Advertising your book on a budget

I like giving away books more than I like the idea of spending money on advertising because I believe if a product is good enough it will sell itself. But in December 2012, for Potbake’s fourth birthday, we decided to offer free ebooks and spend no more than USD 100.00 advertising the offering. It sounds strange right: Avertising something that’s free? But I’ve since learnt that not because something is free means people will know about it. Imagine you’re in the grocery and you walk along all the aisles except the one where they happen to be giving out free samples of a wine or snack you really want to taste.

So, we had an offer and we knew our max budget, but I didn’t have a plan except to run the ads on Facebook and Google and share posts, tweets and pictures on Google+, Twitter and Instagram on the actual days of the offering. When I mentioned this to dad, he gave me something to think about: do movies just show up one day in the cinema? I thought about it and two weeks before I created an article on potbake.com promoting the offering (which turned out to be a great thing because as it turns out advertising an external URL on Facebook was a lot cheaper than an actual Facebook post; compare USD 0.05 to USD 0.65). We shared the link on the different channels we mentioned, got Retweets, Likes, Shares and +1s. Randy Baker was kind enough to post an article on the 15 December mentioning the free books. Then we scheduled campaigns on Facebook and Google with ads that linked to our website article rather than the links to the books on Amazon.com. This was important in terms of measuring the traffic the campaigns generated. If you’re an author or publisher it’s a pretty good idea to have a website, Facebook Page, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest account. This isn’t vanity and there’s no need to daily slave after maintaining these accounts, but you need to connect with as many people possible. I went along with no clear plan but hopefully the madness might make sense. The first step was to enrol the book in Amazon’s KDP Select which facilitates 5 days of free promotion and allows Select Members to borrow the book for free.

Advertising on Facebook

The first thing I learnt is that you can’t advertise to the people of the world. You need to have some idea of who might be interested, what’s their age, where are they from.  For example, I needed to advertise to folks who have some interest in an Amazon Kindle. But registering that interest to the world may yield a result in the millions so I targeted the people of the Caribbean interested in Amazon.com, the Kindle or Kindle Fire. Note: If the books were for sale, I wouldn’t have advertised to people with these interests between the ages of 13 and 17. While they might be interested, they would have less buying power. But the books were free. I included teenagers. Figure 1 shows that an audience of 105,580 from the Caribbean fit this profile.

Figure 1 (Click here to see full results)

At 12:00 AM, Christmas Day, the Facebook Ads went live at USD 0.07 max bid per 1,000 impressions, max budget USD 15.00. That day the campaign reached 47,462. Only 157 clicks. The next day I expanded the interests to include “iPad”, “Samsung Galaxy Tab” and “Toshiba Thrive”. The campaign reached 87,615 and generated 199 clicks but compared to the first day where Amazon.com’s KDP report showed that 203 free books had been downloaded, the figure had significantly dropped—although I had expanded the reach by thousands. Please note that I have no way of knowing or measuring where users, who downloaded the ebooks, saw the ad, on Facebook, Google or a Direct Partner: a big oversight on my part. Looking back I should have prompted them for feedback. If you downloaded the ebook you can still leave a comment here. Figure 2 shows the results of the Facebook campaign where frequency is the number of times the same person may have seen the ad.

Figure 2 (Click here to see full results)

 

Advertising on Google

Initially I had it in mind to use Google to target people who weren’t hip on Facebook and were more likely to perform keyword searches. My target audience were people in the Caribbean and were likely to search for “free kindle books”, “free ebooks” or “Caribbean writers” on Christmas Day. 72 clicks that first day cost USD 9.92. On the 26 and 27 I expanded the reach to Miami, Toronto, Brooklyn and London, wanting to target the Caribbean Diaspora and while the clicks measured at 147 and 183 respectively, the number of free downloads on Amazon.com didn’t budge much.

Figure 3 (Click here to see full results)

Figure 3 and Figure 4 show the number of impressions by ads and keywords respectively with the highest number of ad impressions going to the one with “Free Kindle Downloads” in the headline; a total of 42,283. Over a three day period, the Google Adwords campaign cost USD 47.95, at an average of USD 0.12 per click.

Figure 4 (Click here to see full results)

 

Advertising on other channels

I didn’t spend money to advertise on Google+, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr. I depended on followers, acquaintances and friends, hash tags and writer and reader communities on Google+. Amazon Associates offers a URL Shortener service which embeds their products on Twitter. A post on Twitter from @potbake or @lyndonbaptiste looked something like: Get "oOh My Testicles!" free on your #Kindle: http://amzn.to/V8Z8ax. #freekindlebooks #ebook #amwriting #amreading. Folks follow these hash tags. Use them. I noticed spikes in downloads after tweeting the offers with the hash tags #amreading and #amwriting. Following the results closely on Amazon.com I followed with this tweet: Boy Days ranks #4,258 free in the Kindle store. Do you think we can take it to the top 100? Please RT. I threw out a challenge and asked for help. Users retweeted the post. Their followers would have seen it, so although the book doesn’t make it anywhere close to the top 100, the word’s spreading.

I also posted in relevant communities on Google+ using more hash tags because this service doesn’t have Twitter’s character restrictions. On Instagram I shared images and tagged them using the same hash tags. However I can’t say the results were fantastic. I guess sometimes you just got to spend money, even when you’re giving away something that’s free. Weird huh?

The results

I planned to document but not necessarily share the results. When I first published the promotion, Stephen Hall, a Bajan author, asked that I share something about the experience; and I promised to bare all, because I strongly believe in sharing anything that can help others even if I don’t know how the heck it helped me. It’s important to me that you remember this isn’t to let my left hand know what my right is doing. It’s to share my experience. If one writer or publicist benefits in terms of how they think about or plan a future campaign I will say sharing this information was worth it.

Here are the results: over a 3 day period I spent USD 77.95 promoting the offers: USD 30.00 on Facebook; USD 47.95 on Google Adwords. On the Christmas Day, 203 free books were downloaded. On the 26 and 27 of December, 161 free books were downloaded. I’ll share the lessons that immediately come to mind and update them as they untangle.

1. You don’t have money to advertise to the people of the world. You need to have some idea of who might be interested, what’s their age, where are they from.
2. Not because something is free means people will automatically know about it.
3. As an author it’s a good idea to have a website.
4. Create a Facebook Page, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest account.
5. Promoting is a 24 hour job. A Smartphone is a pretty handy device. Get one. Keep it close.
6. If you’re using Facebook to advertise, it’s cheaper to advertise links to external websites than Facebook posts. I got great results with a max bid of USD 0.07 for 1,000 impressions.
7. Create your Facebook Ads at least one week in advance to the actual event. They take time to get approved.
8. Being in control of your ebook gives you the power to promote it as you like through Amazon KDP and other services.
9. Looking back, I should have asked users, who downloaded the books, for feedback on how they came across the promotion: which channel, which keyword, which ad?
10. One U.S. dollar spent on advertising goes a long way on Facebook and Google. Don’t be tempted to overspend.
11. Don’t rush the results. Don’t sit around refreshing a browser page hoping to see the number of impressions and clicks steadily climb.
12. Stick to your advertising plan.
13. Network with like-minded people. Help them expecting nothing in return. It’s okay to ask for help to spread the word.

I’m not sure I can truly measure the results just yet, but it feels pretty great to have given away all those books for Christmas. People have contacted me on Facebook, Twitter and other channels saying “Thanks for the free books!” and that’s worth a lot more to me than money. Randy Baker who was kind enough to promote the event with an article also reviewed Across The Caribbean­—a review which reflects the spirit with which we produced the book. I’m thinking about all the Kindle users who happened upon the promotion and now I’m imagining the glee of turning into a grocery aisle and saying, “Oh boy… free samples.”

Do you have any ideas you'd like to share? Post them as comments.