Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: Amazon

Raether’s Kindle Countdown

August 16, 2021 /

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.

Selecting Select

May 28, 2021 /

KDP Select, that is. From May 28, 2021, until August 25, 2021, Raether’s Enzyme, the e-book, will be available exclusively through Amazon. Not Apple. Not Barnes & Noble. Not Kobo. Not Smashwords. Just Amazon. The paperback edition will continue to be available on Amazon*, at Barnes & Noble’s online store, and whatever independent bookstores order it from IngramSpark (ISBN: 9781735183909).

“Whoa,” you say. “What happened to ‘going wide’ and ‘meeting readers on whatever device they like to read on’?”

Yeah. The thing is, near as I can tell, the only e-book copies I’ve sold outside of Amazon have been to Tensile Press. That’s me. I purchased the e-book from each store to verify that it worked on their reader apps. Absent amazing success at marketing, my book will remain unnoticed, unpurchased, and unread in the non-Amazon portion of the commercial e-book ecosystem. So, for the short term, no one would be missing out if I unpublished the book to those outlets. I did this. But why?

If you checked out the link to KDP Select, you know part of the answer. For the non-clickers out there, KDP Select offers the following:

Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read as many KU books as they wish for a fixed subscription fee. Authors get paid a share of the KDP Select Global Fund based on how many pages of their book(s) are read. For independent authors, the per-page compensation is very, very, small.

During the KDP Select enrollment period (90 days), you can either run a free book promotion or a countdown deal. Pick one. I think Raether’s Enzyme is a screaming deal at $4.99. For the price of an extra-fancy coffee drink, you get tremendous entertainment value. As the work of an unknown author, many people might not see it that way. Discounting the book, or giving it away, might overcome that uncertainty and help connect the story with readers who will love it.

If they love it, they might tell their friends. They might leave a positive review. Word-of-mouth and abundant online praise are two of the strongest allies a self-published book can hope for. You might not make any money on books you give away or heavily discount, but you can prime the pump of reader interest and build a foundation of (hopefully) positive reviews. After the give-away or sale is done, readers that find their way to the book’s Amazon page via word-of-mouth or (gasp!) paid advertising, might find the confidence they need to justify the already low-low price of $4.99. That’s the theory, anyway.  We’ll see.

The other factor that motivated me to put all my e-book eggs in the KDP Select basket was something I discussed in Stalking You on Facebook. I’m still interested in experimenting with Facebook ads, but my last experiment sent the people who clicked on the ad to my blog’s Raether page. From there they had to click again to reach the merchant who could sell them the book. That extra step was taken by about one-fourth of the people who reached the page. Focusing the marketing and advertising directly on the Amazon page removes that step and makes it easier to a reader to buy the book. That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see.

The 90-day experiment has begun. We’ll see what the future holds.

  • At this writing, the paperback is heavily discounted on Amazon.

Stalking You on Facebook

April 27, 2021 /

Not you-you specifically. Not you, [FIRST_NAME] [LAST_NAME], who lives in [CITY], and likes [FAVORITE_THING]. Stalking you would be creepy. I am referring to a more abstract you: the potential audience for the things I write, such as this blog post and my fiction. That you. Facebook’s built its bazillion-dollar empire on helping people like me stalk people like you.

Spoiler: This post will not tell you how you should set up and run a Facebook ad campaign.

Customer vs. Product

If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

This is the essential fact of Facebook and multitude of “free” media sites, social and otherwise. If you are not paying a dotcom for its services, it’s a safe bet that someone else is paying that dotcom to access your eyeballs. There is nothing inherently sinister about this. The hippest alternative free weekly newspapers of the 20th Century had ad-supported business models.  Facebook took this model to a new level by promising to put the right advertisement in front of the right eyeballs by exploiting what it learned about a user/product-unit’s demographics, tastes, and interests. This makes the customers (advertisers) salivate and the products (users) cringe.

Marketing is an acquired skillset and an acquired taste. Having matured enough to respect and seek the skills of a marketer, I decided to try a taste of Facebook ads. Come with me now as we cross Facebook’s product-customer barrier…

Set the orbital mind-control laser to…

Knowing—or at least deciding on—what you want your ad to do is the first step to conquering the world. I chose to Get More Website Visitors. Sending clicks straight to the Amazon product page was not an option and might have lost folks who get their books elsewhere. There is another benefit/hazard to inviting potential readers to slflynn.com which I will discuss later in this post.

The goal guides the ad set-up process. I went with the default daily budget. As a sub-experiment, I changed the graphics from what you see on this site to feature a blue biofluid background. The idea there is that the red biofluid of the book’s cover will pop. What do you think?

The biggest question remained. Who are you? You, the reader whose eyeballs I want and need to rent.

Know your target audience.

Or take a wild-ass guess and see how it works. Amazon lets you target keywords (including other books) or lets you trust-fall into the magic of its algorithms. Facebook has you describe the products (users) whose eyeballs you want to rent. Therein lies the art and science. Facebook will provide hints about the science. For this experimental ad campaign, I used the following audience profile.

At my most grandiose, I want everyone, everywhere, to read and enjoy my novel. This audience profile narrows the scope of the campaign a bit.

Location – Living In United States

Age 20 – 65+

Language English (UK) or English (US)

People Who Match Interests: Speculative fiction, E-books, Thriller novels, Suspense or Fiction books, Education Level: College grad or Some college, Undergrad Years: 1980-2025

Note: I know for a fact that readers outside of this profile have enjoyed Raether’s Enzyme.

The science-y part of Facebook says that these parameters successfully whittle the ad targeting from 2.45 billion global users and 225 million US users down to mere 120 million users. Focused like a laser!

Or not. As the little gauge at the bottom suggests, this is still rather broad. Part of what makes it so broad isn’t visible above. It turns out that the interests are combined with a logical OR. If you remove ‘Fiction books’ from the equation and leave the remaining sub-categories of speculative fiction, thriller, and suspense, the audience contracts by 35 million. That refinement is something I will test in another experiment.

One week

Over the course of the ad’s one-week run, results trickled in. The first evidence was in my own Facebook news feed.

The rest of the story played out on various dashboards.

Traffic to my blog (which, as of this writing gets very little) rose during the week with referrals from the ad.

The peaks on April 14th and 15th are…interesting. Wednesday and Thursday. Was Facebook placing my ad more vigorously on those days and saving the weekends for bigger advertisers? Or are those just days people are more inclined to explore books from unfamiliar authors?

There was a corresponding (small) uptick in book page views on Smashwords.

At the end of the week, Facebook had many graphs to share with me. They had shown the ad to 2,360 people. The eyeballs they found for my ad tended to be older. The older the audience member, the more likely they were to be female.

Within the various United States, the audience shook out along the lines predicted by the states’ populations, with Texas nudging California out of first place for unknown reasons.

My own use of Fb is limited, so I was surprised by the number of places Facebook found to slide my little ad into.

Tucked away in a different corner of Facebook, the Ads Manager, I found one of the juicier graphs.

Of the 2,360 people who saw the ad, 52 people clicked on it. That’s almost two percent, which doesn’t sound like much, but is actually pretty good. Amazon showed my ad to nearly 43,000 people to get the same number of clicks. The cost-per-click was much better on Facebook than my various experiments with Amazon Advertising. On Amazon, I had spent $123 for 52 clicks. The Facebook ad had netted the same number of clicks for $35. Facebook covered $20 of that with an ad credit. Thanks, Facebook!

So, Facebook ads are better than Amazon ads, right? Not so fast. The Amazon ad clicks went straight to the Amazon product page. The Facebook ads came here to slflynn.com. Of those visitors, 16 clicked a link to the Amazon product page and one clicked over to Barnes & Noble. It cost about $1 to get Facebook eyeballs to the point where they might buy the book. This is better than $2.37 I paid for Amazon eyeballs. But it is not a matter of better. It is a matter of less bad.

NaN

Computers are great at working with most numbers, but there are various semi-exotic classes of numbers where CPUs must throw up their hands and walk away. These “numbers” are Not a Number (NaN) as far as the computer is concerned.

An important metric of success for an advertising campaign is what Amazon calls the Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS). It is amazingly easy to calculate. You divide the cost of your ad by the amount you made in sales driven by that ad. If you sold zero goods, then the ACOS is NaN, because dividing by zero is a flavor of mathematical infinity that computers really do not like.

My Amazon and Facebook ad campaigns resulted in zero book sales. Their ACOS is NaN. I spent less to fail on Facebook, so that campaign was less bad.

Abandon all hope, ye who advertise here.

Nah. These are early experiments. 43,000 and 2,360 seem like big numbers, but they are small samples in the scope of Amazon and Facebook audiences. Less than one hundred people reaching the sales pages and not buying is disappointing, but the general statistics suggest that only a small fraction of people that reach the page of an unfamiliar author and book proceed to buy it. Now is not time to panic. Not yet. But it is time to experiment some more. Perhaps the current blurb is not closing the deal. Perhaps a more refined audience or better keywords will connect the book with the readers who will enjoy it.

I may yet grab your eyeballs.

Okay, that did sound creepy.

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