The First Week
The first week post-publication, I had a huge to-do list (a month on, I still do). I wanted to publicize the book, get reviews, get up the rankings – I wanted results, but I wasn’t sure exactly how to achieve them.
The basic strategy
I got to work – learning marketing and publicity became my main writing focus. My strategy was to try to use the first month to push the book up the rankings, then use the second month to start optimizing (basically bringing down the advertising spend) and then the third month, hopefully there would be reviews and the blog tour and I’d be ready to make another big push.
I am writing this at the end of month one. But going back to the beginning, what did I do?
I’ve already mentioned the courses I’d been taking on Udemy. I spent a lot of time watching and rewatching expert videos, trying to learn strategies. I started an amazon ads campaign (more later), and a Facebook campaign.
Facebook ads
If you are frightened and repulsed by the idea of advertising, look away now. I am not intrinsically interested in advertising, but I wanted to do everything I could to promote my book.
Facebook makes it pretty simple to get started with ads. I had dabbled in the past with some boosted posts and even some traffic ads campaigns for my book Moonlight on the Thames back in 2018. So I wasn’t coming to the table with absolutely no experience – but the next closest thing to it.
Still, in my gung-ho manner, I started a new ad campaign and used one of my InVideo videos that I’d made as the graphic. I targeted every woman and her dog in the USA and UK. (OK not literally.)
I won’t go into great detail on targeting, because frankly, I’m not qualified to do so. Let’s just say that for Audience, you can select things like age, gender, and location, and then narrow the field with ‘Interests’. (Yes, frighteningly, Facebook knows if you’ve been sleeping, it knows if you’re awake, it knows if you watched Big Little Lies on HBO or are a fan of The Handmaid’s Tale – so be good for goodness sake!) Basically, all that stuff you put on your Facebook profile thinking it’s for your friends… Facebook uses it to target you for ads.
I thought I was making a pretty narrow audience by selecting people who were interested in particular comparable authors and genres. I still got a whomping potential reach of like 60 million or something. In the back of my mind, I knew I’d be better off with an audience below 1 million. But I marched ahead anyway and started my ad.
And it did help. I am getting clicks. I am even getting the odd share and like. If you are a rocket scientist or an e-marketing guru, you probably know that it’s possible to use something called a pixel to track who clicks on your link and if they buy or not. I gamely set up my pixel on my website, but that’s about as far as I’ve got. That sort of thing does my head in.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I’m still running my Facebook ads with a cap of £10 per day. It’s not going to set the world on fire, or break the bank either.
I will get back to tweaking my Facebook campaign, but I just haven’t had time yet.
In an ideal world, I would also tell you about my A/B test on my two videos, my really annoying call with Facebook that lasted 2 hours, and also what I learned on Alex Genadinik’s Facebook marketing course. Let’s just say for now that I’m targeting way too broad. The advice is to run multiple ad sets that literally just target one small interest group. Then, you get much more accurate data on who is responding to your ad. Then, you can retarget them and/or create a lookalike audience (another thing that is totally beyond me at the moment). I plan on learning all this stuff when I settle in with a Facebook ad for the long term, but for now, I have bigger ships to keep from sinking.
Which is kind of a warm-up for…
Amazon Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising.
Warning – not for the faint of heart.
Facebook ads lessons learned:
It is best to run multiple ads that are very narrowly targeted to gather more accurate data.
It is possible for people who know this stuff to ‘retarget’ people who click on a particular link.
If words like ‘Facebook pixel’ and ‘lookalike audience’ give you apoplexy, you don’t have to do it. You can still get clicks and promote your books, just less efficiently than people who do this as their bread and butter.
Facebook knows more than you do about who to show your ad to, but it takes the algorithm time to learn. Keep your caps low at least at the start.
You can run ads from your page, but it’s best to set them up from Facebook Business Manager. (All the marketing gurus say this.) If you survive your first campaign and want to start others, it’s best to keep track of them in the same place. I personally don’t like Business Manager, but I have started using it.
You can set up different A/B tests to compare different ads and audiences. Unfortunately, that’s about the extent of my knowledge on that topic.