Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: Facebook

The Gray God’s Countdown

August 5, 2024 /

For the ten days leading up to the release of my second novel, The Gray God, I ran a series of social media posts counting down to the launch. Each post featured an image to evoke a setting, scene, or tone from the book and a short bit of the book’s text. The idea was to tease but not spoil the reading experience. Social media being what it is, the odds of you having seen any of it are very low. So here, now, you can see the whole thing. No pesky algorithm can come between us. Rejoice and relive the countdown to The Gray God.

TL;DR

I enjoyed putting the countdown together and am pleased with images. I should have waited until only five days remained. Friends and family were on board early on, but only the most diehard followed the whole thing. If the algorithms even let them. From a marketing perspective, it was a good concept, but absent a large audience, it did not live up to its potential.

Countdown gallery

Behind the scenes

Each of the pictures was authored in Paint.NET. Paint.NET is a happy medium between MS Paint and Photoshop. It is relatively simple to use and supports layering images, quality text, and some simple but powerful effects. It’s about my speed.

At the bottom-most layer lurks the awesome cover art for The Gray God.

As the countdown progresses, more and more of the cover seeps through.

Next up is the scene image. Most of the pictures were taken by me on a field trip to the story’s setting: Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. I hiked through the woods around Sol Duc, east of Forks, and within the Hoh Rainforest, looking for fungi and forest scenes that I could use in my story.

As you can see, there were a few scenes where I didn’t have my own photos to work from. More on those in a bit.

The next layer in each is a scrim that dims the scene image just a bit so that the text layers above it have enough contrast with the background to be legible regardless of the image.

Yep, top two layers hold the countdown number and the excerpt text.

Beyond my camera roll

Days 1, 3, and 5 needed pictures I didn’t have. Each has a different solution.

Day 5: I started with a picture of myself in hunting clothing.

The plan was to crop it as you see above and turn my whiskers black to match the character in the scene. I could not make the color change work. At all. So, I cheated. I took the picture into Night Café’s suite of AI image generators and told it to replace my face with a “hunter with a black goatee.” After numerous iterations, I found one that satisfied me.

I used Paint.NET’s oil painting filter to smooth out the differences between my photo and the generated face.

Day 3: In the story, Joseph tells Pete about how he felt living in poverty near SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility in Texas. SpaceX was kind enough to provide a nighttime launch photo that was free to use via Pexels.com.

Day 1: After a long, frustrating search for a public domain close-up of a brown iris, I returned to Night Café and asked for an “extreme close up lidless bloodshot brown eye wide with fear.” The AI obliged. Pexels ultimately provided a real-life alternative.

I was torn. I understand and am sympathetic to artists’ concerns about generative AI, but the AI eye was so much scarier. I ran the two of them past a friend with more expertise and he said the AI eye had more color, so that’s what I should use from an engagement perspective.

Day 7: I did resist the AI temptation in one case. Day 7’s scene was originally going to be when Pete arrives home to find the cops parked out front. Oh, no! Co-Pilot’s DALL-E generator did a surprisingly good job at conjuring what I had in mind for the house and the overall mood.

I abandon this Day 7 for two reasons. One was reluctance to rely so heavily on a generated image. The other was that the picture was too authoritative. It usurped the reader’s imagination. They should be free to see the shape of Pete’s house in their own mind’s eye. So that picture up there? Forget you ever saw it. It is not canon!

Playing in a small venue

Ten days before launch, I started posting the countdown pictures to both my Facebook profiles and to my author page. A few of my family and friends rallied to my cause and shared the posts, for which I am very grateful. But I haven’t earned a substantial fanbase, so most of the countdown was only seen (shown by Facebook to) a dozen or so people. The exception was Day 9. That one reached 253 people. Or something. Facebook isn’t saying why this one turned from a tiny bud into a small blossom. Being salty and cynical, I think it has something to do with bots. Or bugs in the Facebook code.

ALSO: It’s a fools errand to attempt serial storytelling using social media posts. The quality-of-service guarantee for deliver is rubbish. Don’t let Facebook, X, or whatever fool you into thinking otherwise. Rubbish, I say!

A few folks cheered me on through the countdown (bless them!), but ten days of posts is a bit much to ask anyone to follow. If I do it again, I’ll start on Day 5.

Doing it again is an open question. It took a lot of work—which I had fun doing—for very little pre-launch buzz. I think a countdown could be quite exciting for someone with a big, engaged fanbase. For someone of very small influence, attention might be more reliably drawn with another strategy. Say, making a drunken, naked spectacle of oneself on TikTok. Or whatever it is the youngsters are media-ing these days.

Thanks for reading this far. Be sure to like, comment, subscribe, and share widely. Or whatever it is you do on the interwebz. I’ll be back soon with an update on Untitled Science Fiction Project.

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.

Stalking Who on Facebook?

August 4, 2021 /

In an earlier post, I discussed stalking you on Facebook. The you I stalked proved less than productive. I resolved to try again. This post documents my latest attempts to find a more productive you.

A proactive marketing department looks out into the world and identifies unmet or underserved customer needs. An author identifies emerging or surging areas of reader interest and crafts a story and a book to satisfy an audience’s hunger. Or their clues them in. Harry Potter’s success heralded years where Young Adult Fantasy was hot. Savvy authors with empathy for, and understanding of, that audience had an audience waiting for them if they could deliver a quality story.

Tensile Press’s marketing department (me) is not proactive. Raether’s Enzyme was written with only the haziest notions of who its audience might be and no data to back those notions up. Since the book’s publication, I have been struggling to divine the traits of readers who might enjoy the story. Facebook ads are my divining rods du jour.

WARNING: This post is NOT a how-to guide for Facebook advertising.

It’s a what-I-did story. Laugh or sigh at my mistakes. Root for me making slow progress toward enlightenment. Don’t try this at home and expect great results.

The Experiments

The previous experiments cast a wide net and caught no hungry eyeballs. Sad trombone.

The key to narrowing the net is hidden in Facebook’s ad-building user interface. With what is immediately visible, you can easily constrain demographics and assemble a list of interests. It takes a bit more poking around to unlock the amazing power of AND. With AND in your toolbox, you can take your base list of interests and say, “People interested in any of THESE, AND they must be interested in THIS as well.”

This narrows the audience for the ad considerably. Starting from a core audience and varying the AND portion, I set a series of divining rods aquiver. Facebook provides all manner of statistics for an ad’s performance. Key among them for my purposes was the Click-through Rate. Of all the people who saw the ad, how many at least clicked on it? Raether was enrolled in KDP Select. That made the e-book exclusive to Amazon, so I had all the ads link to its product page. I could see if there were any sales or Kindle Unlimited page reads associated with clicks on the current ad.

Experiment #1: Neal Stephenson

Location: United States
Ages: 24-65+
Interests: Speculative Fiction, Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Neal Stephenson.

A friend and early reviewer likened Raether to some of Stephenson’s work.

Experiment #2: Margaret Attwood (A/B Test with Neal Stephenson)

Location: United States
Ages: 24-65+
Interests: Speculative Fiction, Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Margaret Attwood.

There’s overlap between Megan’s and Offred’s predicament. Their freedom and agency are threatened, in part, because of something special in their biology.

Facebook allows for A/B testing. So, I ran Experiment #2 as an A/B test with the second half of Experiment #1. I might not be able to tell which clicks to Amazon came from which ad, but Facebook had something interesting to say about which of the two ads was more effective at getting those clicks. (Spoiler: Margaret, by a substantial margin.)

Experiment #3: Speculative Fiction

Location: United States
Ages: 22-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Speculative Fiction.

I shuffled the interests around. And lowered the age range by a smidgeon.

Experiment #4: Speculative Fiction – New Kids Mix

Location: United States
Ages: 18-49
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Speculative Fiction.

Facebook was reporting that it was tending to show the ads to older readers. I was curious if we were missing out on younger readers due to the algorithm’s caprice.

Experiment #5: Gillian Flynn (no relation)

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Gillian Flynn.

I was talking with another friend and early reviewer about the previous experiments. She suggested reaching out to Gillian Flynn’s audience. This was thinking outside my box and just the sort of help I needed.

Experiment #5: The Girl on the Train

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND The Girl on the Train.

Along with Gillian Flynn, my friend suggested Paula Hawkins in general and The Girl on the Train in particular. Facebook had the book, but not the author, as an AND-able interest.

Experiment #6: Hard Science Fiction

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Hard science fiction.

Raether can be viewed as science fiction. It asks, “what if?” and explores the implications for its characters and their world. “What if cancer could be cured by a substance found in the bodies of a tiny minority?” This is somewhat fantastical given what we know about the varying causes of cancer. But it might still be possible.

Experiment #7: The Hunger Games

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND The Hunger Games.

Raether’s protagonist is a bit old for the Young Adult market. Her dystopia is ambiguous. I was curious if there might be any cross-over interest from fans of The Hunger Games.

Experiment #8: Young Adult books

Location: United States
Ages: 18-65+
Interests: Suspense, Thriller Novels AND Young Adult Books.

While I was in the neighborhood, I reached out to the wider YA audience. I left the age range open. There are a substantial number of adults who enjoy YA fiction.

The Results

In General

The audiences Facebook found for the ads tend to be older and female. There’s no way to tell if that’s an accurate picture of Raether’s audience or an artifact of who’s on Facebook these days and what Facebook happens to know about them. The age trend was bucked in Experiment #4 (artificially) and in Experiment #8 (organically, by Facebook’s reckoning).

Caveat Re Specifics

I was sloppy on controlling variables in these experiments. If an experiment was not competitive after a couple of days, I cut it short. Hey, I’m paying by the day for this advertising. This means that the raw numbers of impressions (how many times the ad was seen) and an ad’s reach (how many distinct people saw the ad) can’t be compared directly. The Cost Per Result and Click-Through Rates and the are comparable.

Experiment #1: Neal Stephenson

Cost per Result: $0.31
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 11.68%

Experiment #2: Margaret Attwood (A/B Test with Neal Stephenson)

Cost per Result: $0.16
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 11.30%

Experiment #3: Speculative Fiction

Cost per Result: $0.18
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 9.96%

Experiment #4: Speculative Fiction – New Kids Mix

Cost per Result: $0.21
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 6.9%

Experiment #5: Gillian Flynn (no relation)

Cost per Result: $0.16
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 9.06%

Experiment #5: The Girl on the Train

Cost per Result: 31
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 4.63%

Experiment #6: Hard Science Fiction

Cost per Result: $0.27
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 7.17%

Experiment #7: The Hunger Games

Cost per Result: $0.20
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 7.17%

Experiment #8: Young Adult books

Cost per Result: $0.62
Unique Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): 3.23%

Right, but what about actual sales?

I’m getting to that. While I was refreshing my Facebook Ads Manager dashboard, I was watching my KDP sales dashboard. I attributed book sales to the ad that was running at the time. Kindle Unlimited page reads ramped up and tapered off. Some of the page reads in the early part of one ad’s runtime may be readers who picked up the book during the previous ad.

Here are the KDP report graphs. I added colored overlays to illustrate which experiment was running. For the purposes of Kindle Unlimited, Raether’s Enzyme is approximately 500 pages.

Experiment #5 performed poorly and isn’t highlighted on this table. Which isn’t to say any of the ads did amazingly well, but I am happy with Gillian Flynn, Speculative Fiction, and Hard SciFi. There are intervals where the sales and reads come close to covering the cost of the ads for a given day. But…

It’s not NaN, nor is it a profit.

Previous attempts resulted in no sales. When you divided the cost of the ads by the royalties earned, you were dividing by zero. That’s Not a Number. This time around, the ads went to closer approximations of Raether’s audience. Some of the Unique Outbound Clicks translated into sales and Kindle Unlimited reads, both of which generate royalties. Some royalties are not zero royalties.

July’s Kindle Unlimited Royalties are still pending. In the month of June, I spent $140.14 on Facebook ads and earned $81.83 in total royalties. That’s a long way from breaking even, but I’m learning things and connecting with a few new readers, who, in turn, may recommend the book to their friends. For indie authors, that’s where the hope lies.

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.

Marketing Monday

March 17, 2021 /
Raether's Amazon Ad

Raether’s Amazon Ad

“So, you have a new novel for me?”

“Yes, sir, I do. It’s a thriller/sci-fi/superhero mash-up with an amazing premise, a smart, sensitive hero, bounty hunters, dogs, aspiring supervillains, monsters, hackers, magic, secret identities, gunfights, and a cure for cancer!”

“Wow-wow-wow!”

Raether’s Enzyme is a story I like. The design of the paperback and eBook are excellent. Readers from my circle of family and friends enjoyed it and wanted to talk about it. I remain confident that there are many more people out there who would like it too, but that confidence is largely a matter of faith.  Sales so far have been scant, but the handful of ratings that have trickled in have been good.

The new challenge is to connect my book with readers who might enjoy it. The name of the discipline that encompasses this endeavor is: marketing. I am now consciously incompetent at marketing.

Cosmic Justice

I spent most of my adult life being unconsciously incompetent at marketing, and proudly so. As an engineer, I disdained the marketing department. They were foolish, superficial people who brought nothing but confused “customer requirements”, suspect “market research”, and undue authority to the product development process. Any failure of our efforts in the marketplace were obviously attributable to the gross incompetence of the marketing department. It is right there in both words: market. Case closed. Engineers rule. Marketing people drool. Any Dilbert fan knows this.

Yeah. About that…

Now that I am responsible for both producing the product and marketing it, I regret my former arrogance and apologize to any marketers out there who are reading this. I’m sorry. I should have had more empathy and respect for the people who work hard to identify potential customers and divine their wants and needs. I should have been more curious about how that side of a business works. Having failed in these ways, I have made a thing—a good thing—without a plan or clue as to how I might show the right people that it exists. There are infinitely many ways to fail at marketing and a small number of ways to succeed. My inability to tell the difference may doom my book to obscurity. If I can’t up my game to a baseline of conscious competence (or get very, very lucky), I fear that I will have squandered the contributions of the friends and collaborators who helped Raether’s Enzyme get this far. I will own these manifold failures from end-to-end. It will be my own damn fault.

Beyond doom and gloom

Recognizing you have a problem is the first step to solving it. As a young engineer, my next step would have been to come up with my own definition of the problem and set about solving it. Asking an actual customer for their input would only have constrained my immense creativity and innovation. As a more mature person working in a domain where I am consciously incompetent, I knew that I would need to learn, experiment, and fail repeatedly to make progress. In the months since Raether’s release, I have divided my time between marketing tasks, drafting The Gray God, and playing Cyberpunk 2077. I won’t claim to have found the optimal balance here, but I have committed one day each week to turning the learn-experiment-fail crank. I call it: Marketing Monday.

Learn

An older post offered a high-level, author’s-eye view of the landscape of the traditional publishing ecosystem as I understood it. I went with self-publishing. That landscape is similar, but there are distinct features that I should document at some point. For the purposes of this post, I’ll call out one such feature. I’m not sure if it fits my para-publishing or para-marketing categories. Let’s just say that there are many people out there who offer insight, advice, plans, and coaching for indie book marketing. Many, many people. Since I haven’t successfully employed any of their advice yet, I can’t make a recommendation as to who one should listen to or pay for. There are some common themes I’ve picked up on.

Marketing begins months before launch.

I launched Raether prematurely. I knew this at the time but didn’t want 2020 to find a way to kill me and/or destroy civilization before I had published at least one book. A prudent and planful book launch includes building buzz on your mailing list and social media, seeding influential reviewers with advance reader’s copies (ARCs), and other networking efforts. All of which require a marketing plan to identify receptive parties and shape advertising copy (which is an art distinct from fiction prose).

The Amazonian Gambit

Amazon wants to sell books. It doesn’t necessarily want to sell your book. If enough customers buy your book for it to rise in the sales and popularity ranks (in general and within the book’s category), your book will earn a position of visibility to book browsers. It falls to the indie author to bring readers to Amazon for your book or to find readers within Amazon via well-placed Amazon advertisements. Making the latter work requires insight, a bit of data science, a good cover, and a great blurb. Marketing and sales stuff. Raether has a good cover. I am working on the rest.

The insights you need include a list of books and authors whose readers are likely to enjoy your book. This list allows you to bid for ad placement on the pages for your targeted books. Then, if your cover is good and your tagline is great, a reader might just click on that sponsored product link and consider your book as well. These kindred books may also lead to further insights as to how to best categorize your book. ‘Thriller’ is a broad category. Mystery, Thriller & Suspense\Thrillers & Suspense\Technothrillers is a more specific category that gets you closer to readers who like a little science and technology in their thriller. Fortunately for Raether, which includes elements of thriller and science fiction (in the most general ‘what-if?’ sense), Amazon will let you file your book under multiple categories.

Amazon will also let you associate keywords with your book. These are invisible to customers but not to Amazon’s search engine, which may use them when a customer isn’t searching for a particular book but is in the market for a story with a ‘strong female lead’ or ‘dystopian fiction for adults.’  You only get to assign seven keywords to your book in KDP’s self-publishing system, but you can use many more in an advertising campaign. Picking keywords starts with your own ideas as to what readers might be looking for when they don’t yet know they want to read your book. You should test your ideas by searching for them on Amazon and seeing if your book fits in with the rest of the results. Alternately, tools like PublisherRocket will mine Amazon for you. This process may result in additional insights regarding similar books and authors.

With the right categories and keywords, you can, in theory, become visible to readers. If some of them buy, enjoy, and rate/review your book, the odds of it creeping up the sales ranks improve.

Finding your book’s Facebook friends

Your friends read your book because they are interested in you. Who is inclined to be friends with your book? Advertising on Facebook is a test of how accurately you can describe your ideal reader. What age range do the fall in? What educational level do they have? What interests do they pursue? Those interests can be genres (categories), authors, or specific books. They can also be medieval Scotland or space exploration. Facebook will use its creepy insights into strangers’ lives to target your ad without those strangers having expressed a desire to buy a book about a medieval Scotsman travelling to Mars. On the plus side, you can reach readers who didn’t know they wanted a book like yours. On the downside, they may not be in the market because their to-read stack is already full, thank-you-very-much.

Organic crops are labor-intensive.

I confess that I harbored a ridiculous fantasy. I told myself it was nonsense but deep down I hoped that I’d tell two friends and they’d tell two friends, and the miracle of exponential growth would popularize my book by word-of-mouth. 100% organic success. I wouldn’t have to work for it and could put all my energy into the next project. This didn’t happen. Duh. Not that my friends let me down. They helped me and my book with generous plugs and the book launch was much stronger for their contributions. I am heartened and thankful.

The book marketing coaches say that authors—and new authors in particular—benefit from being recognized contributing members of bookish communities. If readers (and writers, who are also passionate readers) know who you are, you’re not some unknown author to them. If you’ve entertained, enlightened, or encouraged them, they already value what you write. This needs to be a long-term relationship. You can’t just parachute in, flood the zone, and pitch your book.

As someone who burned out on the dramas and politics of online communities before many people knew such things existed, I don’t know if I’ll be able to make this work.

Another approach is to build an author platform. Make yourself known as an interesting person. Your platform can consist of a blog, a podcast, a Facebook page, general recognition of your expertise, all of these, and more. Having earned an audience in this other domain, you have potential readers who will trust you when you say, “Hey, gang, I’ve got a book coming out. I think you’ll like it.”

Having a platform is critical to non-fiction authors. It answers a reader or publisher’s first question: “Who is this person and why should I care what they think?” Having a platform works for new fiction authors who can say something like: “If you’ve enjoyed my articles on medieval Scotland, check out new novel. It’s set in medieval Scotland.” Established fiction authors have their prior work to build their platform on.

As someone whose labored in obscure bowels of tech behemoths until recently, this platform thing has a chicken-and-egg flavor to it. Building the platform entails the same work as marketing my book.

Experiment

So far, my experiments have all been baby steps.

Raether Zero

The simplest Amazon ad campaign you can run is to set automatic targeting. Amazon will use your categories, keywords and whatever secret sauce seems appropriate. If a customer clicks on the ad, you pay for the click based on a bidding range you set. My automatically targeted campaign named Raether Zero generated 7,780 impressions (it was shown to that many customers), 7 clicks, no sales, and had cost me $15.85 by the time I turned it off and scratched my head. The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) was low and the Cost-Per-Click (CPC) was high. This can be attributed to poor placement or a bad ad. The problem is that the ad is the book cover and a short bit of text. I’m committed to the cover and will need to scratch my head some more to improve the tiny blurb the ad allows you to work with.

Raether’s Kindred Books

The next experiment involved targeting the ad at two books I think are related my story. Raether overlaps in style, setting, and plot elements with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. Raether’s dystopian aspects and concern with a young woman losing claim to her body relate it Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Perhaps readers interested in these successful books would show an interest in my unknown novel. 11,202 impressions, 16 clicks, no sales, and $10.73 later, the answer appears to be no. Again, it may be that the ad doesn’t cut it. It may be that the book itself, as reflected in the cover and short blurb, doesn’t appear to be relevant.

Rocket 1

After pouring through How to Market a Book and Amazon Decoded, I decided to revisit my book’s categories and keywords and build a new campaign with a longer list of keywords and targeted books. PublisherRocket was my friend here. It allowed me to quickly test new keyword candidates, explore the categories of related books, and cross-reference books, keywords, and categories. I launched Rocket 1 and turned it off after 2,819 impressions. Most of the keywords were generating no or few impressions. There were only two clicks. Back to the drawing board. I may start it up again after revisiting the ad blurb and fortifying the book’s page.

The first one’s free…

Facebook kindly offered me a $10 credit to apply to advertising for my page. I had prepared an ad based on the assets supplied by my designer prior to launch, so taking Fb up on this offer was easy. I set up a (crude) audience profile and pointed the ad at Raether’s page here on my blog. Seven hundred or so impressions later I had not one nibble. This could be my ad. Or the imprecision of my audience profile. Or both. Or neither. I don’t know.

What I do know is that I am deeply ambivalent about Facebook. I enjoy seeing the good things my friends and family choose to share. I understand that employing programmers and keeping the servers running costs money and that Facebook needs to make that money somewhere. It makes it by selling advertising opportunities based on its creepy insights into its users’ likes and lives. And that bugs me on a gut level. I haven’t made peace with engaging with the ads they show me. Does it make sense—is it even right—for me, with my attitudes, to pay them to insert my ads into strangers’ feeds? I haven’t solved this conundrum, so I’ve been ignoring Facebooks endless notifications about how I can improve traffic to my page with their ads. A $20 credit with my next $10 of ad spending is generous, but I don’t want to give them my credit card number.

I must move past these blocks if I’m going to use Facebook advertising. I’m told it can be quite effective.

Fail

I cannot correlate any of my advertising experiments with a single sale of my novel. Bummer.

If at first you don’t succeed…

Repeat

I plan learn more about modern indie book marketing and experimenting with these channels and others. I expect I’ll fail again. And again. And I’ll repeat the process as needed. I owe it to my book and that’s what one does on Marketing Monday.

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