Book Giveaways and Advertising

I just released my second collection of stories and I've been trying to approach the marketing of it in a more nuanced and specific way.

When I put out my first book, I think I was just happy to have it out and didn't bother trying to create ads for it until months later when sales started to falter. Had I been smarter, I would've started those earlier AND put the book up on several Amazon and Goodreads giveaway platforms to get the book in the hands of other readers who are currently outside my advertising reach (i.e., we are not Facebook friends and they probably don't read my blogs or know who the hell I am).

With this second book, I was more on top of things, having several giveaways planned for both platforms, ads bought on Facebook and Amazon, and a general advertising campaign blast through my regular posts on FB and Instagram.

To be clear: advertising on Facebook and Instagram is garbage. When I did both last time, I got some 50,000+ people engaging with the ad (either by likes or comments; mostly likes), but not one sale turned over from either platform. NOT ONE. And the ads were not cheap. For such a low rate of sales in front of so many people, I won't be using either platform to sell my future books. The first time was a learning experience, the second time was just a waste of money. Never again.

Below is an image of my Amazon ad metrics since starting the ad at the beginning of June and ending at the end of July.

What I like about this is that it shows me the orange metrics are impressions (how many people saw the ad) and the blue metrics are dollars spent on my books because of the ad (two sales, amazingly; based on previous experience, I expected none). First lesson: just because a lot of people are seeing your ad doesn't mean those people are buying your product. Both days where I sold a book through the ad came from low impression days.

Now, I also did a giveaway through Amazon. The plus side of this is that you pay for the books and Amazon takes care of shipping the books out to the winners. The downside is that there's not much wiggle room on the kind of way the contest is decided. I bought 5 copies of my own book for the giveaway and how Amazon chose the winners came down to two options:

• The first five people to enter the contest win. 
• One person out of every 1,000 or 5,000 or 10,000 people win. 

I wasn't super keen with either of those options; the first felt like it stifled the ability for the book to be put in front of more people while the second felt like too many people were needed to enter to win. Turns out that I was correct on both fronts as only about 1,200 people signed up in the month-long contest, so only one winner was chosen (I opted for the second giveaway option). 

The Goodreads giveaway, however, felt much more intuitive and less stifling. While they would send me a list of the winners' names and addresses (I would have to ship copies myself), it also allowed me a few extra fun things: entrance to the giveaway required that people add the book to their "to be read" shelves. When people add a book to their shelves, all their friends can see that. This automatically puts the book in front of a massively larger audience than I currently have. 

Since I'm the one shipping the books out myself, I get to craft a little letter to each of the winners and include some of the fun hype merch I've created for the book, like a tote bag (readers LOVE tote bags) and stickers and a shirt that's being made right now for charitable purposes. 

The winners of the giveaway are getting a crazy amount of free swag and that's pretty great. While I'm hoping this kind of extra stuff sways them to take more notice of the book, I'm really hoping that they actually read the books pretty soon. 

Even more important than that, I hope they just really enjoy the books. 

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