Marketing Monday: When The Data Makes No Sense
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If any one of you either buys this book on Amazon, or tries it as a part of your KU subscription, (and we are 5 star rated!) then this blog post will have garnished more sales that the ad campaign I ran on Amazon last month.
Let us review our total number of sales so far 12. 11 to our friends and family, as we are told to start by every single how to start your writing business/indie career site. We have published ads on our own personal social media, we have run an email list/web site campaign of all of the places we could find to run our book for free. We got 1 sale and our 5 star review from that.
We have run a Kindle Countdown Deal, and now I have run a month long campaign through Amazon Advertising and garnered exactly 4 impressions, 0 clicks, and 0 sales. I steadily raised my price per click bid, and it has done nothing to increase our impressions. I am archiving this campaign, and I am releasing my conclusions in this blog post.
Amazon can be a tricky place, and I am attempting to explain to you guys who are thinking about being indie writers, what you need to figure out to get Amazon to work for you.
First and foremost, this is a short story collection, so demand for this kind of work is relatively low. I'm not sure how many short story anthologies are sold each day, but I do know there are fewer of those than there are of say, mysteries, romances, or epic fantasy novels.
Secondly, we have sold 12 copies of this book. 12.
Thirdly, Amazon is run by the almighty algorithm. So let's take all of our information, or lack thereof, and formulate a theory about what is going on.
Low demand for short story collections means Amazon's algorithm has fewer opportunities to deploy our adds. Secondly, we have not sold many books. As far as I can tell, there is a magic number to get Amazon (and only Amazon's) algorithm to work. The magic number is 50. That's right. If you want to get Amazon to work for you, you need a minimum number of 50 sales per book. But you can't get just any sales, you need them in your genre, to the people who are looking for their next author to read. That has been our problem, and it continues to be our problem.
I have the rest of this year to figure out my next 38 sales. I'll keep at it, I hope you do too.
Let us review our total number of sales so far 12. 11 to our friends and family, as we are told to start by every single how to start your writing business/indie career site. We have published ads on our own personal social media, we have run an email list/web site campaign of all of the places we could find to run our book for free. We got 1 sale and our 5 star review from that.
We have run a Kindle Countdown Deal, and now I have run a month long campaign through Amazon Advertising and garnered exactly 4 impressions, 0 clicks, and 0 sales. I steadily raised my price per click bid, and it has done nothing to increase our impressions. I am archiving this campaign, and I am releasing my conclusions in this blog post.
Amazon can be a tricky place, and I am attempting to explain to you guys who are thinking about being indie writers, what you need to figure out to get Amazon to work for you.
First and foremost, this is a short story collection, so demand for this kind of work is relatively low. I'm not sure how many short story anthologies are sold each day, but I do know there are fewer of those than there are of say, mysteries, romances, or epic fantasy novels.
Secondly, we have sold 12 copies of this book. 12.
Thirdly, Amazon is run by the almighty algorithm. So let's take all of our information, or lack thereof, and formulate a theory about what is going on.
Low demand for short story collections means Amazon's algorithm has fewer opportunities to deploy our adds. Secondly, we have not sold many books. As far as I can tell, there is a magic number to get Amazon (and only Amazon's) algorithm to work. The magic number is 50. That's right. If you want to get Amazon to work for you, you need a minimum number of 50 sales per book. But you can't get just any sales, you need them in your genre, to the people who are looking for their next author to read. That has been our problem, and it continues to be our problem.
I have the rest of this year to figure out my next 38 sales. I'll keep at it, I hope you do too.
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