Well, it’s all over but the shouting…and three book titles that I won’t know until Sept. 1st.
Before I start here, my campaign ended early on FB due to a payment glitch. I tried and tried and tried and tried to pay them the second half of the money due and….no go. Nada. Which is weird because I purposefully tried it like 5 minutes after I ordered Chinese food online wherein I had to use my actual card information (I also purposefully picked this restaurant for this purpose…did I say ‘purpose enough?). Got my food! It was yummy. FB? Nope.
It just wouldn’t save the three digit code on the back of the card no matter what I did. Of course, I can’t get through to an actual person. Not sure Meta has human employees at this point.
So, that’s unpaid and I have no idea what to do about it. I suppose, somewhere down the line, if FB/Meta finds this important they’ll contact me. At least that’s what I told the bot.
Now for the rest of the bad news.
Ok, so, we sold a grand total of 44 books in the Of War Series. Which ain’t bad. Honestly, I haven’t seen sales like that in a long time. BUT
You’re reading that right. I sold 44 books and made a grand total of $15.44 (before taxes).
One more time……
You know, just so my position is clear.
I also sold a whopping 3 books through Draft2Digital
However, I won’t know what titles they are until the end of the month when the statement is ready. From the Amazon sales breakdown it appears, to my eyes anyway, that 1 person was intelligent enough to download the entire series for just under $6.00. One. Some of the others may have downloaded the first two in the series. If that’s the case, well, “Child of War-A God is Born” does end on that nasty cliffhanger so…….that’ll be $5.99 if they want to read “Rising Son” or any other book in the series. Except “Christmas Eve” which went from it’s usual $0.99 to $1.69.
If you want to know why I did that….look closely at the D2D chart and watch me be proven right…again. That ’83’ for “books sold last month”, yeah, that’s the Smashwords sale. Those are ALL FREE downloads. Yep, it’s right there for you in color Free vs. (a shitty) $0.99.
You might also notice that, for my 3 sales, I earned a whopping $1.53…which is better than Amazon but still not so good. This is the Fat Orange One’s economy so all us little people have to be careful here. On Amazon I got my big beautiful $0.35 per book and here I got the bigger beautifulier $0.51 per book.
It’s hardly worth it no matter how you slice it. Stephen King once said that if you were writing for money you were playing a fool’s game. (I know, big talk! Still, he turned out to be right.)
Obviously, I didn’t come anywhere near breaking even on this thing. The good news there is I used money I made from editing other people’s books to run my campaigns so it didn’t hurt the beleaguered household finances.
I am unable to say where the 44 of sales originated. If they saw the ad on Amazon, FB, Insta, TikTok or Book Cave then bought a book. But, I can say this. The Amazon ad netted me 3 sales.
49 clicks total, which means I spent about half my budget here. Again, in this economy, that’s probably a good thing. Also….
Amazon netted 77,028 impressions resulting in a lousy 49 clicks. Credit where it’s due, they did give me the most ‘impressions’ of all three places. However……
The FB/Meta add garnered me 250 clicks with just under 9,000 impressions! (That’s just a fancy way of saying how people actually SAW your ad. That’s all.)
It looks like we got more traffic originating here than anywhere else. So if I ever do this again, I’ll stick with FB/Meta for the advertising and ditch Amazon.
As for the breakdown of the people who clicked….yeah, I was surprised too.
BookCave offers me this for how my ad did.
Grand total of 218 clicks off that ad.
All-in-All, FB/Meta and Book Cave beat Amazon by a country mile for visibility and then sales….as you probably guessed by now.
While we didn’t make our money back we did get a lot of useful info. Like….don’t bother with Amazon ads. Advertise elsewhere but not with the expectation of making your money back and don’t spend more than you can very comfortably afford, it’s just not worth it. On Amazon, I “coat tailed” on some pretty well known authors and upped my bids for those clicks, while I got 77,000 impressions only 49 people clicked it…out of 77,000! You’re better off at the casino or buying lottery tickets.
I keep coming back to this in my mind
Kindle Unlimited.
When I went to KDP yesterday, while I was severely upping the prices on my books, I checked every one of those books to be absolutely sure they were NOT in Kindle Unlimited (officially). They were not. So there’s some new scheme Bezos has cooked up and is trying to get away with. My job is to find out how to use it to my best advantage.
Yes, it is.
As a little experiment, I’m considering putting “Women” for sale at $0.99 on Kindle only and see how it goes. See if they throw it into Unlimited on their own. Again.
Lisa Beth Darling 