New Marketing Skills

After about a month of badgering Amazon to find out why I couldn’t see any details of the advertising campaigns I was trialing I’ve finally got links on my phone to my American campaign and my UK campaign. I can at last see the results of the campaigns – and more importantly that they are not secretly bankrupting me.

I’m sure that many of you will be saying but don’t you just click on your advertising tab and it’s there? Well you’d think so wouldn’t you, but Amazon hate me so no, in my case.

I need to pay tribute to Dave Chesson whose course on how to use Amazon advertising has definitely helped me so far. I haven’t bought the full force of his learning to fruit yet for reasons which I will discuss later. (E.g. Use of KDP rocket to identify keywords for advertising campaigns.)

It is important to note that these campaigns – in spite of garnering 19,014 impressions, 90 clicks (USA) and 1,875, 2 clicks (UK) – have not resulted in any sales yet. (For those of you who don’t know impressions are the number of times Amazon has flashed up my book, amongst other information and clicks are the number of times people have thought ‘let’s take a closer look at that one.’ I only pay for clicks.)

So much for the theory that 1 sale should result from 10 clicks but on the bright side Kindle Unlimited reads are slightly up. (Although I’d like to have some income in the ideal world, being read is definitely up there as an aim.)

This reassures me that the keywords I have haphazardly put in there so far are doing their work. It also reassures me that the cover is not completely putting people off. So there are 3 possible problems. The first is that I believed someone who said that the normal price for an ebook was €5.99 (and as the price I had the book at hadn’t affected sales to date – i.e. pretty much no sales at whatever price I tried €0.99, €1.99, €2.99) I thought let’s try it. It may have put people off especially in this time of recession. So I am back to €2.99 which seems a bargain to me.

The second is that the description I’ve got for the book must be rubbish. I’m currently trialing a new description which I wrote according to some basic guidelines of copywriting. I’m still not convinced it’s right but for the purposes of experimentation I’ve decided to give it a few weeks before I launch my new even more copy-written version. Unfortunately I have no skills in this area but I’m trying – some say very trying🤣

The third possibility is that I’ve just written a book that no-one wants to read. I know it does not fall into any comfortable genres that people know they will enjoy but still, surely some people like to try something different. And ‘some people’ would be enough for me. I don’t need Harry Potter levels of fame. Just as well😉 Anyway it’s too late to worry about this possibility now. It is what it is.

I will be back in probably two weeks to share the effect of the change of description. I hope there are some.

In the meantime I am off to learn how to do e-mail lists and carry on tarting up my website. One day I will do some writing again which is good because I’ve got some really good ideas fermenting.