Having run a series of experimental Facebook ads and enrolled Raether’s Enzyme in KDP Select, my next step was to turn up the voltage and lower the resistance. The voltage took the form of Facebook ads targeted at my three most promising audiences with a much higher daily budget than the previous experiments. To lower the resistance, I ran a Kindle Countdown Deal that discounted the e-book to $0.99. For the price of a very cheap cup of coffee (vs. a fancy coffee drink), a reader could explore the world of Raether’s Enzyme. Such. A. Deal. Or, for the price of a bottomless cup of Kindle Unlimited, they could read as many pages as they liked. The big fantasy was that lots of readers would see the ad, buy the book, and cost of the ad campaign would be recouped in sales. The little fantasy was that some small fraction of the readers would love the book and tell their friends. This is not a fantasy story, but the results were interesting. To me. YMMV.

The Audiences

The most promising ad audiences in my stable were: fans of Gillian Flynn, readers of Hard Science Fiction, and readers of Speculative Fiction. If you dig deep into Facebook’s Ads Manager, it will happily estimate the overlap of your audiences for you.

Speculative Fiction covers the majority of the Hard Science Fiction audience. I kept HardSF in the mix because it brings a few more guys into a combined audience that otherwise leans female.

The Voltage

I increased the ad spending by an order of magnitude. For the previous experiments, I set the spending limit to $5.00/day. During the Countdown Deal, I upped the total to $100/day. That big (by my puny standards) chunk of change was not distributed evenly. I bet $50 on the Gillian Flynn fans, $25 on the HardSF crowd, and the remaining $25 on the Speculative Fiction aficionados.

The Resistance

A Countdown Deal can have multiple stages where the price changes (goes up) over the course of the promotion. It adds a bit of urgency/excitement to the deal. Hurry! Only 12 hours and 41 minutes until the price goes up to $1.99! I debated whether to use those stages to try and determine a better price for my e-book. If sales (books sold X price) peaked at $2.99, then I should consider lowering the price from $4.99 once the sale was over. The counterargument was that if the price was changing, I couldn’t include it in the Facebook ad. There is no way to synchronize a change in the ad copy with the Countdown Deal’s pricing stages. In the interest of keeping it simple, I set the price to $0.99 for the duration of the deal and called that out in the Facebook ad.

The Countdown Begins

If you’re looking for ways to avoid the hard work of editing your next book, it’s hard to beat running ads and monitoring the resulting sales. Facebook and Amazon provide all sorts of numbers and charts. Refreshing the various dashboards and reports can be addictive. It was for me.

The Results (Ads)

Short version: The ads did not perform as well as the experimental approach to the same audiences.

Long version:

Outbound clicks are what take you from the ad to the Amazon product page. The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) dropped by more than a percent for each audience relative to the experiment. And it took more impressions per viewer to inspire a click. Since Facebook sells ads based on impressions, that means that the cost-per-click was much higher than in the experiments.

The Results (Sales)

Short version: 155 books sold during the countdown. That’s five times as many in August as the rest of the year combined. An estimated $162 of royalties for August ($0.99 e-books sales and Kindle Unlimited page reads) vs. $152 in royalties before August suggests that the value of the Countdown might not be measured in dollars.

Long version:

By commercial publishing standards, this is nothing to brag about. But if sales in the ones and twos have brought a smile to your face, seeing days with twenty-something books sold makes you happy indeed. In the first half of August 2021, the number of people who have a copy of Raether’s Enzyme quadrupled. The number of pages read via Kindle Unlimited more than doubled. The royalties earned increased by more than 50%. The numbers are still small, but they’re bigger small numbers. In some ways, it was a good week.

The Results (Visibility)

Ads on Facebook make your book visible to readers on Facebook. Readers on Facebook buying your book on Amazon make your book (more) visible to the algorithms on Amazon. Attracting the attention of the algorithms nudges them to make your book more visible to readers shopping for books on Amazon. The strength of that nudge depends on the number of sales. As a KDP author, your insight into that strength comes through changes in your book’s sales rank.

The formula for the sales rank is part of Amazon’s secret sauce. It’s not simply the number of books sold. That would result in a best-sellers list dominated by a few established titles. To keep things fresh and interesting, Amazon takes other factors into account. Outside observers have deduced that the value of a given sale (for the purpose of sales rank) decays over time. Sure, you sold a million copies five years ago. What have you sold in the last sixty days? Are your sales ramping up or dropping off? We may never know how Amazon calculates its sales ranks, but it does so fairly regularly. So, if you’re running a promotion and an ad campaign, you can include refreshing your product page every hour or two to your list of things to do instead of editing your next book. I did.

Books that aren’t selling float in the deep abyss of sales ranks greater than one million. Books that sell a couple of dozen copies a day over several days rise from the murky depths to a level where they can begin to imagine there might be a thing called light. Over the course of the Countdown Deal, Raether’s Enzyme floated up into the realm of four-digit sales rank.

No one is going to stumble upon the book ranked 6,802 while browsing the Kindle store. Where there is a little more hope and light is the sales rank within the various specialized categories/genres that the book is filed under.

Someone in the market for Disaster Fiction (a category suggested by a marketing consultant (definitely out of the box I had considered for the book)) would see #11 in the first page of results.

A reader looking for a technothriller might click over to page two of the results and see #54.

Hey! I’ve heard of Blake Crouch before! And for a brief time, Raether’s Enzyme was right there between two of his (older) books. How about that?

The glimmer of sunlight was nice while it lasted. After the Countdown Deal and its ad campaign ended, sales dropped off and Raether’s Enzyme began to sink back into the gloom. Sigh.

Inconclusion

There isn’t a space missing there. I’m still processing this exercise.

On an emotional level, the fantasy was dashed, but I’m happy the book reached more readers.

By the numbers, I’m not satisfied with the returns vs. the ad spending. 6.48% of the Facebook readers clicked over to Amazon and only 10% of those readers wanted the book enough to spend the price of a cheap cup of coffee. This must be attributed to my marketing and my book. I own them both. I know I’m weak at the former and fear that I’m weak at the latter.

At the same time, major publishers (and movie studios) have marketing and advertising budgets that are a substantial fraction of the overall cost of production. My $562 ad spend is well below what I’ve invested in bringing the book to market. The marketing consultant threw out a $2000 ad spend figure during our discussions. Playing the advertising game (vs. alternatives discussed here) may require better investments and more of them.

The Countdown Deal is over. The story continues.