Does Amazon Book Advertising Work?

Image Credit: Amazon

Warning: This post is geared toward my fellow writers. For anyone that isn’t interested in the nuts and bolts of selling books, you might want to pass on this one. That said, let us continue!

If you spend any time at all browsing books on Amazon, you’ve noticed the Sponsored Products advertisements toward the bottom of every page. Being the eternal optimist that I am (Hey, no laughing) I decided to give this advertising method a try. Sure, my novel Storm Orphans has been out for years, but let’s be honest, almost no one has heard of it. Perhaps Sponsored Ads would be a way to get the word out there and find some new readers.

Setting up an ad through KDP is actually kind of fun. From your author page, click Promote and Advertise from the "..." button associated with your book then click the Create an ad campaign button. From there, choose the Sponsored Products campaign type. Then you choose the date range for your ad, the maximum amount you’re willing to spend each day on the ad, your maximum bid per click, and finally the keywords that should trigger your ad.

The cool thing about Sponsored Product ads is that you can try different campaigns while risking very little money. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad and once you meet the maximum amount you’re willing to spend that day, the ad won’t appear again until the next day, preventing the possibility of you spending more than you wanted to.

I followed some advice I found online and stuck to the default bid per click of $0.25. That means I’m bidding against other authors for ad space. I’m bidding up to a quarter per spot. If someone bids more, their ad gets shown instead of mine. Again, I don’t have to pay that quarter unless someone actually clicks on my ad, but I’m willing to pay up to $0.25 every time they do until I hit my daily maximum spend.

Being a newbie to this advertising platform and not wanting to spend a ton of money on something that might not earn me any sales, I started cheap. I set my daily max at $5 for my first campaign. As you can see in the graphic below, I needn’t have worried. Despite using keywords based on similar authors and books, I only managed 400 impressions in a week and from those impressions, I only received 4 clicks for an average of $0.17 each. None of the four people purchased my book so I earned nothing, but only spent $0.66 for a week of chances.

Image Credit: Matt Handle

Undeterred, I tried again the following week with a slightly different book description in my ad and a revamped list of keywords. I kept the handful of keywords that seemed to provoke a bit of interest in my first ad, but then added two dozen new keywords to replace those that didn’t perform the first time around.

As you can see in the next graphic, my second ad received way more impressions. This time around, 1831 people saw my ad in a week, but my click percentage was much worse than my first attempt. I only received 5 clicks and again, generated zero sales. A full 2/3 of my impressions were generated on the keyword “Frank Tayell”, the indie author of a popular post-apocalypse series titled Surviving the Evacuation. I mistakenly thought his readers might find my book interesting since they’re based on a similar theme, but all I can surmise is that few other authors used his name as a keyword since I wound up winning that space so often. Only one of the 1225 impressions from his page actually clicked on my ad.

Image Credit: Matt Handle

You’ll also notice I didn’t have any impressions on well known, traditionally published author pages such as Max Brooks. Tons of people are interested in his World War Z and Zombie Survival Guide books so I can only assume my $0.25 wasn’t a high enough bid to win any of those spots. This is kind of a bummer, but in the end I only spent $0.75 on the week-long campaign so I can hardly complain.

So what did I learn from my little experiment with Amazon advertising? It’s something of a fun game trying to figure out which keywords will generate interest while minimizing non-sales-generating clicks, but at least for me, Amazon advertising failed to do what it’s supposed to do. It didn’t help me sell any books.

The Self-Publishing Blues

Image Credit: schuldnerhilfe/Pixabay

Several readers have asked me lately why I haven’t published a second novel yet. It’s been four years since I self-published my debut novel Storm Orphans so that’s a fair question. The answer is until I find an agent and a publishing deal, I won’t. I learned my lesson. I can’t speak for other authors, but for me, writing a 60-100K word story is hard. Really hard. I went into self-publishing wide-eyed and enthusiastic. Here I was putting a zombie apocalypse novel out in the world at the height of The Walking Dead’s popularity. I figured there must be a decent-sized audience for a fast-paced, well-written tale of a ragtag band of good-guys trying to survive in a country overrun by the undead. The Walking Dead was pulling in 17 million viewers per episode at the time. My goal was a modest 10K digital sales. Surely a small portion of those millions of people would try a book with a similar theme and location, especially one they could download for a measly four bucks on the world’s largest eCommerce site. Well, I sold less than 300 copies. And don’t call my Shirley.

For anyone unfamiliar with Amazon author revenues, that means I made a bit over $400 for my efforts. There are certainly self-published authors who have been wildly successful. Hugh Howey (Wool), E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey), and Andy Weir (The Martian) are three of the best known. I became one of the bazillion others. Yes, I managed to find a potential couple thousand more readers via free giveaways, but paying customers? Darn few.

Was it a lack of good promotional skills? Was it a poor choice of subject matter? Was the book simply not good enough? With four years of road behind me, I’m willing to admit it might be a combination of all three. What I’m not willing to do is the same thing hoping for a different result. We all know how that old chestnut ends.

I actually did write a second novel. It’s a MG sci-fi story. For those of you not hip to publishing lingo, that’s science fiction for middle-graders aged 8 to 12. I wrote it for my kids and ideally, yours. My query letter was rejected or ignored by 45 agents that specialize in that genre between March of 2016 and February of 2017.

So I shelved it. As much as I’d love for kids to read it, I’d rather it sit lonely on my external hard-drive than lost in the shuffle of Amazon’s million books published each year. Unlike Howey, James, and Weir, I obviously need the boost an agent and traditional Big 5 publisher offer.

So what does this mean for my small, but loyal band of readers? It means I’ll continue to publish short stories when I find magazines willing to buy them. I’ll post more flash fiction on this blog from time to time too. However if you’re going to read another novel by yours truly someday, it’ll have a publisher’s logo on the spine.

If a Tree Falls

Image Credit: artellliii72/ Pixabay

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the world’s largest book seller is named after the world’s largest tropical rainforest. I’ll bet most readers are familiar with the philosophical thought experiment of “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around, does it make a sound?” Sadly, many self-published authors can ask a similar question about their work. If your audience is small, does your work matter?

As I continue to hunt for an agent to represent my middle grade sci-fi/fantasy manuscript, I sometimes find myself fighting against this same self-doubt. Yes, I’ve sold a couple of short stories recently. Yes, my 2014 self-pubbed debut novel Storm Orphans still sells a few copies a month, but finding readers in the vast forest of more than 12 million books on Amazon is a daunting task. Doing it without an agent or a publishing company promoting you is even tougher. It’s easy to imagine your words lying forgotten and rotten in that forest, no one noticing their passing.

For any of my unrepresented writing peers facing the same uncertainty, I offer you this: Keep writing for you. Write because it feels good to put words on the page. Write because those stories and voices in your head aren’t likely to leave you alone until you set them free. Write because if even one person values your work, you have an audience and something to grow on. Fallen trees, even silent ones, leave roots and seeds behind. You never know when something new and beautiful will blossom.

Storm Orphans: Patient Zero

Photo Credit: AP/KCBS TV

In February 2011 a young, seemingly healthy Los Angeles television reporter named Serene Branson uttered approximately 20 seconds of pure gibberish when she attempted to do a live segment outside the Grammys. Many viewers worried she was having a stroke, but doctors later diagnosed the incident as a “complex migraine”. Her story has a happy ending since she was soon back on the job and continues to work as a reporter for CBS2/KCAL9 to this day. But the oddity of this brief medical mystery inspired me. My imagination grabbed hold of this image of a pretty, blonde TV personality losing it on air and spun it into the start of a worldwide plague that became the main theme of my debut novel, Storm Orphans.

In my book, the reporter’s malady wasn’t an embarrassing but one-time loss of coherence. She was patient zero in a bio-engineered government conspiracy gone awry. Within a couple of years, almost everyone on the planet was dead or mutated into a murderous zombie as a result of their brains being turned to mush by chemicals spread via drinking water contamination and chemtrails.

There’s obviously plenty of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo involved in that fictional leap, but the story appealed to me based on that real-life incident jumpstart. The most powerful tales are those built on at least a kernel of truth. I’m glad Ms. Branson’s reality is a much happier one than what I imagined, but I’m also thankful I got a chance to see her brief moment of crisis. She inspired an entire book!

If you’re interested in keeping up with the latest on Ms. Branson, you can follow her on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/SereneOnScene

My Lost Graphic Novel

Image Credit: Marco Turini

Not many people know this, but there’s a good reason why my debut novel Storm Orphans is so fast-paced, action-oriented, and graphic. It was originally envisioned as a four-part comic book. A year or two before I wrote the book that’s now available on Amazon, I wrote a 100+ page script for a graphic novel and pursued an illustrator I could partner with on a sample. The idea was that if we could put together an impressive half dozen pages, we might find a good publishing deal to justify finishing the artwork.

Unfortunately, it was not to be. First, I learned the hard way that finding a talented illustrator willing to work for little-to-no up-front money is next to impossible. This of course isn’t a surprise, but it’s still immensely frustrating for an unknown and broke (is there any other kind?) writer who has a great story to tell but not the talent to draw it him/herself. Illustrating is incredibly difficult and time-consuming work. Those that are truly gifted at it are either in high-demand and therefore only willing to take on the best paying and/or highest profile of gigs, or they’re trying to make a living with what little paying work they can find while waiting to be discovered. 

Through a lot of searching and querying, I was lucky enough to find two different illustrators that gave the project a shot. The first, Marco Turini, developed a potential cover for the first edition (seen above) as well as three pages (seen below). Marco does great work and these pieces showed promise, but sadly, they didn’t completely match my vision and his schedule was simply too full to continue. The second, Jayant Mall, provided a killer concept piece (seen at the bottom), but the timing again became problematic and at that point I decided I was better off developing the story as the novel that exists today instead.

I still hope to develop a comic book someday. The medium seems well-suited to some of my ideas and I love seeing the characters and scenes I’ve imagined brought to life in pen and ink. Seeing recent work by the likes of William Gibson and Ta-Nehisi Coates just underlines how great the graphic novel medium can be if done right. Until then, here’s a peek at some of those lost drafts for Storm Orphans. I hope you enjoy them.

The Importance of Amazon Reviews

Image Credit: Amazon

Being an indie author isn’t exactly glamorous. No one is toasting you in New York. Your books aren’t gracing the front window display at B&N. They’re not written about in USA Today or the Times either. You’re not getting a whole lot of invitations to conferences or book signings. And interviews on TV or radio? Forget it. Those communication vehicles are reserved for authors signed by the big publishing companies. No, as an indie author, you’re probably toiling in obscurity just hoping that one day your big audience will find you.

But how do they do that? Spamming your Twitter followers certainly isn’t a viable solution (no matter how dedicated some indie authors seem to be to this method.) Facebook ads and webpage banners don’t seem to be the magic ingredient. Paid book reviews might work, but you’re either paying a fortune to a company like Kirkus or you’re cheating and facing a potential ban from the very sites you need to be listed on.

No, the only way to establish a robust audience as an indie author seems to be through the natural growth and buzz that legitimate book reviews on Amazon generate. The more people that post something positive about your work on that site, the more other people notice and decide to buy it for themselves. A reader browses through books in a particular genre. A couple of book covers, titles, or blurbs catch their eye. Which one are they more likely to purchase, the one with a handful of reviews or the one that 100+ people publicly recommend?

You know the answer to that one and so do I. That’s why I bit the bullet and gave away the ebook version of my post-apocalyptic novel Storm Orphans last weekend. Almost 1000 people downloaded it over the course of those three days. It had eight reviews at the time the promotion began. Yes, they’re very positive reviews, but just eight of them after two years on the market. In the three days since, a ninth review has been added to the list. Bless that ninth person! “bsslady_j” you rock! Now I sit and wait to see how many more of those 1000 people read, enjoy, and post something about my zombie-slaying crew on Amazon. The more that do, the more likely others will take their lead and decide to click that “Buy now” button.

Giving away the result of a year of work wasn’t an easy decision, but it is a strategy. Now we’ll see if it pays off.

Never Tell Me the Odds

Photo Credit: Lucasfilm

Like many writers, I’m currently looking for a literary agent. I self-published my first novel Storm Orphans without even attempting to go the traditional publishing route and I learned a valuable lesson. It didn’t matter that readers enjoyed the book. I simply couldn’t reach a broad audience without mass media exposure. Social media and word of mouth only travel so far for us non-celebrities. I needed professional reviews, magazine interviews, and brick and mortar bookstore shelf space. Without those, my book and hence my writing career to date have been doomed to obscurity.

So I’m querying agents with my new book, a piece of middle-grade fiction that I believe will appeal to the same kids that enjoy stuff such as Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, Narnia, and The NeverEnding Story. It’s a fast-paced, fun story but after doing my research, it’s become clear to me that I need to approach the task of finding professional representation in the same fashion Han Solo approaches navigating an asteroid field in the Millennium Falcon. I simply can’t worry about the odds being stacked against me.

Several of the agents I’m targeting post statistics regarding how many queries they receive, respond to, and ultimately sign. The odds aren’t good. Here are a few comparables.

On one hand…

The lowly Atlanta Braves are five times more likely to win the World Series this year than I am to sign with an agent.

I have about the same odds of being assaulted by a firearm as I have signing with an agent.

I also have about the same odds of impregnating my wife post-vasectomy as I have signing with an agent.

That baby is twice as likely to be a genius than I am to sign with an agent.

But on the bright side…

I’m ten times more likely to sign with an agent than Han is to successfully navigate that asteroid field according to C3PO.

And I’m 20 times more likely to sign with an agent than I am to be named the new lead singer of Stone Temple Pilots.

So there you have it. Though the odds may be stacked against me, I’m confident that I’ll find the right literary agent in time. Even if I am a stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder.

Winter is Coming

Image Credit: Pat_Photographies/Pixabay

Based on celebrity news these days, one might think George R.R. Martin is late delivering his next book because he’s too busy killing off well-known entertainers. Scott Weiland, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Alan Rickman - those are just the ones I’m a big fan of. We also lost Lemmy Kilmister, Dan Haggerty, Meadowlark Lemon, Natalie Cole, Wayne Rogers, and Robert Loggia in the past two months just to name a few.

Death is always tough to accept despite the fact we all must face it in the end. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one or the loss of someone famous that we admire, we have to come to grips with the fact that our memories and their past deeds are all we’ll have of them going forward.

Although my little known debut novel Storm Orphans received positive reviews, I caught some flak from several readers over the deaths of a few major characters. I actually consider this something of a compliment. If they cared about their demise, that means they cared about the characters themselves. That in turn means I did at least part of my job as a writer. In the end, no matter how well laid out a plot might be, if the reader isn’t invested in the characters, they aren’t truly invested in the book.

My WIP (that’s “work in progress” for any of your non-acronymers out there) is MG fiction. MG stands for middle grade which is the term used for books geared mainly toward readers ages 8-12. Given that audience, you won’t find a lot of death in this one, but yes, it’s still there. I’m hoping to make a much larger splash in the literary pool with this book. I plan to go the traditional route: entice a good agent via a well-worded query letter and then participate in the necessary voodoo rituals with said agent in order to obtain a deal with a top publisher. If that fails, I may just go door to door visiting elementary school libraries and leaving copies behind like a paperback-planting Johnny Appleseed.

No matter what happens, I promise a story with characters you’ll care about. Winter may indeed be coming both to Atlanta this weekend and to HBO this April, but my next book has a decidedly sunnier outlook.

Cateriffic

Image Credit: Matt Handle

Because I’ve failed so far at becoming the media darling required in order to sell a lot of books I’ve decided to totally phone this post in while I wallow in my misery. This one isn’t about books, or movies, or music, or anything else you might care about. This one is about my cat. I doubt you’ve met her.

My cat is named after a stuffed bunny that plays a minor role in my novel, Storm Orphans. Note, that’s a hyperlink right there. If you haven’t purchased a copy of Storm Orphans yet, you should. In fact, even if you have bought a copy, you should buy another. You can help make up for all the people that won’t buy one.

My cat’s name is Luna. She was an orphan herself two years ago, found abandoned in a parking lot by a photographer friend of my wife’s. Now she’s ours. The cat that is, not the photographer. Luna loves me. She tells me so on a daily basis. She only speaks Cat of course, but I understand her. She follows me around, talks incessantly about her addiction to string, and complains bitterly about how limited her time is out in the yard. She had fleas when we got her. So she’s an inside cat now.

Luna is very affectionate. She loves lying on my chest and giving me kitty kisses. I find this behavior endearing. I’m fairly certain my wife finds it obnoxious. She’s not particularly fond of competition. Technically, Luna is my wife’s cat. She’s the one that insisted we go adopt Luna when her friend posted the (then) kitten’s picture on Facebook. I use this fact to great advantage. Luna shits in a box. As lovable a cat as she is, I find this habit more than a little revolting. That’s what toilets are for and even then, I really don’t want to know about it. Since Luna is my wife’s cat, my wife cleans the litter box. What’s fair is fair.

Now, before you give me grief about this arrangement, keep in mind that my household duties include cleaning the toilets and taking out the trash. Around these parts, no one rides for free. One of the things I’m most looking forward to is my eldest son coming of age so I can hand these responsibilities over to him. There’s a certain nobility in handing down tradition from father to son, even if that tradition is just wiping piss off the rim of the commode.

But I’m getting off track and even when phoning it in, that’s probably bad form. I was talking about my cat. What else is there to say about Luna? She’ll climb an eight foot high curtain in two seconds flat in order to fetch her stuffed toy mouse from atop the curtain rod. She prefers ice cubes in her water dish and she once tore a hole in her own scalp just because she was unhappy about being left in the care of my mother-in-law while we went on vacation. What I’m trying to convey here is that she’s a quirky pet. And truth be told, I might be a bit of a quirky owner. We make a pretty good match.

Everything Old is New Again

Image Credit: Matt Handle

The travesty that was Sam Smith winning multiple Grammy awards last week for serving up a slowed down version of a song Tom Petty did much better 26 years ago reminded me of a well-worn saying. Everything old is new again. While this idea holds true in virtually all facets of life, it seems to be especially true in the world of entertainment. Reboots, remakes, sequels, prequels, and music sampling are just some of the ways artists (and non-artists) find a way to turn something old into something that people will happily plunk down their hard-earned cash for again.

One of the first times I ran across this trend was way back in 1983. I was still in grade school and too young to realize that everything fresh and new wasn't necessarily also original. I was singing along in the backseat to the band Naked Eyes' hit, Always Something There to Remind Me, when my mother sitting in the driver's seat explained that the song had been a hit 20 years earlier. It seemed some strange, ancient creatures named Burt Bacharach and Hal David had written it as a hit for a few different singers of the day, including Dionne Warwick, a woman I only knew from her appearance in the We Are the World video. I'll bet many of Sam Smith's young fans think of Mr. Petty in a similar fashion.

This trend hit me again today while in the Gap, of all places. While waiting for the film, Paddington, to start (a film based on a children's literature character that first appeared 57 years ago by the way) the clothing store of choice for suburbanites everywhere was playing a tune that sounded exactly like an up-tempo version of Lou Reed's Sweet Jane. Like Sam Smith's rip-off of Petty, the lyrics were different, but there was no mistaking the melody. And I'll bet none of the kids shopping there had any clue as to the song's obvious ancestor.

I hear this in music all the time these days and I'm sure this era isn't unique. My recollection of Naked Eyes on that car stereo is proof of that. Today it's Pitbull and Christina Aguilera sampling A-ha or Selena Gomez singing a tune such as Love You like a Love Song that would have sounded perfectly at home on one of Wham!'s mid-80s albums. Twenty years from now, some teenage pop-star will probably be rehashing old Taylor Swift tunes.

Earlier this weekend I saw two more family films on cable. Oz the Great and Powerful is a recent, but poor sequel to the classic 1939 film and Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is a sequel to the 2003 remake of a movie released in 1950. If that isn't enough for you, later this year we'll be treated to the big budget sequel to the original Star Wars trilogy, a reimagining of Mad Max and what I fear will be a terrible remake of the 1994 cult classic, The Crow.

Books aren’t immune to this phenomenon either. Stephen King released Doctor Sleep last year, a sequel to his excellent 1977 novel, The Shining. And that wasn’t the first time he revisited one of his earlier works. In 2001, he and Peter Straub wrote Black House, a follow-up with the protagonist from their 1984 collaboration, The Talisman. Of course, series are a literary staple as well. If we love a particular fictional world or set of characters, we’ll snap up book after book in order to keep up with their latest adventures. Some of the best known current series include George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire and E.L. James’ 50 Shades trilogy.

My own debut novel, a modern tale of the zombie apocalypse entitled Storm Orphans, was compared by many to the hugely popular, The Walking Dead. I've never seen the comic or an episode of the TV series, but just the fact that they both feature the undead hunting down a group of survivors in and around Atlanta suggests they at least tread on some similar territory. While pitching my current Young Adult work-in-progress to friends, I've heard comparisons to The NeverEnding Story, Spy Kids 3, and The Matrix.

I think what all this points to is that it's become extremely rare for any new work of art to be truly original. Whether intentional or not, an educated audience is going to recognize aspects of any new work as reminiscent of something that came before. Always something there to remind me, indeed.

Sometimes Reading a Bad Novel is a Good Thing

Image Credit: Matt Handle

It’s been six months since I self-published by debut novel, Storm Orphans. To say sales have been disappointing would be an understatement. Although I haven’t kept an exact count, I’m almost positive the number of sales is less than 100 so far. Hugh Howey, curse you.

Despite the lack of sales, I’m still confident that Storm Orphans is a good book. It’s fast-paced, exciting, and tells a thoroughly engaging story of surviving in a post-apocalyptic world where your neighbor is more likely to try to eat you than to say hello. True, no one is going to compare it to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or The Grapes of Wrath in terms of impact on the literary front, but I prefer to think of my book as one of those punk bands I liked in high school. The fewer kids that knew their music and had one of their albums, the cooler it made me to be a fan. I wonder how many albums Dead Kennedys or Black Flag sold. Probably not very many.

I read a lot. Most of what I read is the same type of stuff I like to write, sci-fi and horror. Occasionally I’ll pick up some crime, fantasy, or non-fiction just to mix things up. Last night I finished reading a book that was nominated for both the Hugo and a Nebula award. That’s some pretty high praise and so I was expecting a lot. By the time I got through the first hundred pages, I was wondering what the folks that submitted those nominations were smoking the night they chose this book. I’m betting it wasn't legal. Nothing in the next 230 pages changed my mind. The characters were one-dimensional and unlikable. The dialogue was juvenile and the plot downright silly in several places. I just don’t know what those readers saw in it. But you know what? I’m glad I read it. In fact, I recommend that anyone who fancies him or herself a writer pick up a similar book once in awhile.

I’m not suggesting you subject yourself to reading one of the thousands of self-published hodgepodges of clichés, typos, misspellings, and grammar so tortuous only a German dentist could enjoy it that can be found all over Amazon these days. I've picked up quite a few of those online in the past year and dropped every one of them long before I got to its end. Reading one of those cover to cover is too much to ask of anyone. But I am suggesting that sometimes reading a book that just isn't very good is actually good for you.

In my case, I walk away from that reading experience with three things. First, it proves my work can stack up with the most critically acclaimed stuff out there in the sci-fi/horror market today even if I can’t get any of the known critical outlets to even consider reviewing it. Second, just as you can learn from your mistakes, you can also learn from someone else’s. As respected as the author of that book clearly is, he made a number of errors in the writing of that book that I’ll be that much more careful not to make as I write my next one. And finally, it reiterated the logic of a decision I’d already made before I even bought the book. I’ll be pursuing a traditional publishing route once my work-in-progress is complete. Not only do I need the publicity, I’m now that much more confident that my books can hold their own on the same B&N shelves as those of my more illustrious colleagues.