This is a guest post by the wonderful Tara Sparling. Tara loves data and graphs, especially those relating to book marketing and sales. If you haven’t already done so, do visit her blog – just politely refuse any hot beverages she may offer you (sorry, inside joke).
Anyway, I had a bunch of lovely data on book ads, and wanted to do a post on them. So, I thought, who better help me out, than Tara? After all, who else describes data as GORGEOUS? I’ll bet she can do a number on them (heh heh, I kill me). And you know what? She sure did! If you don’t believe me, just read on. Take it, Tara!
Marketing your Indie Book – a Rough Nautical Map in a Sea of Advertising Options
They told me all I had to do was write the damn thing… now you tell me 80% of the work is yet to be done?
So you’ve published your book! Congratulations! All your hard work is now… beginning.
That’s right, folks: it’s time to sell your book. So roll back your sleeves, grab a sweatband, pull on the waders and let’s go into the murky waters of indie book advertising.
I got some lovely data from fantasy author and blogmate Nicholas C. Rossis, author of the dark epic fantasy Pearseus series featured in this data here. Nicholas has crunched some numbers beautifully in his own time – not least here, and here, and you should definitely go and have a look at them. Do that in a minute, though, once we’re done here, because seriously, folks, this data is only GORGEOUS.
Firstly, he had a comprehensive rundown of e-book advertising options which, although helpful, full of commentary and advice, mainly served to make me think… how the hell is any author supposed to know which options to choose? This is worse than standing in a betting shop, five minutes before a race. You have money in your pocket, but a limited amount of time in which to select a guaranteed winner, and the odds are not in your favour.
Thankfully, Nicholas has already tried and tested some options, and he’s made the results available to us. Now, I am first and foremost a data nerd, so I have put some notes at the end full of caveats and disclaimers and all sorts of things which, if not firmly stated, might muddy all this lovely data, so you have been warned.
November – Rise of the Prince
Firstly, let’s look at the November data, when Nicholas promoted one single title – Rise Of The Prince –the 1st in his Pearseus series, at a price of $0.99.
Here are the results. I’ve concentrated on 2 core metrics: the ratio of sales to advertising cost, and sales attributed to each advertising campaign.
First, let’s have a look at the cost of each ad campaign – some of which were run in tandem on certain days – in relation to the sales they actually pulled in.
As you can see, there is a pattern in November: meaning that on this single title, when the ad spend went up, so did book sales. Also, book sales, the blue line, maintains a healthy level above the ad cost, which is the only result which really matters.
Next up, is the cost and sales per advertising channel.
There’s a lot more data here, but broadly, the free marketing channels – Pixel of Ink and Facebook – pulled in some sales, in cases where any revenue at all was a bonus. The other channels covered themselves, but in the case of Book Goodies and Kindle Book Review, only just. As both Book Goodies and Kindle Book Review were run on the same dates, we don’t know which one of them was the better – or indeed only – performer.
December – Pearseus Bundle
Next up was December 2014, when Nicholas changed his game, and promoted a bundle – all 3 books in the Pearseus series, at a price of $1.99. Although more expensive than the usual single-book promo, bundles always sell better, because readers are usually getting a better deal: in this case, one book free on top of the already discounted single title rate.
My first thought on seeing this graph above was: All Bets Are Off. It doesn’t follow the November curve at all: revenues didn’t always outstrip the cost of the ads Nicholas ran. On December 7th, the ENT/Ebooksoda combo campaign made a loss, and on the 10th-13th, the Fussy Librarian/Kindle Book Review combo campaign lost out too.
However, as these dates were so close together, it’s tempting to conclude that perhaps an indie author shouldn’t try to advertise their books between the start of December and the weekend before Christmas (when his Book Gorilla campaign romped home with 80 unit sales).
See the cost and sales per advertiser as laid out below, but bear in mind that this might be date-dependent:
Conclusions
And so, although the sample size is tiny, making the science in this is so inexact as to damn near bring me out in a rash, I would make the following (hazy) conclusions:
- Bundles sell better. If you have more than 1 book, or a series, market them together. Give your readers a good deal.
- Spending on advertising in the first couple of weeks of December would not appear to be much use. Leave it until later on in the month, when early festivities have died down and people are already looking for diversion from their beloved families.
- Spend carefully, and in small increments. BookBub may be the behemoth in e-Book waters, but if you don’t yet know what you’re doing, is it really worth laying out $800+ for such services when you’re starting off? (Especially if you don’t yet know how readers react to the thumbnail image of your book cover?)
- If you have the time, and the inclination, run each ad campaign on a different date: it may make no difference to your sales, but it will allow you to judge how effective they are on an individual basis, so that you’re not throwing good money after bad on future dates for lame ducks.
So there you have it. Tenuous conclusions drawn on a limited pool of information which is nevertheless full of, as I said, GORGEOUS data. Did I mention I was a nerd?
Smallprint
… *and now, the boring notes to the accounts… I did warn you:
- Data relates to Nicholas C. Rossis’ dark epic fantasy titles in the Pearseus series. This may not be your genre or market.
- Some promotions were run on the same day or days and therefore are grouped together, meaning their results are mixed together.
- These results are from one point in time. A promotion run in March may have a very different outcome than one in November or July. Test these waters carefully.
And finally – good luck!
Who is Tara Sparkling, Again?
Except for being the object of my obvious crush (I mean, she loves hard data and PNG files – catnip to my inner nerd), Tara Sparling writes novels, short fiction and screenplays.
Originally from the west of Ireland, she now lives in Dublin. She spends all of her spare time with words – both writing them and reading them. This takes some of the harm out of the fact that her day job in finance is all about numbers: pushing them around, extracting meaning from them, and sometimes even insulting them.
Tara’s blog looks at best-selling book statistics, genre and thematic trends, literary and mathematical humour, also exploring the realities of traditional and self-publishing, marketing tips, bizarre success stories, and spectacular failures.
Thank you for creating your list of promotion sites. We’d really appreciate it if you’d check our service and add our site to your lists of useful resources.
We’re Books Butterfly and we do $0.99 book and free book promotions to our email lists of 125,000+ email subscribers. We have 128,888+ daily active readers across all our sites and blogs and lists.
Our Page for Paid Book Promotions
http://www.booksbutterfly.com/order/paidbookslots/?tag=op250_blogs_3_nicholasrossis
Our Page for Free Book Promotions http://www.booksbutterfly.com/order/?tag=op250_free_blogs_3_nicholasrossis
Books Butterfly
Where we promote: https://www.booksbutterfly.com/order/wherepromote/?tag=op250_nicholasrossis
Many thanks for the link. The post you’re referring to was comparing the relative success of my ads with certain promoters, but I’ll be sure to use your services and share my experience. In fact, I’m heading over there right away, as I’m having a free day promo in a week 🙂
Great post! Just a heads-up, though: it looks like the link to Tara’s blog needs fixing.
Thanks for pointing that out and welcome. Fixed 🙂
On a separate note, Little Drummer Boy is my wife’s favorite Christmas song, so…
Uh-oh. That doesn’t bode well for next holiday season, then. And I need to figure out how to get my WordPress.com profile to default to my author site (https://michaelalanpeck.com) rather than the LDBC blog, but there’s always a to-do list in this author thing of ours, isn’t there?
One that grows faster than even my ever-expanding-amazing-waistline, sadly 🙂
Really good information.
Thanks, John! 🙂
I’ve recently begun testing the paid ads promotion strategy on Facebook. So far, I’ve received mixed results.
My first ad only cost $5 and ran for 3 days. I only gained a few extra sales, it resulted in tremendous traffic & following of my author page, quite a few inbox inquiries which holds the possibility of gaining new clients (I’m also a Freelance Writer), as well as a few more WP followers, so I’d say that wasn’t a bad run for only $5.
The second one also ran for 3 days, but was the total opposite. I got practically no response from it; however, it was slightly different in nature than the first, so I altered the target audience settings a bit, so perhaps that had something to do with it things.
Nonetheless, I think paid ads can really be beneficial providing you stay within your budget, and you know how to hone in on your target audience.
That’s excellent information, thank you so much for sharing – and welcome! 🙂
Hi Tara,
Great to see you over at Nicholas’s blog! I liked the point you made bundles selling better. I have a bunch of ebooks that could be bundled, but I’ve never got around to doing it. I think I’ll start now. Thank you.
Thanks and welcome! 🙂
Hi Tara,
Great to see you over at Nicholas’s blog! I liked the point you made bundles selling better. I have a bunch of ebooks that could be bundled, but I’ve never got around to doing it. I think I’ll start now. Thank you.
Glad to be of help! Bundling is something the big hitters often talk about (David Gaughran has written a lot about the benefits of bundling) and it makes a lot of economic sense.
I think a lot of it also has to do with the fact that e-book readers tend to buy their books differently – if they find an author they like, they often want more of the same immediately. It would be very interesting to see how your bundling experience goes – you’ll have to come back and tell us!
That’s an interesting point, Tara. Physical bundles are a pain. I remember reading a blogger friend’s promise to herself, never to buy a bundle in physical form again, as the 1000+ pages made the book very hard to read. It’s funny how we can forget about physical limitations like this, caught up in our virtual worlds.
On an unrelated note, I sent you an email earlier and was wondering if you’ve seen it 🙂
Great set of statistics and some interesting points. Thanks for being brave enough to post your actual costs and profits.
Thanks! If you thought that was brave, you should read my A-Z on hitting #1, where I deconstruct what I did to do so (it’s under Marketing). 🙂
If you sign up to be an Amazon affiliate, then you can provide the affiliate link to one of the websites if you decide to run an ad simultaneously. Then you can track which one provided which sales.
That’s a very good tip, Fleur; thanks for sharing! Some ads don’t allow affiliate links, but a lot of them do, and it’s a great way of keeping track.
Great post. I love it when author/bloggers team up. I need to do something to promote my next release. This data is helpful.
Glad you found it useful 🙂
Interesting what you see while crunching numbers. Great work, Nicholas and Tara.
Thanks, Tess! 🙂
Interesting data!
Thanks, Sue! They’re pretty useful for traditionally-published authors, too 😉
Cracking post. Thanks. All I’ve learned from paid ads so far is that different things work for different books. I got a fine response from daily cheap reads and e reader news today but nothing from ebook soda too. Bk ights on fiver is good too.
Cheers
MTM
A number of people seem to have a so-so experience with ebook soda, but they were pretty good in my case. It’s probably as Catherine said; the sample is too small. And like you said, different things seem to work for different books. Still, I hope it offered a useful glimpse into the various trends 🙂
Lol, that’s alot of data but not too sure on the conclusions – your sample pool was a little too small (that is according to my research lecturer last year and he would definitely have said you need a bigger sample) 🙂 But speaking from a long-time bookworm perspective and having a small amount of extra cash per week, purchasing books as a bundle makes a lot of sense. Buying Pearseus as a bundle made sound economical sense to me rather than buying the books in their separate format; bottom-line is the fact that I only have a small amount of money to spend on my book passion hence buying bundles is good.
Hi Catherine, I agree with you – I was careful to point out that the sample size is very small. The point really is that any data at all is valuable in a field where there has been, to date, little or no data available at all.
Conclusions are, as I stated, tenuous, but it’s the best we’re going to get without data samples from all the major genres, in each month of the year, over a number of years – and it’s going to be a long number of them before we get that!
Lol – you and your lecturer are absolutely correct, as Tara has already mentioned. I’d need to have run the ads at least 30 times before they reached any sort of statistical importance. However, I think they do offer a good idea of the trends involved – like the bundle making economical sense, for example. 🙂
Thanks for posting, Nicholas, and for the data in the first place. Now that it’s up, all I can see are more potential patterns begging to be explored. Agony!
Your finger is twitching, dear. And that’s a strange twinkle in your eye. Best if I take a step back.
Thanks for posting, Nicholas. I’ve read about promotions before on The Fussy Librarian as well as the others, but it’s nice to have a culmination of all of them on a graph, along with the months they were used. Seeing this visually puts it into a measurable perspective for me. This is very useful information to have. 🙂
So glad to hear it – and welcome 🙂