So, I’ve been running a 99-cent promotion on The Nav Computer to find out how Facebook Ads work. The reason for choosing that particular book out of the set of 5 Daphne books is that it had zero ratings on it. It takes about 100 sales to get one rating, so I expect to get maybe one rate before the sale ends on Friday (January 13th). I’ve also tested two different Ad images to see how they perform, though one Ad image was started before the other (Next time I’m going to start three images at one time).
Learning how to use the Facebook Ad center and Ad Manager has made this experiment worth the money that I sunk into (It was a minor amount anyway). So far my campaign has had almost 8,000 impressions which translated into 458 clicks at about 14 cents a click. The total sales have been at 49 so far. Not enough to beat the averages for getting one review, but it’s getting there. Also, the sales are for all books, some buyers purchased more than one book (they bought Stolen Property, Supercomputer, and Novis Terminal – Thanks). 42 of those sales were of The Nav Computer.
There was one other tweak I did today that had nothing to do with the Facebook Ad, but I want to see how it helps the click/purchase ratio. I modified the book blurb on the Amazon page. The original blurb was two sentences, which was a tiny blurb. So, I noodled on it for some time last night and today (after several rounds of wordsmithing), I updated the book page. I suspect that will help increase the number of sales per click. But who knows? Up until today, I’ve been getting around 11 clicks per sale. If the number of clicks decreases for each sale, then I know that I really need to work on my blurbs (I know I need to polish them anyway, this will just confirm it).
So far, I have some data to work with. By the end of the week, when the sale concludes, I’ll have enough data to crunch some numbers and see what’s going on. After that, I’ll set up a long-term Ad that will advertise the books and link to the first one that is shown by Amazon.
The Ordering Problem/Other book sets
The set of 5 (so far) books are listed by Amazon in the order that I published them in. I set the group to unordered, but Amazon still treats them like they are an ordered set of books. If you’re worried about reading them out of order, it’s perfectly OK. There are trivial references between books, but it’s rare and each story is self-contained. These are the only books I’ve written specifically that way. Other book sets that I’ve written or am currently working on are tightly coupled and must be read in order. The latest book series that I published is Desperate Action (the first book of The Traveler Series). In case you’re interested in that book, it’s on sale until sometime in February at 99 cents. I’m not running Amazon Ads for that yet (I’m driving traffic to that book from another Ad service).
The next book I’ll be publishing is The Demons (from the Escape from the Abyss series). This is my most ambitious book and most complicated series. When that hits the street, it’ll be offered at a 99-cent introductory price too. If you want to make sure that you don’t miss out, sign up for my email list and you’ll be guaranteed to be notified of the sale when it comes out.
Facebook Ads
Apparently, Facebook Ads work best for the Daphne Blazefire series and I anticipate that I’ll be testing all of my books using Facebook Ads. That seems to be where my readers are located. I was amazed that there was such a difference since I had good luck with Amazon Ads for the MacKenzie Steele series of books. Maybe the Amazon algorithms have changed and I no longer get the eyeballs that I used to get. It could also be any number of factors, though I’ve been experimenting with different Amazon Ad settings for the Daphne set since the first book was released. Nothing seems to work with those books. They seem to get ignored by Amazon customers.
Another change coming is that I’ve switched from Amazon exclusive to wide. What that means is that all of my books will soon be available on Kobo as well as dozens of other locations for sale.
I’ll report my findings of this experiment at the end of the week when I crunch the numbers.