Cassidy Advertisements Are Live

Ads have officially begun! In preparation for Cassidy‘s upcoming release, I bought several ads on Twitter and Facebook. I’ve played around with ads before and written about some of my experiences here, but this time I’m going cheaper and, as a result, broader. So this is another experiment in itself.

In the past, I have experimented with targeted advertising, that is, advertising geared toward a very niche or specific group (example: people who like books and Kindle and science-fiction and oceans). That way I know my ad is reaching people who would be interested in the product. These ads are expensive, but worth it, especially because the cost per click can be low if you really nail the right group (which is something I was still trying to work on). I have also only worked with Facebook and Amazon in the past, not Twitter.

This time, I’m going broad. I’m advertising to people who like books and that’s it. Why? Well, a few reasons. For one thing, I want to try something new and see how this goes. For another reason, it’s actually way cheaper and I put more ads out there. Granted, those ads don’t make as much of an impact per-person, but it’ll still do something. I’m also doing ads on Facebook and Twitter this time, not Amazon.

I have yet to determine which ad type will be a better deal. I may come to learn that a combination of the two methods is preferred.

I am still new to this game and have yet to determine my read-through rate, that is, how many people who read book 1 end up reading book 2. For me to effectively price my ads, I really need to gather that information first. That’s why I’m still taking everything slowly.

If you take a look at the whole series, you can see the  cumulative RT (read-through). It’s easy to determine this once you have the sales, which again, I’m still working on, so right now I’m just estimating it all. At the end of the month, if you look at all the sales of the last book in the series, and divide it by the sales of the first book in the series, then that’s the cumulative RT. So if I sold 21 copies of book one and let’s say my four-part series is complete and I sell 13 copies of book 4, then 13/21 = 0.619, meaning I have roughly a 62% read through.

The highest drop off will most likely come between books 1 and 2. People will start the first one but decide not to finish it or continue with the series. But if they’ve made it to book 2, readers are more likely to continue to buy subsequent books. So the RT increases, ideally, from book to book.

Again with this four-part series, if I am  advertising book 1, I want to know how many sales of book one will lead to sales of book 2, 3, 4… I do that math and let’s say I figure out that  for each sale of book 1, I make $6.00 when you factor in the likely hood that I will sell the others.

For every 20-40 or so clicks on an online advertisement, I may only get one sale. This can vary wildly, of course, and relies heavily on the effectivity of the ad, which is something I am still working on. Assuming I make one sale for every 30 clicks in a Facebook ad, that means the highest cost per click I can tolerate can tolerate is $6.00 / 30 = $0.20. So if my cost per click is higher than that, I’m losing money.

This game of math is something I’m still figuring out, as you can see, and experimenting with all the time. I’m sure the more I do it, the more I will master it. I am also fully aware that the more books I get out in the series, it become more worthwhile to spend all this money on adverting. (Right now it isn’t really worth it because I only have two books out).

Hopefully this ad push will generate some more pre-orders. Last I checked, Cassidy is still at a whopping zero pre-orders, which is kind of a bummer.

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