The results from my Thunderclap campaign

For this last release, I utilized a tool I found from the Self-Publishing Podcast called Thunderclap. It looked interesting and I decided to try a little experiment and run a Thunderclap campaign myself.

What is Thunderclap?

It is essentially crowd funding for social media. This is from Thunderclap: “Social media is an easy way to say something, but it’s a difficult way to be heard. Thunderclap is the first-ever crowdspeaking platform that helps people be heard by saying something together. It allows a single message to be mass-shared, flash mob-style, that rises above the noise of your social networks. By boosting the signal at the same time, Thunderclap helps a single person create action and change like never before.”

Obviously, I think that this particular tool is more suited to causes, and possibly non-fiction, but I think that it can be adapted for fiction as well. So I did run a campaign for Wounded Courage, my June release, to see how it would work. **

The process

Setting up Thunderclap is pretty easy. They even have this awesome guide to help you through it. You set a goal. You can choose between 100, 250, or 500. (minimum campaign is 100 supporters). I mentioned this to other authors, and they said they’d be happy with 20 or 50, but the more I thought about it, the more I considered that 100 is really a good low number. The point is to boost your signal. And if you’re only getting 20 or 50 people to boost the signal, it’s not growing exponentially. You’re not reaching people outside your sphere of influence, and that’s the point of the signal booster.

To track click throughs, I used Pretty Link, which is a WordPress plugin I installed that allows me to use redirects to track what people are looking at on my website. It’s like bit.ly or tiny url, except with these, I can change where these links point with a simple click.

When I set up the campaign, I set up the URL that would get sent out with the message as “http://suzanbutler.com/thunderclapit”. During the campaign it was set up to direct people to my book page. In hindsight, I’m thinking it might be a good idea to create a landing page for people clicking through before the campaign day. But this worked out well. I had well over a couple hundred clicks on that link before the campaign day. So even though I was campaigning for the campaign, people were still getting eyes on my book. The night before, I switched over the link so it would go to my blog post, which I’d specially written for the Thunderclap.

Now, I look at how busy the online world is and when. I checked through Facebook analytics to see when my fans were online. I know how busy Twitter gets at certain times of the day while they’re less busy at other times. It’s the nature of the publishing world. This is how I chose 10am. 8am, and I would miss the Pacific folks in the US by doing it too early. Any later than 10am and the UK people would be heading toward bed. And 10am for me is right around the middle of the night for the Aussie/Japan/New Zealand folks. Honestly, that was the best I could do. There would never be one time zone that would work for everyone.

I started the campaign with 38 days left on the countdown. Cue freakout (mainly because I didn’t realize I only had 38 days left to my release!)

The experience

Now, with 100 people, I actually had to find ways to reach outside my particular online network. I talked to people on email loops and asked them if they could share the campaign with their readers. I asked them to contribute to the campaign. I even talked to people in person and got a few of them to sign up for it. It was actually a lot more work than I expected.

And I’m not saying that it wasn’t worth it to do all that work. It was just more than I expected to need to do. And honestly, it makes me think about that Kickstarter I want to do someday, because really, that will be a ton more work because it’s much harder to crack open someone’s wallet than it is to get them to tweet a link for you.

Even though it was a lot of work, I think that it helped get me out of my shell a little, too. There were a few people that I knew had a rather large online readership that would like my type of book, so I asked a few of them if they’d consider signing up and asking their readers to sign up. I think the hardest part was explaining what Thunderclap was to people who didn’t know. It looks kind of confusing right off the bat, though it’s really not. But it got me talking, which I think is awesome, because sometimes, I think that I retreat into a shell when it comes to asking people for things.

Also, like a Kickstarter, a huge chunk of my supporters came in the last forty eight hours of the campaign. Do you know how nerve wracking that is? I was 22 people from goal on Saturday morning. I called in two favors, and promo’d the hell out of it the last two days, and squeaked in #100 at eleven o’clock at night. Right around 11 hours out from go time. I went to bed and woke up to one more supporter for a total of 101.

Bonus points

I got to make jokes about the Clap. Yeah, tasteless, but still funny. Like fart jokes.

The Results

So, now we come to the fun part, right? Was it worth it? During the 38 day campaign I managed to get over 550 unique individuals to click through my promotions to the Thunderclap campaign page. The actual page views were much higher, a little over 600. So the way I see this is that these people were clicking through to the campaign and even if they weren’t contributing, they were seeing my book.

Why do I say that?

Because I ended up with 101 supporters. So less than a fifth of these people visiting decided to pledge a tweet, Facebook or Tumblr post. That’s actually a much better conversion rate than I expected. 20% visited my link and decided to give me their social media support? That’s awesome. If only I could get that kind of conversion rate when i tweet book links. LOL.

So the campaign went off at 10 am. I watched the clicks on the link explode from zero to over 330 unique hits in about three hours. Not bad. I guess when your social reach is over 250k, 330 hits isn’t too bad at all.

So how many sales did I have from the campaign specifically?

I set up an affiliate for each retailer to track clicks and buys. The link from the campaign went to the blog post, which had all the major retailers buy links on it. These are the click throughs for each retailer. ***

iTunes – 19 clicks
Kobo – 53 clicks
Barnes and Noble – 97 clicks
Amazon – 129 clicks

This actually surprised me, because I have a very strong iBooks readership. More than half of my income comes from iBooks. This probably means that social media is not where that readership comes from. I’m connecting with them in some other way, possibly organically through iBooks the platform. I don’t know. I don’t really have enough data to analyze that. That… is possibly a project that I don’t have time to do.

So, next up, is what did these click throughs generate in terms of sales?

What was the conversion rate?

Now, I’m not really priced for impulse buys. My books are $3.99. I’m almost tempted to try this again with a sale book, just to compare the difference, because I do think that the higher price might be a deterrent for some folks, especially folks that have never read my books.  There’s so many variables with this I’m just not sure that I can portray an accurate picture, you know?

Okay, so keeping in mind the click throughs from above to the various retailers, here’s what the affiliate dashboards tell me I sold through the campaign. And keep in mind, these are JUST numbers for Wounded Courage. There are sales for other things involved, particularly Amazon, because people go on to buy other things and my affiliate code is still attached (BTW, that person who bought all that health stuff? Thank you for that. Your patronage is appreciated!)

iTunes – 0
Kobo – 0
Barnes and Noble – 0
Amazon – 13 (though I did sell a few of my other books, like Killing Honor, and No Strings Attached. Those are not counted here)

Seeing that this is a relatively new pen name, only two books out under it (now three), the lower conversion numbers actually doesn’t surprise me.  Now, I had a lot more sales than this shows, but those were all organic sales through the retailers and through my newsletter, which are tracked differently.

Is it worth it for 13 copies? Maybe? I know because of a friend’s tweet, one of their fans was turned on to my books and glommed it on the spot. Honestly, I’m almost tempted to say it was worth it just for that, because that tweet exchange made my day yesterday. But how many other new fans did my Thunderclap expose me to? I have no way of knowing.

Would I do it again?

That’s a tough one, because I’m already seeing more Thunderclaps pop up in the book world. And if everyone is begging people to join their Thunderclap, it becomes white noise. The effectiveness diminishes.

It was a fun experiment. It was a lot of work, too. In fact, it was enough work that I’m rethinking my future Kickstarter ideas. Not saying that I won’t do them, but my eyes are opened to this crowd funding way of marketing, and it’s a completely different beast from normal marketing.

I’m still evaluating the long term effectiveness. I did notice a lot of new followers on Twitter, and I think that’s a side effect from the Thunderclap. Also, I noticed that people RT’d the Thunderclap tweets, which brought my social reach up even more. I reached over a quarter of a million people yesterday in some fashion. I think I’m going to have to hang back and see how effective it really was in the long term.

And now I have to go write, because Gillian Archer guilted me… and she’s right. But don’t tell her, okay?

Notes:

** I noticed this morning that the social reach is different today than what ran yesterday. I don’t know what that’s about, but I have screenshots, so I’m good.

*** This is not purchases. This is just the user clicking the buy link and going to the retailer website.