Writers in the Storm

A blog about writing

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October 18, 2024

Marketing, I Didn’t Hate You Enough – One Author’s Journey

Cover photo keyboard for writing plus sign about marketing

By Piper Bayard

Some of you may recall my previous article where I explored some of the challenges of book marketing and announced that I was going to seek professional help. I would love to come back to you now and tell you that I found the perfect arrangement that led to phenomenal sales without me having to create one more ad on some program that changed its format yesterday, causing me to spend hours I didn’t have trying to figure out the update. However, I only tell you the truth.

What I found was that I didn’t hate marketing enough. I’m sharing my journey, hoping you can benefit from my experience. I also want to learn from the WITS hive mind down in the comments.

What did I buy?

I got the whole package from my professional media company:

  • Amazon Ads
  • Book Bub Ad
  • Pimping to Reviewers
  • Goodreads Giveaway
  • Blog Tours
  • Coaching

Biggest Lesson: The Cost of an Advertising Campaign Is Not the Cost of the Advertising Campaign

I basically bought all the bells and whistles. It cost around $7500 up front. However, that price was not actually the price for the campaign. Let me explain...

The Amazon Hustle

Cow image created from dollar signs signifying "cash cow"

Hiring someone to do our Amazon ads is not the same thing as buying the Amazon ads.

Amazon ads are designed to make money for Amazon, and not necessarily to make money for us. We are just the cash cows to be milked by Amazon, especially because Amazon is literally in competition with us with its own publishing endeavors.

The pros set up three Amazon ads for me on the same book to run concurrently.

One was Automatic, meaning Amazon algorithms determined where it would appear. The second was based on Keywords, which appear according to the search terms shoppers type in. The third was an ad targeted at Products, and it appeared to potential customers based on their searches for other people’s books.

The real hook of Amazon ads is that Amazon only charges for clicks.

In other words, Amazon shows the ad far and wide, but authors are only charged if someone clicks on the ad. Sounds great, right?

The amount an author is charged, called a “bid,” varies and can be set by the author. However, Amazon algorithms make recommendations for bid amounts that can vary from a few cents to a few dollars per click. In my experience, if an author strays too far below the recommended bid, the ads simply don’t get seen. Bids were frequently over $1 and even over $2 per click for my Bayard & Holmes thrillers.

Authors can set daily limits on the ad spend, but $20/day was recommended by the pros. Those charges were in addition to the money spent on the ad campaign.

The pros said it takes around seven impressions before most people click on an item.

It can then take more than one click to sell a book. One advertising pro told me that one sale for every three clicks is an excellent rate.

Amazon keeps a tally in the campaign account online of how much money was spent on ads and how many sales were produced. If an author pays for three clicks at $1.52 per click and makes one sale, the record will show $4.56 spend and $12.99 in sales. Yay! Making money! . . . It looks great on the page and inspires people to create more ads and spend more money. 

However, it’s entirely likely that each book sold makes much less in royalties than it cost to pay for the three clicks it took to sell it. Add to that the fact that almost always, authors put their books on sale for ad campaigns (I did), and every three-click sale loses even more money. As a result, running the three ads cost me an additional $650/month above any return. 

What did the pros have to say about this? They said that the only way to change this trend is to keep those ads running and make sure the keywords are updated regularly. They were happy to provide that service for me for another $400/month if I so chose.

In Summary 

Look closely at Amazon ads and make sure you are not spending more to sell a book than you will make in royalties, or that if you are, you’re doing it with a reasonable expectation that things are going to turn around before you go bankrupt.

Review and Promotional Copies

Another added expense of a campaign are the review copies and promotional copies for giveaways. The reviewers that I met almost always wanted hard copy.

Author copies take a solid ten days to two weeks to arrive. If you’re like me, you like to strike while the iron is hot so occasionally I sprang for retail copies of the things I didn’t have on hand already. Books I had on hand to send cost the price of the author copy plus the cost of postage. By the time I got royalties back for the retail books, sending them was around the same cost as buying and shipping the author copy. That was true even if the author copy was sent directly.

Do that fifteen or twenty times, and there goes another $200.

Reviewers

Friends toasting a book review
Terrific New Reviewer Friends

An option the pros gave me was to hire a paid reviewer. I was willing to try everything so I did. In my case, this was a total waste of money. I don’t think he even read the book. He wrote it up on his website, which I can’t tell that anyone reads, and he put about three sentences over on Amazon for me. That’s it. Definitely do not recommend that!

One positive experience with reviewers, though, was that I met several reviewers who do not charge and who have excellent websites. I have made friends with a few of them, and I look forward to working with them in the future.

Goodreads

The pros set up a Goodreads account for me and put my books up for a giveaway. They also provided me with how-to instructions to continue engagement and build an audience.

The giveaway was successful in that I had a few thousand people enter. It’s on me, though, that I did not continue Goodreads engagement so I cannot speak to how that would have turned out over time. I would love to hear what your experiences are with Goodreads.

BookBub

The pros ran a BookBub ad for me that garnered more than 54,000 impressions and rendered exactly nothing.

I spoke with a couple renowned indie authors I know, and they told me that BookBub is very hit and miss these days. Some had had the same experience as me, even though they had experienced great success with BookBub ads in the past. Do with that what you will.

Blog Tours

The pros also set me up with several bloggers who ran either articles or interviews. Blog comments are down everywhere, so I could not tell that these appearances amounted to much for me or anyone else. These days, the real action seems to be over at Substack.

Person jumping off a high platform
Author After Seeing Post-Advertising Bank Account

As far as I can tell, there is no way for an indie author to hire their way out of spending substantial time and money on marketing. The pros say that "it’s a long game," and they aren’t kidding.

My best advice after my dance with the marketing pros is to first be clear with the fact that while writing is an art, publishing is a business, and businesses take time and money for marketing. The extra twist to the business of publishing is that successful marketing tactics change faster than the weather in the Rockies. What works brilliantly this month might not work at all in another six months.

The pros can definitely help get things started and point us in the right direction at a steep cost, but unless there’s a trust fund to throw down what is potentially a black hole, the bulk of marketing work is still on us authors. There must be ways to do it, but as best I can tell so far, successful marketing is a second full-time job no matter how great the books.

Best of luck, my fellow writers. If any of you hit on the magic marketing formula that makes authors "J.K. Rowling Rich," please do share.

Questions for the WITS hive mind:  What marketing efforts work for you? Does anything work consistently? Has anything worked in the past that no longer works now? Do you see any upcoming trends? Please share your valuable tips in the comments.

* * * * * *

About Piper

Bayard and Holmes, author picture

Piper Bayard and Jay Holmes of Bayard & Holmes are the authors of espionage tomes and international spy thrillers. Please visit Piper and Jay at their site, BayardandHolmes.com. For notices of their upcoming releases, subscribe to the Bayard & Holmes Covert Briefing. You can also contact Bayard & Holmes at their Contact page, on Twitter at @piperbayard, on Facebook at Piper Bayard, or at their email, BayardandHolmes@protonmail.com.

Though crafted with advice and specific tips for writers, SPYCRAFT: Essentials is for anyone who wants to learn more about the inner workings of the Shadow World.

“For any author, this is the new bible for crafting stories of espionage.”

~ James Rollins, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Demon Crown

Spycraft: Essentials book cover

All post photos purchased from DepositPhotos by the author.

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30 comments on “Marketing, I Didn’t Hate You Enough – One Author’s Journey”

  1. wow, thank you for this post. It shows what a money spinner we indie authors are for other people. I wish you all the luck in the world, me...I'm on the hunt for a good agent trying the traditional way to see if that makes a difference.

  2. Hi Piper,

    I can recommend Readers' Favorite for book reviews. They did a wonderful job for each of the books I sent. It's been a while, but as I recall I sent a doc.x to them. https://readersfavorite.com/book-reviews.htm

    I've tried Amazon ads to little success, but could just be me. I may not have given them enough time.

    I do have a good feeling about Substack and plan to learn how best to use it, but not until next year.

    Marketing is definitely a long game.

    Indie author Dharma Kelleher is one person I know who seems to have been able to figure it out. You might have a look at her website.

    Best of luck to us all, and thank you for this post.

  3. What you describe is what I've experienced too.
    Daily Facebook posts cost nothing. I enjoy creating them. If I get sales from that, bonus. I don't know if that is the case. At least I have created an online presence.

  4. I loved your comment that Substack seems to be working. I've been noticing that. Having spent a lot of time in conversations with indie publishers about advertising, I can agree with everything you said. I recently tried an advertising experiment. While it wasn't as expensive as yours, it was fascinating in that the books I expected to do well didn't. One that is a great seller, actually did WORSE with the new plan than others. Meanwhile, one that has never done well suddenly started performing really well. While I wouldn't say the return is positive based on spend, I did extend it for another month to see what happens.

    There are some classes on how to do Amazon ads that are free periodically. I can attest that they do work, but not at the positive return level most of the time.

    They're right that it takes 7 or more exposures, and it works best if those exposures are on different platforms. (Seeing ads different places, reading reviews on blogs they follow, etc.) And one thing that one advertiser mentioned to me is that getting DATA on these types of things is key.

    So lets say you get a lot of eyeballs on your Amazon page and very few conversions. You can look at things like your cover and blurb, and existing reviews. Then also look at your genre and your ad. Is your ad attracting the right readers? Is your page converting for the right readers? If things like that are not in alignment then the sale may not happen. So taking data and tweaking the sales page can help. Don't know if your marketing pros had suggestions on that.

    If they didn't - you might want to ask them what the data showed.

    Last thing I've discovered: not enough reviews is a problem for one of my books. I'm getting the right people to the right page and it is starting to convert - FINALLY - but now I need more reviews to increase the percentage of sales.

    I totally agree: marketing is a PAIN.

  5. I love that you shared the medium, the ugly, and the truly crappy here. Authors need to share the money info, in addition to the writing craft, so we can help spread the word about the realities of being a writer. Maybe your experience will help someone else pivot in a different direction.

    I think some people see this profession as a competition, rather than a "co-opetition." A competition means, "if you win I lose." Whereas "co-opetition" means, "let's try to make sure we all win by lifting each other up."

  6. Also, y'all, WordPress is preventing nested comments at the moment, so definitely scroll down. When you leave a comment in response to someone, maybe put their name at the beginning, like so:

    @VM - That's good to know. I don't think there IS a magical formula...just little pieces of knowledge that people share that help a bit.

    [And yes, I know it is a colossal pain. We're looking for the loophole (aka the fix) right now. It's like being back in Blogger days.]

  7. Terrific post. I appreciate your insightful rundown of what you went through.

    Marketing is challenging, especially now. When I started out in January 2017, publishing my first urban fantasy novel into Kindle Unlimited, I leaned hard on the promo newsletters which worked for a few months, as well as building up my own newsletter with a prequel reader magnet. After going wide later that year, I released a box set in early 2018 o the first three novels, set it to 99 cents, and ended up getting several Book Bub Featured Deals for it over the next few years which made all the difference. In early 2020 that first book was part of a multi-author boxed set that was released as free and that led to great sales that year.

    I moved from fantasy to mystery toward the end of 2020 and it took time and a lot of effort to produce my first mystery, released in April 2023, followed by a second this year. I'm now working on a third. I have a mystery newsletter, but until that third book is out, I don't feel like I can market the series, so sales are very sporadic. Patience is hard, but called for.

  8. I have a PR and marketing background but that doesn't make my book marketing any more effective than the average person's, just slightly less painful to put together! I agree with everything you wrote. In marketing, we groan and say, "Half of my marketing budget works great. If only I knew which half..."

  9. Piper, THANK YOU for posting all this! I frequently proselytize to authors the necessity of being an informed consumer in goods/services they buy (which are so rampantly marketed to them now). Your post is valuable in showing why and I'll be sharing in my newsletter for authors.

    I wish you good luck with your book, and all your writing!

  10. It is easy for MONEY to go fast with these services, and they all specifically do not guarantee results.

    The ROI (return on investment) can be very bad (MONEY is attracted to black holes - I'm a physicist, and this is true).

    The only solution is to go viral and be ready to ride the wave. I'll let everyone know, after I've figured that out and maxed out my earnings! Promise!

    Marketing properly requires a whole lot of time and energy ABOVE what is required to write, get covers, format, publish... I have zero. Be warned: it's going to be a while. Good thing I'm an optimist.

  11. S.M. Stevens: Ha! What a great saying. You saying that your own PR and marketing background doesn't make book marketing any easier reminds me of something a fellow attorney told me shortly after I graduated law school. "I became a lawyer to learn how to not get screwed. Instead, I still get screwed, but now I know HOW I'm getting screwed."

  12. Dale Ivan Smith: Thank you so much for sharing your journey. Sounds like you've found a few things that are working for you. Good luck with that mystery series. May your muse be generous!

  13. Lisa Norman: Thanks so much for sharing your experience. The pros were supposed to be eyeballing the data and tweaking the sales accordingly. They did do a bit of that, but no amount of tweaking put me into profits, and they really couldn't tell me if it ever would.

    Which book do you need reviews on? I'll go look it up. 🙂

  14. Ellen Buikema: Thanks so much for sharing your experience and your recommendations of Readers' Favorite and Dharma Kelleher's site. Will definitely check them out. . . . Indeed. Best of luck to all of us!

  15. Here's something new! Shepherd.com This is a website for authors to showcase their books. I just joined, put my new book release, Draakensky, on it. They have a marketing tactic for readers shopping for books by using book lists. It's free to join and post your book. They had 5 million visitors last year. Check out the "For Authors" section on their website for the details. Or type my name Paula Cappa into the search bar and see how they present me as an author and my book to readers.

    Piper, I've done all you have mentioned with moderate success. A blog about reading, stories, novels, etc. helps considerably. On my Reading Fiction Blog I get 40 to 60 views a day and that attracts readers in my genre to my blog/website, and yes some of that turns into sales. Good luck to everyone here!

  16. The whole marketing game is rigged /against/ us. Just like in the goldrushes of earlier times. Thousands, nay, millions of hopefuls suffer enormous privations in the hope of making it big. Most get next to nothing. The only exceptions to this are the merchants who supplied the hopefuls at outrageous prices because they were the only game in town.

    Amazon, Bookbub, D2D, and all the professional marketers who provide 'advice' are the merchants at the gold fields. We are the diggers.

    For myself, I've found that blogging and become part of this community on WordPress is the ONLY thing that has made sense to me. I don't sell many books, but I've made a bucket load of wonderful friends. Gold doesn't always glitter. 🙂

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