Only two weeks left on the Unbroken campaign. The results thus far have been promising. I sold more books last month than I did for any other month for all of last year. The final total isn’t in, but it was close to 100 books. Once again eBooks out sold print. How much of this was attributed to the holidays as opposed to my marketing efforts is hard to say. What I did notice was more sales from outlets like the B&N Nook and Sony eReaders. Now I know that there are some who will say big deal. So you sold a hundred books. The book Unbroken probably has that many sales every hour. Well, I don’t have the benefit of having a major publisher behind me. I haven’t had my book reviewed in the LA Times and Entertainment Weekly and countless other mainstream media outlets. And my book has been out now for nearly three years. So yeah 100 books is a big deal.
My budget has increased dramatically since adding the Aviation display ads. My total costs for the first month of the campaign was around $65. This last month will be closer to $250. At that rate it’s difficult to sell enough books to pay for the advertising. But what I’ve seen over time is that for every book that I sell I probably sell an additional five books through word of mouth. So from that standpoint it is worth the cost.
When setting up a campaign like this, it’s important to monitor the campaign and where your ads are appearing. I’ve had to constantly ad placements to the negative placements list.
But I have also had some success with my placements. Below is one of my ads that appeared on the LA Times book review page. I couldn’t get the whole image in one shot, so here is the first part.
Here is the second part.
There are a couple of interesting things to point out here. First, this is the LA Times and I am advertising my book for about $1. Second, the ad is right in the middle of the review. It’s not off to the side or the bottom of the page. You can’t miss the ad if you are reading the review.
This ad was an automatic placement, meaning that Google matched the ad based on my keywords, the user’s query, and the content on the page. Since this is a prime spot for my ad. I moved the ad to the managed placement list and upped the bid to make sure that my ad appears more frequently.
I haven’t made it on to the Amazon book page for Unbroken for print or eBook, but there is still a couple of weeks left. Stay tuned.