Sean L Flynn

An author's blog

Tag: marketing

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.

Guest Blogger Book Marketing Tips

February 20, 2023 /

I’m busy worldbuilding for Untitled Science Fiction Project, so I’ve enlisted a guest blogger to write a post of interest to readers of this blog. It’s everyone’s favorite robo-scribe: ChatGPT!

Here’s the prompt: write a blog post about how to market your novel and make it a bestseller

And without further ado:

Writing a novel is an impressive achievement, but getting it noticed by readers can be a daunting task. While publishing a book is a significant milestone, the real challenge lies in marketing it effectively. In this blog post, we’ll discuss some tips on how to market your novel and make it a bestseller.

  1. Build your author platform Before you start marketing your novel, it’s essential to establish a platform that helps you connect with your target audience. A platform can include a website, social media presence, blog, podcast, or any other channel that allows you to engage with your readers. Your platform should showcase your personality, writing style, and any other relevant information that can help you connect with your readers.
  2. Leverage social media Social media is an essential tool for marketing your book. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram provide a free and easy way to connect with readers and promote your book. Make sure to create a professional profile that includes your author bio, book cover, and links to your website or blog. Engage with your followers by posting interesting content related to your book, hosting giveaways, or creating polls.
  3. Book reviews Book reviews are essential for promoting your book. Positive reviews can help you gain credibility and attract new readers. There are several ways to get book reviews, including reaching out to book bloggers, offering free copies to reviewers, and participating in book clubs.
  4. Book trailers Book trailers are like movie trailers but for books. They can be a powerful tool to promote your book and generate interest. A book trailer is a short video that showcases the main plot, characters, and themes of your book. You can create a book trailer on your own or hire a professional video production company.
  5. Book signings and readings Book signings and readings are a great way to connect with readers and promote your book. You can host an event at your local bookstore, library, or any other venue that attracts book lovers. Make sure to promote your event on social media, your website, and other relevant channels.
  6. Build a mailing list Building a mailing list is a great way to stay in touch with your readers and promote your book. You can use email marketing tools to collect email addresses from your website visitors, social media followers, and event attendees. Make sure to send regular newsletters, exclusive content, and promotional offers to keep your subscribers engaged.
  7. Offer freebies and incentives Offering freebies and incentives can help you attract new readers and promote your book. You can offer free chapters, short stories, or other exclusive content to your subscribers. You can also run a promotion where readers can get a free ebook when they buy a paperback version.

In conclusion, marketing your novel can be a challenging task, but these tips can help you connect with your readers and promote your book effectively. By building your author platform, leveraging social media, getting book reviews, creating a book trailer, hosting book signings, building a mailing list, and offering freebies and incentives, you can increase your book’s visibility and make it a bestseller. Good luck!

As you can see, it’s easy-to-read, actionable, and a regurgitation of conventional wisdom. And it only took a few seconds to generate! I’ll have spent much longer on my commentary and NightCafe image generation (prompt: robot novelist struggling with writer’s block renaissance painting oil on canvas) than either AI spent generating their contributions. All hail our robot overlords content producers!

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.

Seeking External Validation

March 24, 2021 /

Dice, chips, and cards

Image by Tom und Nicki Löschner from Pixabay

“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”

― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Reviews and ratings play an important role in lives of books. They help readers decide which of many books to pick up next. The wisdom of the crowd is something we’ve come to rely on in an age of superabundant choices. A positive and articulate review from a trusted source will make a better case for readers investing their time in a book than the best advertising copy.

For the purposes of this post, reviews and ratings overlap but are not the same thing.

Ratings

Ratings are a simple score of how much a reader enjoyed the book. Four-point-three out of five stars! They provide a reader with a flash assessment. Being numbers, they are easy for a computer to file, rank, and analyze. Authors smile at high ratings. It’s nice to see that people like or value your work. Low ratings are a mix of disappointing, depressing, and frustrating. Failing and not knowing why you failed makes the world seem that much more arbitrary and cruel.

Stellar ratings suggest that all the pieces fit. This time. Do the same thing again. If you can. And it might work as well.

Terrible ratings suggest that one or more of the pieces failed catastrophically. Did you write a bad book? Market it to the wrong audience? Is it time for a new pen name? It can be hard to tell.

Reviews

A book review can go into greater depth. The reviewer offers a mix of insight into what they read and how they felt about it.

Prospective readers risks encountering plot spoilers and having their experience of the book colored by the review, but they learn more about what the story is about and why the reviewer liked or disliked it.

Authors should find reviews—positive or negative—interesting. The reviewer is opening a window into their experience of the book and many important questions might be answered, including, but not limited to…

Did they follow the plot?

If not, where did you lose them? Authors are free to play games with intricate plots, flashbacks, flashforwards, unreliable narrators, and a host of other devices with the potential to confuse. Readers may enjoy the story being a puzzle. They may appreciate how confusion conveys the chaos of the characters’ lives and world. They expect it to be intentional. For the most part, they expect the design to be revealed by the end of the book.

Did they feel the way you hoped?

And intended. It is mortifying to have what one has written in all seriousness read as comedy. It is frustrating to have what one wrote as satire taken seriously. It is best to know when these inversions have occurred and to adjust the marketing plan accordingly.

Were they the reader you imagined?

Whether an author is writing to market or not, they have expectations as to the type of reader who will be interested in their story. A reviewer from outside those expectations is promising or perilous from a marketing perspective. Promising if the book got a positive review from an unexpected quarter. There’s an opportunity to reach out to a whole new audience. Yay! Perilous if the book’s marketing landed it with someone whose tastes and sensibilities are incompatible with its contents. Now that reviewer is saying harsh things about how a cerebral examination of a family in crisis fails as a psychological thriller. Ooops!

Ratings vs Reviews

As you might guess, I find reviews more interesting than ratings.

Aggregate ratings such as Amazon’s can lead you to stay the course, try something different, or pull the plug on marketing a book. That’s something, and not a small thing. But it’s not meaty. Positive ratings from celebrities or authoritative sources can be folded into advertising to good effect. At least that’s what I suspect. I haven’t had any experience putting such into play.

Reviews can highlight strengths and weaknesses in your craft. They can lend weight in support of or against decisions you made while writing your story. Those lessons can be brought to bear on future writing projects. A sweet pull-quote from a favorable review is free quality advertising copy.

There aren’t many ethical ways to solicit ratings independent of reviews. Paying someone to give your book a high rating is straight-up wrong. Paying someone to honestly rate your book is problematic. Asking for ratings is considered tacky and you’ll probably get what you pay for. In either case, most rating aggregators won’t tell you who provided a simple rating, there’s no way to know how or if the rater did their job. Attributed ratings lack proof of work.

There are legitimate channels to solicit reviews (which may include a rating as a form of summary).

Some channels do not involve a money changing hands. A robust social network or diligent research can connect you with book bloggers who are intrigued by something about your book. Terms vary, but you are generally hoping for positive exposure and the blogger is hoping for the chance to write an interesting blog post. This is akin to querying literary agents. Bloggers are looking for what they’re looking for and even if you have it, their dance cards may be full.

The modest scope of my (excellent) social network and unhappy memories of the query-wait-hope-wait-wait-hope-wait-rejection cycle led me to look for alternatives. To date, I have tried two.

Reedsy Discovery

For a modest fee, Reedsy’s Discovery site will make your book visible to a pool of reviewers who might or might not choose to review it. Ideally you post it to Discovery as part of the build-up to your book’s launch to create buzz and win pre-orders. Discovery recommends posting weeks in advance of your launch date. I did not do this. I submitted Raether to Discovery on its actual launch date and set the Discovery launch date five weeks later. During that interval I hoped that some of the discovery readers would find it, read it, like it, and review it. They did not do this. Sigh.

Grumpy

The nice folks at Discovery offered to extend the (potential) review period. I took them up on that offer. Nada. Zilch. I oscillated between despair and anger, as one does, before settling into a grumpy curiosity. How much weight should I put on this failure? Who was it that wasn’t responding to the awesome cover and intriguing premise? Would it make sense to approach some of the reviewers directly?

Heigh-ho!

Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work I go. Off to the open-bit mines. I made my way through the directory of thriller reviewers (link goes to the current directory), dipping into each profile to see what mix of ratings and reviews each had done overall, in the last year, and in the last six months. This was slow-going, as Discovery only lists twenty per page and bounces back to the top of the first page when you return to the list from a profile. After examining the first forty-seven thriller reviewers (out of about 200), a pattern began to emerge.

Ratings Reviews 6 months 12 months
21 2 15 21
2 2 2 2
385 0 51 126
1 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
513 0 41 89
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
14 0 11 14
318 0 25 59
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
215 0 21 60
1 1 1 1
0 0 0 0
16 2 2 6
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
149 1 48 55
0 0 0 0
1 1 1 1
3 3 3 3
0 0 0 0
2 2 2 2
768 0 49 108
9 9 9 9
0 0 0 0
218 1 6 23
1 1 1 1
6 6 6 6
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0
4 0 4 4

 

My read on these numbers was: Most of the reviewers are not engaged in the Discovery review process. The ones that are posting skew heavily toward rating vs. long-form reviews.

My impression from scanning the profiles was: Most of the reviewers are book bloggers, aspiring book bloggers, or the YouTube equivalent of book bloggers. Discovery reviewing is an adjunct to their book blogging platform and probably an experimental one at that. Reviewers follow each other and import their reading lists from outside, suggesting that for them, Discovery is a social media platform which is likely secondary to Goodreads.

Genre Shift

Someone from Discovery reached out to me during this second interval of quiet failure with a generous offer to review the cover and blurb and make suggestions on how to make them more appealing to the site’s reviewers. They weren’t able to suggest a change in wording but proposed moving the book into science fiction. Perhaps the reviewers there would be more receptive. This was a reasonable and good idea. The story has a science fictional component to it, as does the cover art. This did not work.

Down on Discovery?

Do I have a negative opinion of Discovery? A bit. I think it’s an interesting idea but that it lacks transparency with respect to odds making. It’s not an easy equation to figure and your odds certainly improve if you’ve written a book that people want to read. I may not have done that. But I get the sense that success on Discovery is also sensitive to the distribution of reviewer interests across genres and your timing relative to potential reviewer’s availability for engagement. Alternately: You need certain amount of luck place your book when and where it will get a review. This is not a bug from Discovery’s perspective so long as they have enough material coming in to interest readers and fill their newsletters.

All is not lost.

Raether emerged into public view on Discovery. A few people have seen it there.

Kirkus Reviews

Chances are you’ve seen Kirkus Reviews cited in book advertisements, especially their starred reviews. Kirkus has been around for a long time and is a known quantity in the world of book reviews. For indie authors, their deal is that for a fee, they will match your book to one of their reviewers. In four to eight weeks, they’ll get back to you with the review, which is by default private. If you want to move forward with the process, you tell them so and they publish the review on their website. You are then welcome to quote it subject to their guidelines. If you aren’t happy with the review, it remains private.

The fee will give some pause, but it is fair. You’re hiring a publishing industry professional to read novel and write a review. If the reviewer assignment process did a good job, the reviewer might well enjoy the read, but it is still work. They deserve to be paid for it. Amazon estimates that Raether is a nine-hour read. If you take out a cut for Kirkus and add in the time required to write the review, the reviewer isn’t making big bucks. It’s probably a freelance side-hustle or entry-level gig.

The fee didn’t give me pause. It’s a marketing expense. I have made peace with risking speculative investments in my book’s success. As a sensitive and insecure artistic spirit, I dreaded the possibility that this stranger would dislike my story, a dread I knew from querying agents but more acute and grounded by the fact that here it wasn’t my pitch or first chapter that was being tested, but the whole of the actual story. Any fault across those hundreds of pages could sink it. A minor irritation with the style would accumulate across 114,000 words and erupt in a caustic condemnation of the whole work. Yeah, I came up reasons not to enlist Kirkus. In the end, pride and curiosity won out. The promise that I could bury the review if I didn’t like it helped. I paid Tensile Press’s money, uploaded the manuscript, and began the wait.

Kirkus took their full time, two months, to deliver the review. During that interval, I was sanguine. It was going to be okay. When the email arrived saying I could download the review, the butterflies in my stomach took flight again.

It begins.

A Kirkus indie review begins with a short description of the premise.

Raether’s review does a good job of this.

And continues.

Next comes an in-depth paragraph that touches on characters, plot, highlights, and lowlights.

The reviewer starts with a light synopsis the story’s first act, which is mostly accurate and only a bit spoiler-y. The highlights and lowlights that follow are fair and more focused on characters and tone than plot. The review warns that the tone becomes dark and cites examples in a mix of specific and abstract terms. My first reaction was that this was entering spoiler territory. And it is, but in a way that I’ve come to understand and respect. The reviewer is cautioning the reader that there are nasty surprises lurking between the covers. Cruelty and violence that are outside of what some thriller readers may enjoy. Startling trope subversions. Readers seek out reviews to make informed buying decisions. This review’s warnings balance that purpose with preserving most of the reader’s experience of discovering the tale for themselves.

Then ends.

The review ends with a one-sentence summary judgement.

Raether’s review ends thus:

“A plausibly chilling what-if tale with a smart, sensitive hero.” — Kirkus Reviews

Well, there it is…

If you read the Kirkus excerpting policies, you know that for me to use that quote here, I had to release the review for publication on their website. Click here to read the whole thing. I sat on the review for a full day before pulling the trigger. It took a couple more days to get the cover art to display with the review. It isn’t the rave, starred review I wished for, but it is on the whole positive and that pull-quote may prove useful. I’ve added it as an ‘editorial review’ on Raether’s Amazon product page and will seek other opportunities to use it in my marketing efforts. Kirkus sent me a follow-up email with details about who to contact there about promoting the book on their site and in their magazine. I’ll pursue that in days to come.

Questions answered?

I suggested (above) that a review could answer questions an author should ask. Did the Kirkus review supply any of those answers?

Did they follow the plot? Yes. The reviewer synopsized the first part of the story accurately and didn’t note tripping over anything later.

Did they feel the way I hoped? I think so. They found the premise intriguing. They loathed the villains and liked Megan and her friends. They found the disturbing things disturbing. I’m not sure they liked being disturbed in those ways, but their response was appropriate. The ending worked for them on an emotional level.

Were they the reader I imagined? Yes, but…

One of the agents I queried required submissions to include a description of the story’s audience. It was a fair thing to ask and something I hadn’t thought through before I wrote the manuscript. Working backwards from the manuscript, I came up with:

Raether’s Enzyme is looking for adult readers who enjoy a provocative premise but may not be willing to enter the alien worlds of science fiction. They appreciate the brisk pace of a thriller but not at the expense of humanity and theme. They are intrigued by imperfect characters making (and avoiding) hard choices in a world where personal and societal ethics are in turbulent flux. They are comfortable with modern technologies and aware that there is a dark side to our connected world. Their reading tastes are eclectic enough to embrace a full-on geekfest colliding with the machinations of a brutal mercenary within one story. They may not have use for superheroes, but they are willing to cheer on an ordinary person as she struggles to master a power that Superman would envy.

Experiences with early readers expanded that envelope to the point where I think the Kirkus reviewer was akin to readers I already knew.

Place your bets.

And take your chances. It’s not a game of complete information.

My small bet on Reeds’ Discovery crapped out.

If I can translate my Kirkus review into a few hundred sales, it will pay off.

Time will tell.

The story of my story is still being written. Stay tuned.

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.

A Dream of Launching

October 20, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In The Prints of Proof, I resolved the burning question of which book design for Raether’s Enzyme to bring to market by creating paperback proof copies of each design. After studying the proofs and consulting with my trusted beta readers, I settled on one of the three excellent designs. Eager to get the book to market before the murder hornets descended on me, I uploaded the book’s files to Kindle Direct Publishing, IngramSpark, and Smashwords. Hilarity ensued.

Covering my assets

With the great power of self-publishing comes great responsibility. Promoting my books is up me.  For my soft launch, I’ll be announcing the publication of Raether’s Enzyme on my social media. With a little luck, some of my friends, family, and will find the premise of the story interesting. Some of those good folks will enjoy the book enough to recommend it to their friends. Word-of-mouth will spread.

To reach readers beyond my social network, I need to advertise. The twenty-first century is awash in advertising opportunities. To put it mildly. Exploring and exploiting them requires ad media tuned to the various marketing channels. Facebook, Twitter, et al have idiosyncratic requirements for what makes optimal ads on their platforms. As I prepared to engage my designer’s talents, my research revealed that the number of ad formats was daunting. When you add the number of images required to fortify my web site, Facebook page, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, the project was too large. And any or all these requirements were subject to change without warning.

Rather than ask him to produce all the ads and artwork I would need, I asked him to set me up with graphical assets that I could combine and arrange for all the scenarios I was facing and might face over the life of Raether’s Enzyme. The cover art for Raether is amazing. The title typography is dramatic. The background is a fascinating biofluid texture. He provided me with the title in SVG vector form and extracted the biofluid from the cover art as a PNG file. To round out the package, he rendered the cover as a paperback book and on a tablet (for the e-book). These building blocks empower me to apply my (admittedly modest) Photoshop skills to build ads that play off the strengths of his cover designs.

Ad-ing it up

I set to work building the images I’d need to announce the publication. There wasn’t room for the full back cover blurb. I distilled it down to three sentences, two of them quite short. Putting them into the artwork, I hit my first speedbump. The back cover text is in a font called Thonburi. The only free-to-use version of Thonburi I could find for Windows is for Thai systems. The text of my English sentences rendered as fragments of Thai characters. After consulting with the designer, I settled on Franklin Gothic Medium for my ad copy.

I knocked out the ads and banners on my checklist with time left to pursue a stretch goal: producing a video teaser trailer. By default, I resent PC makers pre-installing third-party ‘bloatware’ on new computers. It’s mostly crap I don’t need or want. The nice folks at MSI preloaded PowerDirector14 on my machine and I’m happy they did. The free portion of its feature set was enough to do the job. The learning curve wasn’t too steep. Before long, I had combined my assets, a few transition effects, and sound effects from soundsnap to create an intriguing thirty second video that had the flavor of a movie trailer. Minus the epic “In a world…” voice.

I was pleased with myself. I downloaded it to my home theatre PC and watched it on my big screen over and over again. The final image features the mock book and tablet. After working on the ads and the video for days on end it finally hit me: a dreadful certainty that the paperback cover I had uploaded to Amazon KDP and IngramSpark was still too dark. It failed to deliver on the promise of the ads. It was one week before Raether’s scheduled launch and I had to fix the cover.

Re-cover-y

Looking back, it was clear that I had settled for a darker cover too readily. My frustration with the screen-to-print issues got the better of me. I should have worked through the problems with the aid of the designer and landed a version of the cover art that printed well back in September. I had run an experiment on my own with an enhanced version of the cover art and a matte cover, but abandon it because the matte finish made the biofluid look chalky. I needed to recreate those enhancements and make them work with the glossy cover finish that worked so well with the liquid theme of the art.

Prudence recommended contacting the designer to ask for a version of the cover with the enhancements I believed would rescue the art from the CMYK darkness. Pride, courtesy, and desperation argued against that. I owned the mistake so I should fix it. It would have been rude (and unprofessional) to interrupt the designer’s work for other clients with my fire drill. The designer is in a different time zone, so even if I was willing to inflict my panic on him, it would be more efficient if I could make the changes and test them with KDP’s previewer on my own.

Easier said than done. I don’t need programs as powerful as Photoshop often enough to justify subscribing to Adobe’s software-as-a-service. For my occasional needs, I have work-alike programs from Affinity. They are generally potent beyond my ability to fully exploit. When I opened a copy of the cover PDF file in Affinity, I ran into two problems. The bleed portion of the cover image was missing. Affinity showed only white. That had the risk appearing at the edges of the paperback cover. The second problem was my old nemesis: Thonburi. All the back-cover text was a mess of arbitrary Thai characters if I had the font installed. Absent Thonburi, the software substituted another font. In the course of ‘fixing’ the imagery, I was breaking the typography.

Necessity is the mother of subscription. I couldn’t bring myself to buy into the full Adobe Creative Suite, but a seven-day free trial of Acrobat Pro DC enabled me to convert the cover PDF into a PNG file that combined (flattened) the image portion with the text. I adjusted that to match my matte cover experiment, boosted to contrast for good measure, and saved it as a PDF. KDP raised no alarms when I uploaded it. I ordered a new proof copy with next-day delivery and told myself to hold off on uploading the new cover to IngramSpark.

Hold the WordPress

My plan was to share the video from this very website, which is powered by WordPress and lives on a BlueHost server. WordPress had other ideas. My attempts to upload the video to the site’s media library failed. “Sorry, this file cannot be uploaded for security reasons.” What?! It’s a simple MP4 video file! It plays just fine on my desktop and my iPad! I consulted various oracles and tried different WordPress plugins to no avail. One of the plugins revealed that MP4 files were on the list of permitted file types. Something else was going sideways during the process and WordPress was barfing up an incorrect error message.

Well, bugger. I didn’t have time for a trip to Techsupportland.

I created a YouTube channel for Tensile Press and uploaded the video there. That should work, but viewers will have YouTube spraying ‘watch next’ content at the end of the video. Because YouTube.

Pressing the button.

The jolly, candy-like button. KDP advises that when you press the paperback publish button, it may take up to 72 hours before the files pass through final review and the book is available for purchase on Amazon. I was slipping inside that window and the proof copy with the new cover had not arrived. The new cover looked better and brighter in the previewer. No guts, no glory. I pressed the button. And waited. No guts, no glory. I uploaded the new cover to IngramSpark. And I went to bed.

The next morning I received e-mail from KDP. My files had failed the final checks. The message’s wording was that of a human being. At long last, actual human eyes had evaluated Raether’s files. It wasn’t the new cover that was the problem. It was the interior PDF, which had passed the automated tests over a month before. The interior design brings the biofluid effect inside the book. You see it in the front matter and in each chapter heading. It is super cool. The biofluid extends to the edges of the pages it appears on. For printing purposes, that means the artwork must extend past the edges of the books page into the paper that gets trimmed away, into the bleed. The interior file I had uploaded ended at the page edge. It did not include the bleed. This should have been easy for the automated tests that run when you upload to detect, but they didn’t. The final human-powered check discovered problem. This error also explained a few problems with the test copy I had ordered from IngramSpark. The designer supplied me with a full-bleed version of the interior. I uploaded it to KDP and IngramSpark, which accepted the update. I pressed the KDP publish button a second time. And waited.

The next morning KDP’s e-mail congratulated me on having published my book. That afternoon, the proof copy with the new cover (and bad interior) arrived. It looks amazing. The colors are a close match to the vibrance of the art on-screen. I hope you relish it as much as I.

The Prints of Proof

October 10, 2020 /

Previously on Game of Tomes

In A Dance with Designers, three talented teams of freelance designers produced covers and interior book designs for Raether’s Enzyme. Each team’s cover captured a different aspect of the story and were viable keys to unlocking readers’ interest. The teams mastered the layout challenges posed by the manuscript’s stylistic flourishes. The dance ended with a cliffhanger: I had three great designs and could only bring one to market. There was one last test.

Kindle Direct Proof

The final test was to upload the designers’ files to Amazon KDP and request proof copies of the paperbacks. This would get me as close as possible to what a real reader would experience. I had prior experience with the system that gave me cause for concern. This time I had professional design products, not dev. I was optimistic. Too optimistic…

I’ll break here and to say that the trials I recount here are 21st Century First World Problems™. KDP and IngramSpark afford indie authors an amazing opportunity to create real live books without the overhead of a full-blown print run. Raether’s Enzyme would not be available in paperback if it wasn’t for Print On Demand.

Okay, back to our story. I chose the design I favored ever-so-slightly for the first proof. With the files uploaded and the automated tests passed, the online preview of the book looked promising. The cover was a bit dim, but the interior tracked the designer’s PDF file perfectly. I ordered four proof copies and sat on the porch steps waiting for the delivery.

The covers were rather dim. Areas that glowed on the screen with red were like dried blood. The magical cyan was the green of chalkboards. Whole areas of subtle detail were lost in the darkness.  I’ve worked in and with computers long enough to know that unless the screen to printer pipeline is calibrated, what you see on the former isn’t what you’ll get on the latter. The additive colors on your screen work differently than the subtractive colors used by printers. Gamut mapping is a science. But it struck me that in the years that KDP had been serving indie authors, it should be able to print the users’ cover files with greater fidelity.

Diving into the KDP community forums revealed that dark covers were a persistent issue. The best advice anyone had to offer was to print on glossy paper (I had chosen a matte finish) for a 10%-20% boost in brightness. That was useful. I would try that. But that would mean another week or so before the next (single) proof copy arrived. The process was broken. For the time being, I had to deal with it.

I imagined ways it could be better, wrote them up, and posted them to the section of the KDP community forums dedicated to feedback and feature requests.

First things: I’m still new to this but have been in the system since CreateSpace. I know that printing cannot deliver the luminosity and range of colors that you can see on the screen. I recognize that an ideal pipeline would include calibration of the monitor to the printer. I understand the difference between RGB and CMYK but am not versed in the art and science of gamut mapping.

KDP has done an excellent job with my books’ interiors. The covers of my proof copies are invariably MUCH darker than source PDFs and images. The new previewer hints and the darkness to come, but IMHO understates it. The availability of proof copies on demand is a miracle of 21st Century publishing, but the one-week time between requesting a proof copy and having one to evaluate makes an iterative approach to getting the desired cover very, very slow.

Any or all of the following would improve productivity and reduce resource use. Please consider implementing these features for KDP.

COVER PROOF COPIES. Allow the author-publisher to request a printing of just the cover.

FILTERED COVER PROOF GALLERY. Like a cover proof copy, but with multiple miniatures of the cover on a single sheet. One displays the cover as uploaded. The others show the printed results with variations on the cover. RGB vs. CMYK. Selected embedded color profiles (community wisdom is that these are discarded by KDP, so maybe not). Gradations of enhanced saturation and/or brightness. Label each so that the customer can adjust their cover to match the one that looks best to them.

SMARTER COLOR MAPPING. Amazon’s a smart, capable company. Do a better job at translating the customer’s colors to what the printer can deliver. Train a machine learning system to provide customer-satisfying results. Something to keep my spirits from falling when I open the box of proof copies.

GREATER TRANSPARENCY AND BETTER GUIDANCE. Community members have done heroic work in offering workarounds to weaknesses in KDP. They aren’t in a position to solve our problems with this aspect of self-publishing. KDP should tell us up-front how to get the best color fidelity for our book covers. At the very least, it should document which printers to target so that we have a better chance to get things right the first time.

KDP is an important partner in getting Tensile Press books to market. Addressing the issues around cover color fidelity will make it a cherished partner.

Thank you for your attention.
Sean Flynn
Tensile Press

This is a “compliment sandwich” with some “plussing” in the middle. These was no response from the KDP team. Various jaded community members took time out of their days to tell me that it was foolish to expect any improvements to the system. One helpful soul recommended that I send the same message to KDP tech support. I did. The response was a polite email thanking me for my input and assuring me that they would forward the message to the business unit. Time will tell.

With help from the designer and a glossy cover, the second-round proof copy looked great.

I still had two more designs to proof. Swapping in their cover and interior files one after the other would take weeks—possibly months if changes were required—before I would have all three in front of me to compare. I cheated by creating two new books with slightly different titles and KDP-supplied ISBNs. With the files uploaded for each, I ordered both as proof copies. In these cases, the covers and interiors were fine.

Proof of spines

Now there were three real-world copies of Raether’s Enzyme, each a unique embodiment of the story. The fruit of the dance with designers lay on my dining room table. I studied the covers under sunlight, LEDs, and the sky. Magical. Sophisticated. Electric. I paged through them all, weighing how each rendered the general text and played my various formatting games. A favorite emerged. A personal favorite. For a final final test, I met separately with two of my stalwart beta readers and asked for their impressions. Both preferred two of the designs. To my great relief, one of the two was my favorite. My marketing-savvy reader told me that an image should contain one, or at most two messages. He pointed to one of the proof copies and said that it had the most direct message. It was the design I had chosen based on the emotion in its cover and the way the design infused the interior. Sometimes marketing and personal taste converge.

The Bill-ion-aire, and the rest…

Amazon (via KDP) is a big market for independent authors. It is not the only market. I want Raether to available to as wide an audience as possible. Or at least as practical. Alexa will tell you that I’m quite fond of Amazon, but she doesn’t know that I like my local bookstores too and favor them when it comes to new books from my favorite authors. Readers enjoy their books on tablets, phones, laptops, desktops, and eReaders. They check out print books and e-books from their local libraries. Raether’s Enzyme should meet them where they want to read.

The self-publishing ecosystem makes this possible in numerous ways. After research and deliberation, I decided to split my non-Amazon betting by putting the print edition and the e-book into separate channels. Part of this was for eggs-and-baskets reasons. The other was to learn more about these channels for future projects.

Sparking Raether’s Enzyme

IngramSpark, that is. In many ways, IngramSpark is like KDP. Authors upload cover and content files. IngramSpark’s printing arm, Lightning Source, prints copies of the book on demand. KDP is a vertically integrated tentacle of the vast quasi-monopoly that is Amazon, who prints and sells the book. IngramSpark is part of Ingram Content Group, the largest book distributor and wholesaler in the United States. In that role, it is the ally, rather than adversary, of bookstores large and small. Adding your book to Ingram’s catalog makes it visible to your friendly neighborhood bookstore, Barnes & Noble, and your public library.

As in KDP, after your files are uploaded, IngramSpark guides you through setting the price of your book. This was my first real contact with life outside of the Amazon basin. I learned why paperback books cost what they do. To make money, bookstores need a wholesale discount. IngramSpark recommends 55% off the cover price. When I combined the price I had set for the paperback on KDP with the discount and the cost of production, Ingram calculated that my profit would be negative. I would owe for each copy sold. I needed to raise the list price by…a bit. To maintain the goodwill of the non-Amazon universe, my Amazon price would have to rise to match what I needed to charge to make things work with Ingram.

Bookstores very much want to be able to return unsold books for a refund. Margins are small. They need to manage the risk of stocking new authors. I understand and respect that. Tensile Press (which is me) can’t afford to be on the hook for a big return. Or a multitude of little ones. So, at the very real risk of Raether never appearing on a bookstore shelf, I opted out of offering a return policy.

Smashing all the words

The prospect of plugging into all myriad e-book stores daunted me. There are several outlets that will handle the multiplexing for you. I went with Smashwords. It has a good reputation and I have some pleasant memories of working with (what I think is) its founder, Mark Coker, back at Apple in the 1980s. When you upload to Smashwords, there’s little room for shillyshallying.  You’re either in the pipeline for immediate publication, or you’re available for pre-order. I freaked out. I hadn’t set a date in my mind, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t that day. I picked a release date a few weeks in the future. And I found a button on the dashboard to ‘unpublish’ the e-book. I clicked it.

Finger on the trigger

I sat there and asked myself, “If not then, when?” It was 2020. The murder hornets appeared here in Washington in the second act. Chekhov’s Gun required they be used before the curtain fell. Did I want to risk dying in whatever ether, cocaine, and peyote infused madness the 2020 writer’s room had in store without having published one book?

…………………Bang.

The answer was no. I republished on Smashwords with the original release date. I set the release date on IngramSpark. I set the (e-book) release date on KDP. The hammer struck the firing pin. The firing pin hit the primer. The powder began to burn. Raether’s Enzyme was on its way down the barrel and into the world.

Two days later an excited email arrived from one of my beta readers. Raether’s paperback edition was available for preorder on Amazon. After a moment of confusion, I realized that the IngramSpark had pushed the preorder to Amazon. As I write this, I’m working through Amazon’s support network to override that edition with the KDP version. Over the next few days, the e-book preorder surfaced on Apple’s bookstore. Print and e-book on Barnes & Noble. Kobo.

I am committing the quietest, softest, weakest book launch imaginable. I have flouted all the online guru’s advice for building interest. I haven’t sent advanced reader copies to influential book bloggers. I haven’t sought out the online communities where my (potential) audience dwells. I haven’t commissioned reviews to decorate the ad campaign I haven’t even planned. I haven’t raised an army of flying monkeys to trumpet the news to the far corners of Oz. My marketing-fu is rubbish.

Nonetheless, here it goes. There is much left to do before I can at least make an announcement via my limited social media.

Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

© 2024 Sean L Flynn

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑