I've never come out of my own pocket for promotion except for materials for a book signing. Other than that my publisher did most of the advertising and I am sure they paid for that as they all do.

I've thought of maybe doing a little paid advertisement for my next book but I've found out it's rarely worth it. Most authors see free promotion does the trick. The thing about promotion is that it's an ongoing thing and you gotta do something that's effective. Most times paid advertising doesn't bring back the results you want. The best things to advertise in cost an arm and a leg anyway so most authors can't afford to participate without their publisher's help. And what an author can afford most likely won't be effective. Cheap paid advertising is worse than free advertising.

Most of the authors I know who've done the book trailers, paid ads, paid email lists, etc wish they hadn't done it. I got tons more promotion and results then they did by using social networks and book reviews. Nothing beats a book review for promotion.

Best Wishes!

http://www.stacy-deanne.net

I found Google Adwords really bad. They have an automated system that checks that the site your ad links to is relevant to the keywords you choose. I linked my ad to my book's page on Amazon, using keywords that I know very well to be relevant.

After some initial success (quite a few clicks, although no sales) Google stopped showing my ad and marked it with a low quality score - its algorithms did not think my keywords relevant because the algorithms are not clever enough to actually read through my book!

I am very suspicious of their cost model. They act like a drug dealer: they get you lots of clicks really cheap at first, then they coerce you into raising your bids to retain the same rate of page impressions.

I found Facebook much fairer. They have a similar cost model and will raise prices if your ads do not generate a good click through rate, but they do not try to be too clever like Google and start spidering the site your ad links to. With Facebook it is also possible to make small tweaks to your add and then it will give you another chance and give you lots of cheap page impressions before it ascertains the quality score. This actually helped me to improve my ad's quality, because I was able to experiment with the ad's target demographic. You can also show your ads to specific groups such as "people who like reading" or even "people who like Australia or aliens".

However, as I mentioned, the adverts generated clicks but not sales and so it extremely difficult to measure whether or not they are worth the money.

I tried Google Adsense and it didn't work.

I'm a new author and I found that CoffeeTime Romance offers good services for low prices.

Just posting a review I received of my book, Crossroads at Isca from Coffee Time Romance. Laurel
CROSSROADS AT ISCA
LAUREl LAMPERD
ISBN#: 9781849237772
Trade paperback
$12.99
213 Pages
Historical Romance
Faine is a Briton and the niece of a very important man. She is beautiful and sings and plays the lyre beautifully. She also writes songs. She is unusually well educated for a woman of her time and place.
Titus Antoninus is a Roman Tribune from a very important family. He is very handsome and diligent in his duties. He has a bright future ahead of him.
Faine and her cousin Marella are asked to entertain the local Romans by their uncle. This evening is more important than either one of them could guess. Soon their lives will change dramatically and lead them to places far away from home.
This is a sweeping story set in a very turbulent era. Faine is a gentle character who soon shows her strength. Titus is also very strong character. Theirs is not a cozy romantic romance of hearts and flowers but compelling all the same. The story is rich with vivid characters and full of drama and action. The author does a good job of describing both the Roman and Briton lifestyles of the time and leaves the reader in anticipation of the next installment at the end.
Maura
Reviewer for Coffee Time Romance & More

Gregory,

I haven't advertised on GoodReads, but I have used adwords and also Facebook ads in a very small way.

If you pay per click, you don't pay for all the thousands of "impressions". Mostly, you are able to choose whether to pay for a click (more expensive) or an impression.

Recently, I did a contest, and created an ad for it. I think I got 4 clicks, which cost me about $2.50 each, but I got 93,000 impressions.

I did set a daily limit of $10.

It didn't translate into sales... but they say that you need to make 7 "impressions" with a book before a reader is likely to consider buying it.

If you do pay for either clicks or impressions, be sure to take advantage of the ability to track your visibility by looking at the charts.

Good luck.

I'd be curious to hear from anyone who uses paid online ads on Goodreads or elsewhere (such as Google adwords). $0.50 per click seems ridiculous to me - you need a very high conversion rate for that to be worth it. So who uses paid advertising, and does is work for you?