The Demons
I thought I would start this post by talking about my progress on The Demons. I am still about 15k words of re-reading and editing before I catch up to where I left off on the rough draft. I have MLK day off (since I work for a credit union), so I have big plans for tomorrow. I will be getting up early in the morning and working on The Demons all day. I’ve put a few hours into it today and I’m still working on it right now. I still have some tweaks to do to the temple drawings to wrap up the Tome.
I also have some edits I need to make to Daphne, the free giveaway book.
Desperate Action
Desperate Action has a few reviews already and it appears that readers like that book more than the first Daphne Blazefire book. I feel that it’s an accurate assessment (for both books). The first Daphne book was written around January of last year before I took Dean Westly Smith’s depth series. That knowledge has made a huge difference in my writing and you can see it in the comments on Desperate Action. The Daphne series was a good learning and practice set of books. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still good books, but my craft has improved over time, which is directly related to writing those books. Practice is important.
There is a special going on with Desperate Action where it will be 99 cents for some time. When the number of reviews is satisfactory, I’ll set the book price back to normal (which will probably be in February or March). It’s going to be a good series. Earth is messed up. The human race is messed up. It’s bad. Real bad. By the end of the first book, you should get the feeling that there is only a tiny chance that things can be salvaged. That’s what makes the story so exciting. How are they going to pull it off? Well, you’re never going to find out by reading my posts!
I know, I’m such a savage.
Facebook Ads
I should have titled this section “Why didn’t I try Facebook Ads sooner?” I can’t believe how much more traction I got from a Facebook Ad. I can’t get a click from my Amazon Ads for the Daphne Blazefire series no matter how high I raise my bid price. I know part of the problem was due to the fact that the audience for that book hasn’t discovered it yet.
I started the Ad with a limit of $5 a day. The number of clicks maxed that out within a day, so I upped it to $10. Then, a day later and I put it up to $25. I ran that for a few days and had to increase it to $50. Finally, I put it at $100 a day for the last two days. The sales poured in on the first day and they ramped up nicely as I increased the Ad spend. Writers always talk about how Facebook Ads are easy to scale and they were not kidding. If I had left the book at 99 cents and just ran the Ads, I know I could easily double or triple my daily spend amount and get more sales. The clicks maxed out on the last day, so I could have done more than $100 per day. Unfortunately, the clicks per sale were at 9.5. Since the cost per click varied between 13 cents to 26 cents (the price goes up as you increase the Ad spend because Facebook starts targeting more competitive sale times), that means that the price per book for advertising comes out to $1.23 to $2.50. At a price of 99 cents, I only get 35 cents per book. I’m OK with losing some money to get a rating or two or to get purchases of other books.
I did manage to get other sales. For every 100 books I sold at a loss, I received purchases of 22 other books at full price. That would be $111 for total sales (assuming the read-through numbers stay constant), with an Ad spend of…between $124 to $247.
Yeah, not profitable.
So, not going to set the first book to 99 cents and try to run an Ad campaign that way. I will probably set up an Ad for each book (since they’re a chronology) and try a campaign with all books at full price. I can run that for a couple of weeks and determine if they’ll make money. Technically, if the clicks-to-purchase ratio stays the same, then I can still make money, even if the Ad spend comes out to $2.50 per book. At 70% royalties, each book earns $3.46. Another tactic is to advertise only the first book, then keep my fingers crossed for a good read-through. I have to decide if I want to advertise for this series or not. I might just leave them in the backlog and move on.
Reviews
I managed to get one review and one rating from this experiment. The rating was a 5-star, so someone liked The Nav Computer. The review was a 2-star with a complaint about depth. Yup, probably a legitimate complaint, since I didn’t learn about the technique until the completion of the last Daphne book. Then again, the 2-star reader might not be the audience for that series. The series was targeted toward young adults, so I watered down a lot of the complexity to keep the story from getting into sticky subjects. Another weakness is that I have two main characters (though I added several throughout the series) to keep the plot simpler. Chalk it up to a learning experience.
On one hand, I’d like to rewrite the books and see how they perform (I bet if I re-read the first book, I’d cringe). Rewriting books, however, is not a good strategy, since I could still end up with a lame duck. Now that I’ve confirmed that the series is a bust, I can move on to The Traveler and Escape from the Abyss. The Traveler series is looking good already. The lesson I learned from Daphne Blazefire is that I need to let the first book sell and get reviews before producing the second book. I’m not going to worry about the Amazon algorithm drop-offs. I’m done with producing the second or third book of a series before the first one receives reviews. If the first book fails, then I can save myself a lot of wasted time. Time that I can put into a more successful series.
I’m still going to finish Daphne because it’s almost done and I promised it to my readers. Someday, the right audience may come by and get attached to the series. Who knows?