional marketing, we used to say that an ad has to be viewed about seven times before it takes hold on an individual. Things have changed dramatically now that things are digital, but it's still a part of human nature, to a degree. Reinforcement leads to eventual interest. Plus you need as many eyes as possible to find your audience in the first place. People that don't care for the ad as presented might not care for the book anyway. It's all about sales to the right set of readers.

I'll run all this past an outside source for an opinion before I embark on more, here. But for now, it's a work in progress.

My Amazon advertisement. Yes, the cover text is too small. We've been over this in previous columns, thanks.

Related to what I was saying about reinforcement and many eyes, I am running an Amazon ad campaign based on cost per click. It's a bit of a sneaky, in that you are getting your stuff out there in front of many people but only paying for click-throughs.

In other words, I have gotten more impressions for free via Amazon, thus far. Again, zero clicks. Zero sales. But excellent statistical tracking, and more valuable marketing info. How do readers feel about sponsored listings such as this one? I know I tend to tune them out, if not scorn the people who place them.

At the high end of bidding, a sale could cost me a dollar... Or a click could cost me three...

Cost: Zero dollars so far. Balanced with zero dollars in sales, but I'm coming out ahead in terms of increased visibility. I think.

Finally, I put my money behind a few Fiverr book promotion accounts. This is the weedy end of things, sharing a huge overlap with Indian Bookstagram, except if you're looking for a book trailer or perhaps a nice logo designed for you. I did manage to find four promoters I felt pretty good about. After adding on a few options and making one a rush, 24-hour delivery job for this article, I ended up with much the same sort of deal small book sites give you: a listing, a feature, a sidebar ad, some tweets or Facebook posts.

Cost: $150 or so. 

It remains to be seen if this is anymore helpful than the rest of my efforts, they mostly just went into effect today. Some of them are better targeted (erotic fiction), and space out their promos over a week's time. All of it together might not help, but at least it doesn't hurt.

Or does it?

With $600, I probably could have squeezed out a very basic Boobbub promotion of the sort that tends to pay for itself in a day or so. My early analysis indicates that it's the better option. All other things being equal, do both if you can. 

Some of this depends on where you are in the publishing process. If it's your first book, you definitely want readers and reviewers, but at the same time, every free book is one you're not going to sell. Free promos are much more synergistic when you have a catalog that can benefit from indirect marketing.

With careful planning, you can schedule a free book weekend, and line up many promo slots for free on the major eBook promo sites at little or not cost to you. This will assuredly make your book a major mover on the free charts. 

Another viable route for reviews, however, is to sign up for something like Reedsy Discovery. (Something else I signed up for at $50, and although it's only been a week, I haven't seen any reviews. It's a weird process, because it's set up for unreleased books. In my case, it's already out, so I had to put some projected future release date on it, and I'm not sure if that's helpful in any way. Most likely a detriment.) 

Avoiding the free-on-Amazon promotion route will let you put your first book up on Apple Books and Barnes & Noble, etc. at the same time you list it on Amazon. I'm honestly not sure how it works right now, but you used to have to be exclusive to Amazon to reap the benefits of free book promotions, and that probably hasn't changed.

Reddit has a number of groups which are okay with you promoting free, Kindle Unlimited, or even normally-priced books. It's where a large part of my free download traffic came from, the second biggest source probably being Instagram.

Reddit is *really* funny about self-promotion. Other than those groups, it's terrible for that. Conversely, it's a great place to find writing communities. Even then, you're usually expected to only speak in the abstract about your work, and generally never mention it by name. A trade-off. One of the best writing groups is actually Writing Circlejerk, a parody of the writing group. Spend enough time in the two, and you start to realize that the best writing advice is in the parody group, and that the 'serious' group is sort of a parody of itself.

I have had decent results with finding select readers in "Recommend Me A Book" on Reddit, and DMing them a free review copy when one of mine fits the bill. Most of the responses I get are overwhelmingly positive and grateful.

Instagram is a good place for the middle ground. There are a literal ton of authors on there, and book people, "Bookstagrammers". But let's be realistic, here. It's 90% women, in both cases. Now, that's perfect for me. And I have met some very cool male authors on there, as well. 

Don't approach Instagram as a mere marketing tool, or you will likely fall flat. Engage with readers, engage with authors. Post interesting content. This holds true across the entire social media universe.

I do monitor traffic from my 'Linktree' (Instagram is terrible about links, in most cases. You can't even DM them...) so I can see that I'm getting blog traffic from IG. which also means I'm getting Amazon traffic, and therefore must be doing something right. It's more of a giant community than the impersonal Reddit, and great friendships and alliances can be forged there. It definitely needs to be an arrow in your online quiver.

As far as Facebook and Twitter go, you're on your own, there for now. I am either banned or just pissy and wary of them, currently. Maybe I'll be back someday. Maybe. Obviously, you can benefit greatly from a presence there, and a good deal of my early book sales were via Facebook. Twitter is also super for engaging with authors you admire, promotions aside. I had a delightful talk with Clive Cussler not too long before he died, actually. That's worth so much more than book sales, to me.

So there you have it. I threw $600 down the drain so you don't have to. My next foray will almost definitely be a full-blown Bookbub promotion campaign for the Radar Love audiobook, and I'll report back then with more findings.

If you're, like, rilly rich and stuff, you could do worse than throw $.99 down the drain on my new self-publishing eBook, Don't Be An Idiot (Like Me). We'll both pretend that most of the content isn't from this blog.