ADVERTISING DIARY

Spurred on by success of a fellow author in my genre I have decided to give Facebook ads another try. The plan is to see if I can make a £5 per day advertising campaign on Facebook for my zombie books generate a profit, or at least pay for itself. I’ve chosen the amount based on what I can reasonably spend without getting too stressed out by the ad’s performance. In effect I have told myself that I will run the ads for a month and if I lose the £150 then it’s not the end of the world.

I produced the ad on Saturday and sent it off for approval. It went live on Monday morning. My sales are pretty low at the moment so it will be easy to keep track of the ads performance and I plan to keep a diary of how things are going right here on the blog. Perhaps at a later date this will appear in a new edition of my publishing book.

Along with consideration of the advert itself, the text, the headline and the image, I’m testing the price point. Currently IN THE END is set at £3.99, as are the other two books in the series. The lower the price, the more sales I will get, but I want to see if my copy and reviews etc are good enough to sell at this price.

Day One – Monday 3rd April

One of my long-term fans left a very lovely comment on the ad without being asked, that means the ad is getting to the right people and the comment is great social proof for those seeing the advert.

Here’s how the stats looked after the first day, and remember these things always take a little while to get going.

Post likes and comments – 3 likes. 1 comment. (Any negative comments will be deleted).

Frequency – 1.09 (The number of times someone is shown the ad on average)

Link Clicks – 82

Spend to date – £7.31

Accredited Amazon sales – 0 (Sales I put down to directly due to the campaign)

Accredited Audiobook sales – 0

Accredited Kindle Unlimited page reads – 0

Stress level – 6 (Scale of 1-10 indicated the level of stress the ad is producing. 1 being asleep. 10 is near heart failure)

It’s difficult to comment at this stage as some of the sales figures will be delayed. I’m already thinking how long I’ll leave it before I drop the price.

Day Two – Tuesday 4th April

Post likes and comments – 9 likes. 2 comments.

Frequency – 1.16

Link Clicks – 152

Spend to date – £11.29

Accredited Amazon sales – 1 (+1)

Accredited Audiobook sales – 0

Accredited Kindle Unlimited page reads – 0 (I did have a small amount of page reads from IN THE END, but they are in the normal range.)

Accredited sales – £2.70 (-£8.59)

Stress level – 5 (My first sale accredited to the ad has helped lower the stress level)

Day Three – Wednesday 5th April

Post likes and comments – 13 likes. 2 comments.

Frequency – 1.24

Link Clicks – 234

Spend to date – £16.57

Accredited Amazon sales – 2 (+1)

Accredited Audiobook sales – 3 (+3)

Accredited Kindle Unlimited page reads – 0 (I did have a small amount of page reads from IN THE END, but they are in the normal range.)

Accredited sales – £15.30 (-£1.27 profit)

Stress level – 3

I hadn’t thought about increased sales of the second and third books in the series as a consequence of advertising. IN THE END is very widely read in the community and it makes sense that many people haven’t read the subsequent books as they either weren’t released at the time or they didn’t realise there were other books for some reason. If those books have a significant uptake I’ll start including them too. The same is also true of the novella for series. This is on sale for 99p/99c so it makes sense that people may choose to try that first.

I’m very pleased with the way this is progressing, to be only at a small loss at this stage is a very positive result, especially considering the cost I note each day includes some of the costs for today, whereas the additional sales are for yesterday.

Day Four – Thursday 6th April

Post likes and comments – 15 likes. 3 comments. The comments are all from people who have read the books already.

Frequency – 1.34

Link Clicks – 328

Spend to date – £21.89

Accredited Amazon sales – 2 (+0)

Accredited Audiobook sales – 3 (+0)

Accredited Kindle Unlimited page reads – 0 (Small amount of page reads from IN THE END, but they are in the normal range.)

Accredited sales – £15.30 (-£6.46 profit)

Stress level – 4

I sold a novella but it’s difficult to pin this down to the ad so I’ll leave it off.

After a great day yesterday for sales, it was a dismal day on Thursday. I wonder how the bank holiday weekend will effect things.

WORK IN PROGRESS

Harm’s Way Audiobook – The production of this short audiobook is complete and it’s going through the approval process with Findaway Voices and once that’s done I really should decide what I’m going to do with it. I really enjoyed rediscovering the story again.

Out of the Blue Audiobook – This production is now ready for me to listen to and sign off.

A new non-fiction book – One of my latest ideas is to write more non-fiction books that I can sell to a wide audience on my stall. I’m come up with one idea and I’m just putting some detail to it before I do a big reveal of what it’s all about.

Their Right To Vengeance – I continue to edit this at pace and I’m about 40% of the way through with the manuscript sitting at 106,000 words. Not much more to be said other than it’s coming along nicely!

FUTURE PROJECTS

I’m thinking about future projects with the aim to try new things out. I read very widely and I love the idea of trying something new. I asked in my main Facebook group for some suggestions of a new genre to write in now I’m holding a vote of the most suggested ones, promising that I’d write at least a short story in that mixed the two chosen genres. It looks like it’s going to be a time travelling sci-fi adventure. I’ve always had a soft spot for time travelling fiction so I think I’m going to enjoy this.

That’s it for this week. I hope you all enjoy your long weekend!