I never thought I’d get a chance to work “dagnabit” into the title of a blog post (or, you know, anywhere), but it seemed to be an appropriate euphemism for the occasion. I asked what folks wanted to hear about on Twitter today, and a resounding number of people (okay, it was just the one) requested a post on online advertising for authors. Does it work?

Depending on who you ask, the answer could be, “No, it’s a waste of money,” “Yes, it made me a bestseller,” “I sold some books but didn’t break even,” or “Huh? Authors can advertise?”

In other words, your results will vary. Personally, I’ve found a couple of places where advertising has worked for me (it never made me a bestseller, but there have been times where I spent less on ads than I earned back on book sales). More often I’ve lost money.

Here’s more of a breakdown:

Types of Online Advertising Available for Authors

Pay Per Click Ads

Facebook, Google Adwords, and Goodreads are all pay-per-click options. You throw a certain amount of money into a campaign (or give them your credit card number so they can charge you whatever you spend each month), and you get to make a text-based ad that will be displayed on their pages. On some sites, you can include a little picture (i.e. the cover of your book), but usually it’s about the text. You get a few words for a header and a few more for the body of the ad. If you have a copy-writing background, it could come in handy here, because there’s not a lot of space to entice someone to click.

Did they work for me?

I’ve tried pay-per-click ads on Facebook and Goodreads. The latter handed me some of my early sales, and I wrote a long post on how to set up a Goodreads Advertising Campaign last year. My own daily book sales have increased a lot since then, so I can’t guess any more how effective the site might be (when you’re not selling a lot, it’s easier to see if one particular thing you do has an impact on sales), and I’ve stopped putting money into my campaigns over there. I think it can help out in the beginning though.

With Facebook, I tried some ads to direct people to the free-ebook tab on my Facebook Author Page. It didn’t cost me much (a couple of dollars most weeks), and it did get some people to click the links on the free-ebook page (since I give away those stories to everyone, I don’t use Smashwords coupons — coupons would have been a good way to see if people were actually downloading the books, though at the same time they make a potential reader go through more steps to get to your work).

I used to use Google Adwords when I was selling affiliate products for my day job, so I have experience with them, but I never considered trying them as an author. One of the problems with pay-per-click ads is that one click can only translate into one sale (and it’s probably going to be more like eight or ten clicks to get one sale), and, as an independent ebook author you’re only making a couple of bucks per book sale (assuming a $2.99+ ebook), so there’s not a lot of room for error. (The numbers are, of course, more abysmal for traditionally published authors who make far less per sale.)

With Adwords, you can’t target as specifically as you can with Facebook and Goodreads (i.e. age, sex, reading preferences), at least not the last time I looked (it’s been a couple of years, but I don’t think Google has implemented stats on what people are fans of the way other two sites have).

As you can see from the things I’ve talked about that did work (a little), pay-per-click is a dribble-drabble sort of system where, unless you’re spending a lot of money (and that can be hard if you’re targeting a specific demographic, such as your ideal science-fiction-romance-loving audience), you won’t sell a lot of books. The good thing is that you only spend money if someone clicks your ad. The bad thing is that you’re reaching a finite number of people, and it’s almost like hand-selling to one person at a time. Goodreads does have some viral potential, since people can add your books to their reading lists (lists other people can see), but it’s hard to gauge how helpful that is.

What to be careful with when it comes to PCC ads

Make sure to target your audience carefully, so you don’t waste money (i.e. when I was setting up my Goodreads campaign, I only had ebooks available, so I put ebook in the ad copy to ensure paperback-only people wouldn’t click). With Facebook and Goodreads, you can target, for example, science fiction lovers only and even advertise to those who are fans of authors who write in a similar style as you do. Make use of that.

Banner Advertising

With banner advertising, you pay for a graphic ad to be displayed on a site for a certain amount of time (you usually pay a flat monthly fee or for a certain number of impressions). They’ll usually appear in a site’s header or side bar. You pay whether they’re clicked on or not, but they tend to be less expensive than the other types of ads I’m talking about here.

Did they work for me?

I haven’t done a lot with banner advertising, because there are a lot of studies that suggest people have had “banner blindness” for a long time and text-based ads work better. That said, their cost-effectiveness can make them appealing.

I tried a banner ad for Encrypted and also for Ice Cracker II (a free short story) last year on the Nookboards, because I was trying to figure out how to target those Barnes & Noble Nook folks. My banners were part of a rotation of ads for about three months. The campaign didn’t cost a lot, but I’m also not sure if I can attribute more than a handful of purchases/downloads to the experience.

I’m about to try a banner-advertising campaign with someone who emailed me when I started my Kickstarter campaign. His ads run on a number of gaming sites, and since there’s a lot of crossover between people who game and people who read fantasy, I thought, “Why not?” Also, I’ll be advertising the first Emperor’s Edge novel, which is free (on sites such as these, I’d think it would be a lot easier to get people to check out something that’s free than something that’s $5, and, of course, people who try the first book might want to go on to try the rest of the series).

In the end, though, I don’t expect much. For me, no form of advertising has been a knock-it-out-of-the-park success (and there haven’t been many base hits either). The main reason I’m still tinkering with it at all is that I’m making enough now that tax-write-offs are nice. Also, I like to experiment with things so I can post about them on this blog.

Sponsored Posts or Daily Blog Spots

Sites such as Pixel of Ink, Kindle Nation Daily, and Ereader News Today are blogs (sometimes with newsletters) that offer a variety of daily sponsorships where your book can be featured in a post and/or email.

These blogs have large audiences, but they’re general readership audiences. As someone who writes steampunk/high fantasy, I haven’t found these types of sites to be particularly effective, but I’ve heard of people who write in genres with a broader appeal (i.e. thrillers, mysteries) having good results. (Note: I tried KND when their rates were cheaper and I broke even with a $2.99 high fantasy ebook — I tried again recently, and I paid more and didn’t come anywhere near breaking even. I believe the proliferation of free ebooks — many of which these blogs promote — is making it harder to sell an ebook through these sites.)

I’m ambivalent about these types of sites for other reasons, too, in particular that they charge a fortune (KND especially has hiked its prices way up in the last year), and I think there’s a lot of authors paying against their better judgement, hoping against hope that it’ll somehow be worth it. I used to work in online advertising and affiliate marketing, and I’m floored by the going rates for daily sponsorships in the ebook-sphere ($200+ in some cases). Even sites with little to no traffic are charging $40-$50 for daily sponsorships. But I guess as long as authors are willing to pay such rates, the high prices will continue (these sites are all booked far in advance).

Personally, if you want to try advertising, I’d recommend thinking outside of the box and getting away from the sponsored-posts sites. If you’re a science fiction author, for example, it might be better to hunt around and find a popular SF blog that isn’t necessarily in the ebook sphere but is a place where your fans hang out. You might be able to get a text or banner ad for $50 a month.

What Really Works in the Modern Era

So, as you can see, I’m not against advertising, per se, but I’m not a huge fan of it either. There have been times where it’s helped me out (especially in the beginning with Goodreads) and more times where it’s been a waste of money. I will say something I’ve pointed out before, though:

I’ve found that once you sell your first 1,000 books or so, Amazon’s algorithms start kicking in, and your book will show up in people’s recommendations and in the also-boughts for a lot of other authors. Because of that, it might be worth losing a little money early on (if you have it to spare) if it’ll help you get to that point.

That said, the 100% most effective thing I’ve done to increase my sales is giving ebooks away for free. Long-time readers have seen me say that a lot, and it’s because it’s true. For me, it’s blown everything else out of the water.

First, I gave away that Ice Cracker II story (something that was effective in helping me sell my first book because it stared the same characters and I included an excerpt to the novel). Then, at the end of November, I decided to go ahead and make my first full-length novel free (since, by then, I had two other novels out in the series). It’s no coincidence that that’s the month this author thing went from being a part-time gig to my primary source of income.

Free works best with serial stories, though, so it’s not necessarily going to be as effective for everyone. Advertising can be worth trying if you have the money to spare. Some folks will argue, though, that the best “advertising” you can do is to buckle down and get more books out there (I don’t disagree with this sentiment).

All right, I’m done talking for the day. Do you have any thoughts on advertising? Is there anything you’ve tried that I haven’t covered? Let us know below!

Warning: this post is long and rambling. Read at your own discretion.

There are a lot of challenges as an indie ebook author, but perhaps the biggest is being found. As I’ve mentioned before, nobody is going to stumble across your work at the bookstore, and, with Amazon’s millions of books for sale, it’s unlikely on-site searches are going to lead people to your work either. That will change if you start selling enough for your ebook to show up in various bestseller categories, but getting to that point is a challenge.

I’ve written about my Kindle Nation Advertising Results, which helped me sell a bunch of ebooks in one day, and today I’m going to talk about Goodreads, which has led to a small trickle of continuing sales.

I’ve run pay-per-click advertising campaigns for my day job, and I was leery about getting anything except a high credit card bill out of Goodreads, but they’ve proven more effective than I expected. Amazon and Barnes & Noble don’t tell you where sales originate, so it’s hard to say anything with 100% certainty, but I believe I’m spending less on advertising there than I’m making from books purchased through the ad campaigns.

In other words, it’s profitable.

Let me give you a breakdown of how Goodreads works and what I’m doing to achieve my results. (Just to be clear, these are not staggering results. Right now, I’m spending in the neighborhood of $4-$5 a day there and making $10-$14 in royalties–selling 5-7 ebooks a day at $2.99 each. Not all my book sales are from Goodreads, since I still sell some on days when GR clicks are low, but I’ve definitely noticed a correlation between higher click days and higher sales days. Because I’m very new as an ebook author–you can read my recent Indie Ebook Publishing Results After Six Weeks–and my books aren’t being mentioned left and right all over the web, I suspect this isn’t a coincidence.)

How Goodreads Advertising Works

As I mentioned, Goodreads is a pay-per-click advertising system, meaning you pay every time someone clicks your ad. If nobody clicks, you get charged nothing, but Goodreads also won’t show your ads much. Here’s a blurb from their FAQ:

We use a complex algorithm to determine which ads are shown on the site. A major factor in this algorithm is initial click-through rate– that’s the click-through rate for the ad in its first few hundred impressions for the day. The ads that generate more clicks in those first few hundred impressions are shown more frequently throughout the day, while those that don’t generate as many clicks early are given a lower priority. This is how we make sure that the most relevant ads are shown most frequently. How the ad was performing the day before has no bearing on this, as each ad gets a fresh chance each day.

You can choose how much you want to bid per ad, with the minimum being ten cents. Here’s another blurb to explain how the bidding works (sort of):

All self-serve ads are sold at a default rate of $0.50 per click, but you can bid anywhere from $0.10 to $300.00 per click. While higher bid amounts are given higher priority, the initial click-through rate is still more important in determining which ads are shown the most frequently.

In my experience 10 cents doesn’t end up getting you many page views a day, whereas 50 cents gets you plenty, so I don’t think there’s a need to go higher than that. If you’re an indie ebook author like me, and you’re only charging $2.99 per ebook ($2 royalty, give or take a few pennies, depending on the retailer), you need to be careful about how much you bid. At 50 cents a click, you’d only break even if one in four people bought your novel, and that’s asking a lot from an ad.

You can do some things in the ad copy and with the targeting to make it very likely only people who read your genre and have an ebook reader will click (any other clicks are a waste of time), and I’ll talk about that in a minute.

On slow days, I tinker with my campaign, and I’ve found I get a reasonable return on my investment coupled with a reasonable number of clicks per day when I bid around 30 cents. I’ve got a $15 daily cap on my campaigns, but I’ve never come close to spending that much (because I do target my ads very precisely). I’d be happy to spend more if it resulted in more sales, but, as big as Goodreads is, there’s a limited number of people who fall into the target audience for my science fantasy romance novel (someday I’m going to write a book in a popular genre just for kicks!).

Before I move on, I want to say that I believe paying for Goodreads advertising on a novel you’ve priced at $0.99 is going to be a waste of money. Since ebooks in this price range only earn the author $0.35-$0.40, you’d have to bid very low and have a ridiculously high conversion rate to break even. If you want to throw money around to increase visibility and get your name out there, that’s your call, but, like I said, it’s easy to waste a lot of money quickly with pay-per-click ads. I’d probably choose banner advertising where you’re paying a flat monthly fee for exposure if that was the goal.

Creating an Ad Campaign

Okay, you’ve read this far, and you’ve decided to try Goodreads yourself. What’s Step #1, you ask?

First, sign up here: Goodreads Advertising.

You’ll fill in all your personal information and give them a credit card number and say how much you want to spend. I wasn’t sure what to expect or if I’d get billed right away or after I’d burned through some clicks (right away is the answer), so dumped $300 in. In retrospect, that was pretty high, but if you write in a popular genre, you may go through money (and sell more ebooks!) more quickly than I.

Next it’s time to set up ads. It’s a bit like Twitter in that you don’t get much space to woo people. I’ve never liked selling, and I’ve never studied copywriting, so I won’t presume to advise you here. Nothing is permanent, however, so you can experiment to your heart’s desire.

I do recommend creating a campaign for each book and trying several ads within each campaign. There are a couple reasons for this:

Split Testing to See Which Ad Copy Works Best

If you create two ads where all other factors are equal (destination URL, book price, audience targeted, etc.), then, after a while, you’ll be able to tell which book blurb is drawing more interest. Eventually you can eliminate the poor performer and swap in a new ad and start the comparison process over again.

I’ve definitely had instances where the ad copy I thought was best didn’t turn out to be the best performer. I’ve got one running now that’s, in my opinion, a little cheesy, but it gets a lot of clicks, so it stays.

Using Different Destination URLS

Goodreads recommends you make the destination URL (or web address) your book’s Goodreads page. I have mixed feelings about this. I was on Goodreads two months before I even noticed book pages had buy links on them. Even if other Goodreads members are swifter than I, you’re putting extra steps between the buyer and the purchase if you send them to the GR page and hope to earn a sale from there.

I’m not saying you should never do this (I have an ad in each of my campaigns that delivers the clicker to the GR page), but you may want to pay less per click, as you’re probably going to see fewer direct sales. That said, there are some less tangible benefits. Goodreads members can add your book to their shelves, which are seen by their friends, who might add your book to their shelves and so on and so forth.

Aside from using Goodreads as a destination URL, if you are an ebook author, you will probably want to set up an ad for each of the places your book is for sale. This is because people with different ebook readers shop at different stores. If they’ve got Nooks, they go to B&N. Kindle people go to Amazon. Etc. etc. etc.

Yes, you could send people to Smashwords, where all ebook formats are available, but a) not many people outside the biz are aware of Smashwords yet and b) you know people already have accounts at the store their e-reader is linked to so there’s only one single solitary click between that reader and a purchase of your ebook. Compare that to some store they’re visiting for the first time and where they have to set up an account and enter in credit card information. More steps means more places from them to bail out and decide they don’t want the book so badly after all.

So, long story short, consider setting up an ad for Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Apple if your ebooks are available in all these places. They can be the same ad (though it wouldn’t hurt to put the name of the e-reader in the title or the description) for each, just with a different destination.

Note: The least effective thing you could probably do is send people to your author website. I’ve seen a few ads that do this on Goodreads, and unless you’re snagging the person’s email address for your mailing list, this will likely lose you money. Internet marketers will give away free ebooks in exchange for email addresses (once you’re on their list, they can try to sell you other stuff), but this is beyond what most of us are doing with our marketing campaigns. In most cases, you’re just going to be putting extra roadblocks between the interested party and the actual act of purchasing your book. Simple is almost always better. Interested person clicks ad and interested person is delivered to place to purchase book with one click. Author success story!

Crafting Your Ad to Attract Your Target Audience (and nobody else!)

Still reading? Good, because this is the section that’s going to keep you from wasting money and make it possible to profit from running a Goodreads advertising campaign. The other stuff is important too (everything I say is important, duh!), but this is key:

If all you have available is an ebook make sure it says ebook somewhere in your ad.

This is common sense, but easy to overlook (I see people overlooking it on Goodreads right now). A lot of people don’t have e-readers, and they’ll only read paper books. That means it’s pointless to have them click your ad, because they’re not in your target audience.

Consider mentioning the price.

Ad space is finite, but you may also want to list the price of your ebook in your ad. I do this because, at $2.99, Emperor’s Edge and Encrypted are both low compared to traditionally published ebooks. A low price tag alone may make a book more appealing to a Goodreads member.

If your ebook is higher priced, it may still be worth mentioning, because you don’t want bargain-seekers clicking your ad if they’re never going to pony up $10 for an ebook.

Only target people who read in your genre.

After you’ve inputted your title, ad, url, and uploaded a little picture of your book, it’s time to select your audience. This is pretty easy. Click unselect all, and then check the boxes that match your ebook (i.e. science fiction and fantasy or young adult and romance). This means your ads will only be shown to people who’ve indicated they read in your genre.

The downside of precise targeting:

A possible downside to being this precise is that your click-through-rate may be so low that Goodreads won’t display your ad every day. I included the blurb above about how they choose which ads to display (if yours doesn’t get a click early on, it’ll get shelved for the day), and I never have all my ads running full throttle, because some days they just don’t get those early clicks. I do always end up with at least one or two ads from a given campaign running, but this is a big reason as to why my Goodreads bill isn’t very high each day.

From our point of view it’s good not to waste money, but from GR’s point of view, they only want to show ads that are making them money. It’s admittedly a balancing act.

The nice thing is that every day starts anew with Goodreads, and it’s easy to tweak ads and keep trying to see what works. Once you’ve got things down, this system is very “set it and forget it.” Compare that to all the other promotional stuff we try as indie authors, and I think you’ll see the benefits of having a campaign running quietly 24/7 without you having to do anything.

What if I’m a dead-tree-book author and don’t sell ebooks?

Ah, who let you onto this blog? Sorry, kidding. Everything above can apply to you as well, but it’s probably going to be harder to track your results. With the digital publishing platforms, you see sales the same hour they’re made, so you can more easily see the correlation between a bunch of clicks one afternoon and a few sales that afternoon. You can certainly give things a try though.

If you’re published through a traditional press and getting a much smaller royalty than indie ebook authors get, then Goodreads may not be cost-effective for you. Success really depends on you being able to make a profit, and you have to assume it’s going to take multiple clicks to sell a book.

Good luck to you with Goodreads!

As I mentioned Sunday, I purchased a Kindle Nation sponsorship for The Emperor’s Edge, a full-length fantasy novel priced at $2.99.

Kindle Nation has several advertising options, and I went with #1: “free book alert sponsorship.” To qualify, your book must be a bargain compared to traditionally published ebooks (which are often $7.99 and up). The cost of the ad is currently $80, and this gets your ebook listed on the KN site with picture, blurb, reviews, etc. It also goes out to the subscribers that follow the blog on their kindles.

I didn’t sell enough books to earn back the cost of the ad (Sunday royalties will pay for about 75% of it), but it was easily my best sales day ever. My ebook climbed to 3,600ish in the bestseller rankings (read my post explaining Amazon Sales Rank if you’re curious how that all works) and briefly appeared in the Top 100 for epic fantasy (my novel isn’t really epic fantasy, but Amazon’s categories for fantasy are lacking… a rant for another time!).

Unfortunately, Amazon’s DTP page only shows you the number of books you’re selling, not where buyers are coming from, so it’s hard for me to tell which sales on later days may have been the result of the advertisement. I know I download samples of ebooks before buying and often go back days or weeks later for the rest. My sales have been a little better than the two weeks before this week, and I believe some of that is from the KN ad.

Beyond direct sales, it’s likely there are less tangible benefits of a sponsorship. For example, more people have found my blog this week by searching for my name (people know my name, wow!). Also, just having more people read the book means more chance for reviews online and recommendations to friends.

Some things which may have hindered my sales:

• Cover and blurb — maybe not to everyone’s tastes?
• It’s fantasy, heh. SF is worse, but traditional fantasy is definitely a niche genre.
• Sunday of a holiday weekend — I have no basis for comparison yet, but blog traffic is always higher for me during the week (yes, everyone surfs during work hours), so it’s possible more people shop for ebooks M-F too.
• Price point — while $2.99 is a bargain next to a $9.99 ebook, there are a lot of $0.99 ebooks posted at Kindle Nation.

Other People’s Kindle Nation Results:

Curious how other people do with their books? Here’s a spreadsheet of the site’s results for January sponsorships thus far. And the December 2010 results are up too.

The $0.99 ebooks are the biggest hits (surprise!). I remember seeing someone who had sold 150+ books as a result of the KN sponsorship, and I was quite envious until I realized they’d actually made less than I had with my 30-odd sales. (Thanks to the quirkiness of the Amazon pricing system, you get a 35% royalty at $0.99 and a 70% royalty at anything from $2.99 to $9.99. Essentially, you have to sell six times as many copies at $0.99 to make what you do at $2.99.)

That said, I may try initially releasing Encrypted at $0.99 and seeing if the cheaper price encourages significantly more purchases. That could make it easier to get onto the various Top 100 fantasy charts at Amazon, which is the way to be seen over there. It’s easy to raise the price later. Or maybe leaving it low could act as a gateway into my other novels. The fun thing about being an indie author is you have all the control and can experiment at will with these things!

All in all, I’m happy with the results of my sponsorship, and I am planning to sign up again for future ebooks.

When it comes to advertising your ebook, Kindle Nation is one of the biggies (if not the biggie) in the field. They’ve got an email mailing list, more than 6,000 subscribes who have the blog updates delivered to their kindles, and countless visitors who visit the blog on the web.

They have a number of sponsorship options, and I signed up for the first one, a Free Book Alert Sponsorship, which highlights free or bargain ebooks (The Emperor’s Edge is $2.99).

The cost for Option #1 is $80, and slots are usually booked months out (I was expecting an appearance in March), but Stephen had an opening for today and was kind enough to slip me in. My book only has two reviews at this point (it’s only been a week and a half since it went live on Amazon), but they are nice ones (thanks reviewers!).

I’ve already seen some sales, but I’ll post again tomorrow night or Tuesday and let you know how effective the sponsorship was.

In the meantime, check it the book’s Kindle Nation page.