Introducing The $55 Experiment

It's often said that you need to spend money to make money.

I'm not a gambler, but I do like the song and if there is ever a time to learn something from Kenny Rogers, especially via the Muppet Show, it's probably during this era of unrestrained hopefulness and rampant insecurity. Not that I am an advocate of casinos or any other kind of voluntary tax. In fact, I try to stay away from any business that might make organized crime another cent.

That said, I've started a $55 experiment on a Goodreads ad for Love From Planet Wine Cooler.

For most investments, self-publishing has been relatively risk-free for me. I had a lot of help from friends to do the cover and copy edit. Almost all of the stories had been published elsewhere before they appeared in the collection, so I got paid for writing them before I even tried to sell the book.

$55 is not a huge amount, but the difference between gambling and an experiment is writing down the observations and drawing conclusions based on those experiments. I will be sharing the observations about this experiment here on this blog.

To be honest, I have not followed the Goodreads ad best practices that they outlined in a Powerpoint slideshow I scrolled through.

According to their guide, I should have bid 50 cents per click-through and I only bid 11 cents. This will effect how often and at what time of day my ad appears on the site. I also put my own site, http://www.katebaggott.com as the destination of my click through rather than my Goodreads author profile. I will see how things go and switch to their way if things look really dismal.

I'm not sure if you can view my campaign dashboard, but as I write this, my ad had been viewed 13 times and has a 0% click through rate. Since it has only been up for an hour or two, that's not bad.

If any of the other authors reading this would like to share their experiences with a campaign like this, I would really like to hear them!