Marketing Monday: Planning an Ad Campaign

So it's been awhile since we talked about the book that I helped my friends put out late last year. And I'm going to take some time today to talk about our current ad campaign and I will update us all next Monday as to our final results. 

In many of the indie author chats I tend to see, many people struggle with how to sell their book. I also see some writers struggle to understand what their numbers mean. So next week, when we have some numbers I will break down what numbers mean and how to interpret them.

But for now I will break down the steps for getting the data. So let's start at the beginning. You've published a book. Great! Now what?

Well you have to find a place to advertise it to readers. There are several different strategies to do this. And I will outline a few of them here.

• Paid email list builers
• Get on other people's email lists
• Web/blog tours
• Social Media
• Ads other places

Ok, of these, I have managed to cultivate a few places where I can get on other people email lists for free. I have a few friends who might have me on their blog and my Twitter account has over 700 followers. So, what to do?

Well as of yesterday, our ad went live on several email lists. Of the things I had available to me, it was the only strategy I had not yet used. Using all of the other strategies, and with the help of my other co-authors we have exhausted our sales capacity at a whopping eleven sales. Yeah, I know, not so great. On the up side I can now tell you, stop tweeting your book. 

I mean that really. Nobody buys stuff off of Twitter. I've tweeted this book, all of my co-authors have tweeted the book. Not only that we spread that on Facebook and a lot of other social media sights as well. It didn't work. 

Alright, time to move on. So we are offering the book on Amazon. I know, we should go wide with it, but it was hard enough to get us all to agree on anything. Navigating going wide with literally a zero budget just wasn't in the cards. It was too complicated. So I enrolled the book in KDP Select and left it alone. Which means, if you have been playing along at home, it is now eligible a KDP Countdown Deal. And I am going to share how I put this one together right now. 

First, I found all of the email lists that I could that were free to apply to. Then I set a date far out in the future. (In this case about three weeks.) I filled out the paperwork. (By which I mean I roped my husband into using my database and doing it for me.) And waited to get confirmation that I would be included on my selected day. Once I was sure I would get onto these lists on the day I selected I set a reminder on my calendar app to set the Countdown Deal. (This is important, because basically you can only set these at a maximum of two weeks out.) (Also, I actually did this one by myself, no need to call in air cover.) On the day of the reminder, which I set at least one week in advance of sale, I went ahead and enrolled in the sale.  You do this by clicking on the menu on your KDP bookshelf and following the steps. It's really quite easy, it's just boring. 

Now in all of this time that I was working on setting up the deal, I made sure all of the stuff at the end of the book worked. I re-tested all of the web links I put in last year. It currently takes 72 hours for Amazon to update an existing ebook, so you need to make sure all of your edits are completely done no less than four days in advance. In my case, emails go out on a Sunday, so I uploaded the afternoon of the previous Tuesday. 

Now for the social media echo effect, I'm redesigning my ads for Twitter, which while they didn't work that well before, it's free so I might as well not. 

The email went live yesterday, so now all I have to do is sit and wait and see what sales I get. See you next week with the wrap up, I'm crunching numbers right now.  Fingers crossed.