Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 4 - Coming to a Close

Final Days, and more reviews of the new services I tried.

Coming to a Close

The campaign is winding down now and I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I put a lot of effort into this campaign to drive nominations and traffic to my Kindle Scout book, and then hopefully I can drive that traffic back out into my other platforms. 

Some of the things I did for this campaign didn't pay off at all, but some of them did even better than I expected. I've talked in previous posts about a couple of the better options I found while running this, and now I'm going to go into detail about some of the meatier (and more expensive) options that I used to drive nominations.

Scout Boost

This became available not long after I was selected through Kindle Scout, so I didn't get a chance to try it that first time around. That always sort of bugged me because I wanted to be able to get a solid review of the program in my Kindle Scout Guidebook but wasn't able to accurately review it. Running this campaign gave me a chance to actually sit down and test out their offering and see how worthwhile it really is.

They will let you pay for their service up to four times, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. It is simply too expensive, so I only ran it twice. I also signed up for their email to get 25% off, but even that isn't enough to take the sting out of the sheer cost of this promotion. When you're talking something that costs over $90 for a promotion for something without a guaranteed return, then you're talking something crazy expensive.

So, how well did it do?

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Not well. It was, in fact, one of my worst performing days in pageviews, and that is compared to similar days with almost no promotion. Considering how expensive this promotion was, I know without a doubt that if I had just upped my facebook promotion to pay directly for clicks (even with relatively expensive clicks) I would have gotten a lot more traction out of it than I got.

I have another promotion with them coming up in a couple of days, so there will be a second chance to see if it performs better this time around, but all in all I'm thinking this one doesn't have a lot of bang for its buck.

Best Indie Press

This one went live Wednesday and works for four days. I actually scheduled this one and then ran into a problem wherein all of the emails they sent me went directly to spam (thanks to Google) so it took a while to get in touch. When we finally did, we had to adjust the days a little bit, which wasn't a big deal for me.

Working with them has been easy, and they are encouraging and offer some new ideas that are pretty cool. For example, I was encouraged to modify my thank you note at the end of the campaign with an offer. 

Basically, I sent in: 

THANK YOU! When you read this, you'll already know whether or not The Everett Exorcism has been selected by Kindle. If it was selected then you'll get a free e-book copy directly from Kindle. However, even if it hasn't been selected, I would like to give you a copy anyway. To do that, though, you'll need to give me your email address so I can tell you when the book is available for free on Kindle. Click here to give me that information: http://bit.ly/teefree Thank you so much for your support!

The note now offers a direct copy of the book whether or not it is picked, and this will hopefully get signups either way after the campaign ends. It'll also help with early reviews if the book isn't picked, so it is a win/win.

They also recommended creating a book trailer, which I did, and then their goal is to drive traffic through likes to the trailer to get people to visit on facebook.

All in all, some really solid suggestions...Which means, the only thing left to do is see how well they performed...

Book Trailer

I know this one is just showing up out of the blue, but that is because it sort of happened out of the blue. I didn't really plan to make a trailer early in the campaign, and none of my efforts were tied to it, but about midway when I was bored and without anymore things to work on I decided to try and have a book trailer built.

I made one previously for Raven's Peak and thought it turned out really well, but this time I wanted something different. I wanted something themed around the genre rather than something that tries to stand as a real trailer. Ideally, it would get the blood pumping and make people excited without really delving too much into the story.

Did I succeed? You can be the judge. I do wish the guy who made the video had made it a little bit darker, but the music cue and timing is spot on, and the after effects are really cool.

So the question is: how did I do it, and do I recommend it...

Yes. For the most part, it was a super easy experience and the trailer came out really well. It was a little longer than I would have liked, but that isn't really a problem. It looks good in Facebook's timeline and only took a couple of days to make. Fiverr is a great place to find people to work on something like this, and Videohive is a great place to get videos you can use in the trailer. Frank is the

I will try to keep track of it and see how things pan out, and then I'll let everyone know what comes of it.

Social Advertising

Twitter has been fairly steady but not amazing with results. Facebook is, of course, rather expensive. My clicks have been coming in around 4-10 cents per click, which is worse than expected. I actually stopped the ad, changed a few things and modified the targeting, and then I'm running it again to see if this time I can do better.

I made a bookbub ad and I'm giving that one another try, but the clickthrough was abysmal the first time around. Reddit is too costly to recommend. Stumbleupon is pretty good, but I'm not sure how well that translates to page views because of how they display pages.

Goodreads is just completely not worth it. I overpay dramatically for clicks, and in general they still don't see as much traffic as I would like. In general, it just isn't really panning out and I don't think I'll bother re-upping the account next time. Bing didn't do bad, but the cost per click was expensive.

With Google, my ads have been costing about 1 cent per click, and I'm directing the traffic to my giveaway page. That has actually paid off really well and seems to be driving a lot of traffic back out to my campaign page. Penny click ads can be worthwhile when they work, but it's been slipping in results for the last few days and I don't know if it will manage to stay valuable.

In general, with ads you will want to start small and slowly ramp up. Pay as little daily as possible, monitor results, and make sure you are getting value out of it. The ads that seem to do well you can ramp up to higher cost per day, and the ads that perform poorly should be turned off or re-evaluated. 

Don't go overboard or wish for huge results, because it is really easy to spend dozens or even hundreds of dollars and get almost nothing in return. I play around with ads on a regular basis because I want to get better at using them, and I've gotten to a point where I can get decent results fairly cheap. That being said, it cost me a lot of wasted money to get to this point.

However...it feels like email advertising (which used to be an author staple) is really slipping in value. It is expensive and the results keep diminishing, so I think we are reaching a point where (at least for a while) social advertising might be one of the better ways to generate returns. Just be careful, take your time, and constantly monitor your results.

Upcoming

One more post about the campaign itself, and then you can expect to see a post after the acception/rejection email is sent from Kindle Scout, and that should cap off my Kindle Scout flurry of posts. I didn't go way into depth about what Kindle Scout is or if you should try it out (I did that last time around when I ran my Raven's Peak campaign and wrote my guidebook) and I wanted all of this information to be a pure supplement of everything I did before. I used a lot of the tips and tricks from my guidebook so I'm not going to spell them out again.

I've had a lot of fun with this one with trying all sorts of new things, because a lot of the promotional methods I've been trying out will also go into new promotional campaigns I run to helps sell books or for other reasons. 

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