The Business of Writing: Advertising.
Book News
- Savory & Supernatural, the second in the Movie Magic novellas, is getting some lovely reviews. If you've read this cute movie shoot supernatural romance, please feel free to drop a note on the review site of your choice.
- Ask Cassandra, the first in my new Olympus Inc Trojan Women arc, is coming out on June 4th! Pre-order now for secrets, murders and hot sex in the attic. If you haven't read any of the Olympus Inc. books, and the TBR pile is getting kind of intimidating, this is also a great jumping-in point.
- Love, Laodice, the second Trojan Women book, is also now available for pre-order! I just saw the final lineart for the cover today and Alison has really outdone herself. There's some serious smoulder.
The Business of Writing: Advertising
Ohhhhh, advertising. You have to happen, and yet, I kind of hate you.
The rationale behind advertising is that there is an audience for my books, but unless they know about my books, they won't find them.
Word of mouth is vastly important, and, honestly, the second best thing you can do for me and my career is tell people about my work if you think they will like it. Maybe don't try and sell your friend who only enjoys gritty true-life crime on Bespoke & Bespelled, but your friend who watches The Great British Sewing Bee, or really liked The Ex Hex might enjoy it!
But for everyone else, there's the algorithm. The idea is that if you like the kind of thing I write, you might see an ad I create for that thing, and then you might click on it, and then you might buy it. But I have to make that ad and pay for it, and hope that I have targeted it correctly and used the right images and phrases to find the right audience for my work.
And also, I have to hope that the algorithm won't let me down. This is a perhaps futile hope.
An example: Recently, I donated to several charities working in Palestine, and now my ads are easily 70 percent horrifying images and harrowing stories from agencies asking for donations. This is meant to be "hey, here's someone who donates, let's see if she's willing and able to give a bit more" but it feels like punishing emotional manipulation.
Less disturbing, but more annoying, are the ads I get for raunchy romances that are badly written. I am not saying I do not appreciate good smut. I very much appreciate good smut, and even pretty okay smut. But I was an English teacher for ten years. I am not going to read anything where dialogue is formatted badly or punctuation is but a distant dream. So far, I cannot train the algorithm to recognise that I want something like this, but good.
Anyway, here's what I've been spending on advertising, and also my sales numbers:
Royalties
So, this is fun! Here are my total royalties for last year (excluding my trad published titles):
Bear in mind this is just net royalties - it's not taking into account any business expenses, taxes or Kiwisaver (retirement) contributions. But I am happy that in raw terms, I've already made more in the last five months than I did in the whole of the previous year.
Speaking of expenses!
Advertising Spend
This is something I've only really started doing this year, because it didn't make sense to spend money on advertising until I had multiple books in a series out.
So far, I have used the Instagram side of the Meta Business suite, which serves ads on both Facebook and Instagram. I've been targeting (horrible word) women between 18-55 whose interests include romance novels and romcoms, and I have mostly targeted either the US exclusively (where most of my sales come from) or a global English-speaking mix: the UK, Ireland, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
In March I also included Nigeria and India, two countries with large populations where English is widely spoken. Unfortunately, as you can see, this had the effect of vastly inflating impressions (number of people who saw the ad) without noticeably increasing clicks (number of people who went through to the website, a small number of whom might actually buy the book). What I want is the largest number of clicks for the least amount of money spent, and I'm still experimenting to find where that is.
So far, royalties (green) is more than ad spend (orange), which is good! (That spike of royalties in Jan is because of Hera Takes Charge pre-orders, and doesn't represent a phenomenally successful cheap advertising campaign, alas.)
Ideally, I would spend 20-30% of my royalty income on ads, but at the moment it's more than that, while I build my backlist and gain more readers. And, probably, experiment more with genres and writing to market.
I doubt I'll ever write exclusively in one genre or stick with one series forever. I like playing with genre too much to settle down, and I didn't partially quit my dayjob to be bored or boring. However! This is also a job, and I want to make a living from my labour. When I make decisions about what book to write next, it's partially with an eye on what readers might want to purchase.
And then, I have to figure out how to sell it. That's the part I kind of hate. But it's got to be done, and so, I will learn to do it.
Advertising! Huzzah!