I can’t tell you how many times over the last month that I’ve had this thought. It started immediately after publication. For the first week, I had a huge to-do list. I worked diligently trying different things and working through the checklist. The book was climbing up the rankings, but I was not quite achieving the results I hoped for.
So now what?
As a part of this process, I am learning to take action. It may be blind action, but it is action. If something isn’t working, I am going to try something else. I will try to identify what I don’t know and find out how I can learn it. That’s the theory anyway.
More actions taken
Here’s some things I did towards the end of the first week and beginning of the second week:
1. Joined Canva: https://www.canva.com. This site is great for creating your own book promo artwork, and is very fun to play around with. Best of all, there is a lot you can do for free. I ended up signing up for the paid plan, because I think I will use it a lot.
2. InVideo – I found from my Facebook campaign that my original video was a bit long, so I made a shorter one.
3. BookBub – see below.
Bookbub
If you are a previously published author, or even a voracious reader, you probably know about Bookbub. https://www.bookbub.com/welcome Bookbub is basically a site with a huge mailing list that I assume ranges in the millions, that publishers use to promote discounts and promotions. It costs quite a lot of money (around $800 for the USA, I think) and you have to apply to get selected.
I applied for a promotion to coincide with my blog tour in November. I was willing to shell out the money, because Bookbubs can sometimes get your book into the top 200 overall on a particular promo day. I’ve had this happen before with my other books.
Unfortunately, the book was rejected for a promo. I don’t exactly know why, but I think it’s because my book is exclusively on KDP, and I didn’t have enough reviews at the time. So I was a little disappointed, but you can re-apply every month. (Note to self to do this for October).
The other thing you can do on Bookbub is run Bookbub ads.
Bookbub ads
These ads sit at the bottom of the daily promo mailing that gets sent to the phones and emails of thousands or millions of readers each day. You can target specific authors, and it seems like a great place to advertise. I did a Bookbub ad in the past for Moonlight on the Thames, and it did get some clicks, though I found the results a little disappointing.
I set up a Bookbub ad for My Secret Sister. Again I had high hopes, but again I was disappointed with the results. I really don’t know why this hasn’t worked well. I might ask around to see what results other authors have had. The one positive was that I had so few clicks that it was very cheap! (OK, this is not a good thing.)
Lessons learned:
Keep taking action to achieve better results
Bookbub seems like a great advertising platform. A Bookbub promo is costly, but can be well worth the money. Bookbub ads should be really good too, but I haven’t had a good conversion rate with them.
Comments