>Facebook Ad sells a Bazillion Books!

>Well, a long time ago (April 21st, 2009), I tried out Facebook's ad campaign to mixed results. Enough time has passed and I've saved up enough cash that I decided to try again.

I chose to advertise my recently released eBook DUST.
As you can see I made up a clever ad (which is relatively easy to do with Facebook Ads) and pressed the "go" button. Facebook allows you to choose your target audience, so I selected America (because the eBook is only available there) and young adult/horror. I chose to pay $5.00 a day for three days. Because I published this version of DUST it meant that I could track sales exactly. My hope was that people would see the ad, click on it and go directly to the Amazon kindle site, then voila--buy the book. And I'd pay off my mortgage (okay that's more of a long term goal).
Here were the results:

As you can see there were 91,000 impressions and 49 clicks. And the number of books sold during that time period = 1. Yep, only sold one. I needed to sell at least 8 to break even.

Now I didn't expect the ad to sell bundles of books. First the person who clicks on the ad would have to own an eReader, then they'd have to have $2.99 to spend, and finally be willing to take a chance on an unknown book. So obviously this ad wasn't hitting the impulse buyers (all I need is about 100,000 impulse buyers...is that too much to ask).

I have been told that advertising usually takes 3 months to imprint onto your audience's brains. At that point they are more likely to buy the "product." But I'm not prepared to buy 3 months worth of ads. I may try Project Wonderful next, which is much cheaper. And have been itching to give Goodreads a try, too.

Art

>Dust on iBooks Worldwide (mostly)

>
G'day Australia! Howdy US of A! Bloody top of the morning UK! Bonjour France!

Dust is officially up for sale on iBooks in the above countries. I am enough of a Mac geek that I find this thrilling (alas, again I must mention it is not for sale in the Canadian store because of "negotiations" etc--I can't even download my own book!).

It has been ten years since the book was released. When I talk to students they often ask me which of my 15 books is my favourite and I always answer Dust. It is the one that I feel "worked" the best out of all my novels.

Art

>The Ebook Experiment...so far

>Well, yesterday I launched (or resurrected) my first novel, Draugr, as an ebook.

A few weeks before that I released Dust as an ebook (available only in the US and UK because I don't have the Canadian rights).

Total sales so far: 6
I'm actually very pleased with that. I don't see this as a massive sales rush, but more a long term project that (I hope) will pay off over time. If I only make $1000.00 a year from the experiment...then that's ten grand after ten years (because the books will not be taken off the shelves unless something major happens to the internet or people start downloading them into their brains).
Why bother? Well, two main reasons. One is that these books were out of print in various countries, so I could at least be making an income from them. The second is that right now in the publishing world there is great, numbing fear about the changes coming to the industry via ebooks (umm...update the changes are here) and, frankly, the e-rights being offered by major publishers are not very generous (to make it simple if I sell an ebook through a publisher I make $25% of net which on a $10.00 book would be $1.75. If I upload that same book to amazon myself I make $7.00). Obviously there are a multitude of factors on why a traditional contract is still very much in the cards for a new book ("paper" books are the vast majority of my sales and, at this moment, the sales of the Children's market, publishers have promotion budgets, editors, sales staff, etc.) For my out-of-print books it was an easy decision to go it alone.
I am a bit of a techie and I like to have control over my own work. I was inspired by blogs by people such as JA Konrath


and Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publishing.


Read those blogs. They are very inspiring and eye-opening about the ebook world (Konrath has a long list of authors who have been successful on the epublishing front--some heady stuff, to be sure, though of course I can't find a corresponding blog about failures of e-pubbing--then again you can't win if you don't play).

So armed by inspiration, I researched how to make an eBook. And you know what, it's relatively easy. First I signed up at Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)(Amazon's ebook publishing program). Then I converted my book into html following this guide by Derek Canyon:

Then I asked an artist friend to do the cover for a fee (in the case of Dust it was Christopher Steininger and Draugr was done by Derek Mah--hire them, they're great). Then I uploaded my file to KDP and within 24 hours it was for sale worldwide (C'mon brits...buy a book...I dare you!).
Of course, Amazon isn't the only game in the ebook market. There are many others including B&N, Apple, Sony etc. I am in the process of getting my books on iTunes myself, but for the rest of the distributors I used Smashwords. What Smashwords does is take a word file (prepared exactly to their specifications) and put it through their "meatgrinder" which spits out your book in various formats (epub/pdf/html) and then distributes it on their website and to all the major ebook sellers (Amazon/B&N etc.,). For a fee, of course (15% of net). This is likely the easiest way to go--I chose to put up my book on iTunes and Amazon on my own because it was easy enough to do and I kept that 15%.

Anyway, that's been the journey so far...

Hmm in the time it's taken to write this blog another sale appeared on Smashwords. That's 7 total. I'm gonna open the bubbly when it hits double digits. Err, maybe I'll wait until after 11 AM.

Art