Mary Sisson's Blog, page 82

Thoughts on targeting ads

As I mentioned, the latest Facebook ad campaign was less efficient than the one before--I had a lot of people clicking who didn't download the book, unlike the last time.

So, how did I target differently? And why do I think it was so much less efficient?

The last time, I targeted two groups: Science-fiction fans who liked stuff I thought was similar to mine, and Kindle owners. It will tell you how naturally adept I am at this that the group that I didn't think to target until the last minute and that I basically targeted by accident, the Kindle owners, responded the most to the ad.

This time around I targeted Kindle owners and many more science-fiction fans. I got many more responses from the sci-fi crowd. Unfortunately, as I've noted, overall that response was more clicks than downloads.

I can't determine which group responded which way, but I'm going to guess that the Kindle people did more of the downloading, and the sci-fi people did more of the looky-looing.

Why? Well, to my way of thinking, the average sci-fi fan is, you know, interested in science fiction. So when they hear of a new book, they go check it out.

How do they check it out? They click (and I pay).

Then once they get to the Amazon page, they see that, yeah, if you've got a Kindle, that book's free. But does Joe Sci-Fi Fan on Facebook actually own a Kindle? Maybe, but maybe not--he'd click anyway, because he's interested in sci-fi.

If Joe doesn't have a Kindle, well, then Trang is $13.99! Oy! That's a pretty penny for a book you've never heard of by an author you don't know! Maybe Joe should get a Kindle. Maybe not. Maybe next Christmas? He'll think it over. In the meantime, he's on to other things.

In contrast, Bobby the Kindle User on Facebooks (they are distant cousins, both members of the storied o'Facebook clan) definitely has a Kindle and is able to pick up that book.

What he's not going to do if he's not interested in that kind of book is click on the link. Period. There are a lot of free books on Amazon, and after an initial phase of gobbling up tons of free books, most Kindle users get way more selective--the realize that getting a bunch of free crap still leaves you with a bunch of crap.

In fact, that greater selectivity probably contributes to looky-looing from the Kindle users as well--Bobby likes sci-fi, decides to check the book out, and then looks at the EIGHTY BILLION unread sci-fi novels on his Kindle and says, Never mind.

But I do think that it's likely that most of the looky-loos came from the sci-fi side. I think the difference between the two campaigns supports that hypothesis, and logically it seems to make sense.

Looking ahead to when I make Trang free everywhere, the nice thing is that you can target different retail populations on Facebooks. I don't know how this works for other online advertising platforms, like Project Wonderful or Google AdWords, but Facebook's targeting is extremely precise. You name the group--Nook users, Smashwords fans, even Sony Reader users (both of them!)--and you can pick it out and market just to it.

Progress report

I finished editing Chapter 6 of the Trang audiobook--uf. The sucker is almost 50 minutes long! I'm definitely going to have to split it into two for a podcast! Not shockingly, my reading toward the end of the chapter is mighty mumbly.

The roofers are coming tomorrow and will be here all week. Which is a very good thing, but it also means I'll be getting up at the crack of dawn and there's going to be a lot of ambient noise...oy. We'll see if anything gets done.

Obscenity, thou heaven-born maid!

So, we were discussing that stupid review by that sanctimonious idiot who didn't read the book description, and now that I've calmed down a little I think I'm OK with it staying up. I'm also totally OK with it getting yanked--the bonehead didn't actually read the book, which I think disqualifies any review. But if Amazon doesn't respond to my request for it to be pulled, I'm not going to push it.

Why not? Because three people already marked it as "helpful," and it's now the "most helpful" critical review. And you know, it IS helpful! If you are too fucking stupid to read the book description and heed the clearly-stated warning about the book's language, that review is going to help you heaps. A review complaining that the book is science fiction and written in English might also help.

If you are sufficiently literate to read the description, that review will give you a good laugh. You might even think, "Ah, so morons don't like this book. I'm not a moron--I like it already!"

I think that's better than moving the warning higher up in the description. I don't want the gist of the description to be Trang: A Novel of Obscenity, Containing Many, Many Very Bad Words. For one thing, despite what that patronizing piece of shit thinks, I did not write the book so that I can use bad words and prove that I am cool, so I don't think it's fair to the book to make the profanity sound like a major theme. For another, I once worked a job where I dealt with the general public, and my experience is that the people who are too dumb to heed a warning sign are also too dumb to heed a really big and obvious warning sign.

I am, however, going to record a language advisory and put it in the first chapter of the Trang audiobook. That strikes me as prudent--people who like to listen to stuff hopefully will process spoken information a little better. Although I'm sure some won't.

(If you're curious, what really frosts my shorts about this is that I feel like I've met people who don't like profanity halfway. I put a warning in there because I don't feel like it's my place to judge a bunch of people I don't know whose attitude toward language differs from mine. And what do I get in return? I get repeatedly insulted by a complete stranger.

Fucking asshole.)

More talk about e-book share

From an article in today's Wall Street Journal about Barnes & Noble's plan to close stores comes some more information by publishers about e-book sales:

Bertelsmann SE & Co.'s Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer books, says e-books now make up about 22% of its global sales, up from almost nothing five years ago. The head of a major publishing rival says he expects e-books will be as much as 50% of his total book sales in the U.S. by the end of 2014. Digital books already account for 60% of this publisher's sales of new commercial fiction, a key category for the nation's largest bookstore chain.

Notice how much the percentage of the market that is e-books varies depending on where you sell and what kind of book you sell. Fiction + U.S. = e-books e-books e-books!

Second set of free days: Postmortem

So, the second set of free days is over. On the one hand, it went quite well--two-and-a-half times as many free copies were downloaded as last time, and I got up to #2 on the science fiction:series free list!

On the other hand: Well, let's just say I paid a lot more than two-and-a-half times as much for the Facebook ads!

It's my own fault--I wanted to see what would happen if I really let a campaign run. (I can afford to be dumb with money on occasion.) So I set the budgets and per-click bids high, I broadened the groups that I advertised to, and I never brought down the per-click bid in the course of the campaign.

The result was a LOT of clicks. Wow. Many more clicks than last time.

But fewer of the clickers actually got books--I paid for a whole bunch of looky-loos. (Clicky-cloos?) Before I had many more downloads than clicks, and the volume of downloads tracked the volume of clicks pretty closely, suggesting that last time most people who clicked went on the grab a copy of the book. So I feel comfortable in blaming too-broad targeting: This time around, I managed to reach a lot of people who were interested enough to click, but not interested enough to get the book.

So: Keep your targeting tight--the temptation to broaden it is always there ("Maybe this group will like the book!"), but move slowly and skeptically (unlike meee!) into any area that isn't tried-and-true.

What's the takeaway for me? Since I do intend to have Trang go free, I'm glad to know that I can push the levers and have a result--and now I know which are the more-efficient levers.

Remember my advice to keep the per-click cost as low as possible? Standing by that one. Also, it's interesting to note how much the relative worth of your per-click bid can change. I bid the same amount that I wound up bidding last time, but this time it bought me far more exposure, presumably because there was less post-Christmas advertising to compete with. Likewise, the Goodreads ad was shown to ten times as many people Saturday as Sunday, presumably because more people happened to be advertising Sunday. So, definitely keep close tabs on results and drop your bid if you can.

I have one last free day before Trang gets out of KDP Select, but I'm not going to advertise on Facebook this time--I actually got an ad into BookBub! That surprised me because last time I tried they didn't even reply to me (of course, that was around the holidays, plus I thought something was off with the scheduling calendar), and this time I had the anti-profanity brigade pulling down my overall rating (did you know that if you've been to university, you aren't allowed to cuss?), but they accepted the ad anyway. Maybe that bit of controversy was just what I needed....

Temptation

OK, now I want to change the subheading of this Web site from "books! books! books!" to "a pixel-stained technopeasant wretch." Or, since I am a woman and keep reading it this way anyway, I could be a pixel-stained technopeasant wench....

ETA: Oh, hey! There's an International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day! That makes me so happy!

Progress report

So today, in keeping with Chapter 5 of the Trang audiobook's general theme of being an enormous pain, it took me probably six takes to fix a bad voice match toward the end of the chapter. It's a place where the narration resumes after Shanti's been going off. The idea with Shanti's voice is that she sounds like I do after I've had a couple of beers--I recently watched Better Off Ted (VERY funny), and Shanti sounds surprisingly like Linda, which makes me wonder if that actress had the same idea. Anyway, the problem was that character voice essentially contaminated the narrator's voice, and today, when I haven't been doing Shanti, I could not for the life of me match that voice. I was about to just go ahead and re-record the entire end of the chapter, but instead I decided to try talking through my nose just a little, and that seemed to do the trick. It's not perfect, but it's not glaringly obvious that the line is looped in like it was before.

In any case, it's done (yay!), and I also edited a big hunk of Chapter 6. Which is a loooong chapter....

Halfway through the second set of free days....

So, I got it together earlier this time around, and Trang is up to #3 on the science fiction: series free list on the first day, instead of not getting there until the second. Yay that.

What's going on that's interesting? Well, just about no one is clicking over at Goodreads--there's no question I'll have to let that campaign run for quite a bit longer to use up the pre-pay. Which is fine, actually--I wasn't going to renew the campaign for the full-price book over on Facebook, so I might as well let Goodreads run. The click-through rate is somewhat lower on Goodreads than on Facebook, but the main reason the number of clicks is so much less is that the Goodreads ad has reached about 1,200 people today, while Facebook ad has reached about 140,000 people.

And I got a one-star review on Amazon because of the bad language. The person was shocked! shocked!! shocked!!! that a book described as containing "some really bad language" would contain...some really bad language! It was especially awful because people on other planets would never use bad language--wow, that is something I did not know.

Anyway, I did something I normally would not do and reported the review. Opinion or not liking the book is one thing; ignoring a warning clearly stated in the book description is something else.

For no particular reason, I'm also going to throw in a link to my favorite recent review. And my guest post on cussing.

Progress report

I was feeling pretty out of it today--too out of it even to polish off Chapter 5 of the Trang audiobook--so I recorded Chapter 6. It's hard to be so out of it you can't even read aloud, you know?

Random chaos

The random chaos sort of pre-descended this week, although hopefully that was a short-term thing and serious chaos won't hit until March. I have rolled my Norwescon membership forward to next year, because spring is just going to be impossible. How impossible? you ask. Get this: I was going to take a stress management class, but I can't, because my schedule is too unpredictable. Oh, the irony.