Thursday 14 Jan 11:30
Despite my rational brain, I still keep waking up with giddy nerves when I check my amazon sales, as if things are going to change overnight. If I’m addicted, I figure you might like to hear if there’re any spikes, too. I had one extra book sale on Tuesday, and this morning I woke to find 500 pgs were read on KU. Not likely to get me on any bestseller lists, but it’s a spike, and for right now, as long as things keep ticking up, I’ll take it. Still getting my mind across the cost-per-click (CPC) significance and other indicators of my amazon ad’s performance. Right now the CPC is at 0.45 and I think that’s pretty good; still it says the sales it’s generated are at 0. . . You’re meant to run test ads, so next week we’ll add another to compare. Didn’t get the bookbub, but DID get an email back, saying I could resubmit for free promo. Done! Next, I submit my cover details to 99Designs (discount via Self-Publishing Podcast here) for ON FIRE, the re-launch of my backlist romantic comedy title, THE VELVET ROPE DIARIES, which had the worst cover known to man—even my agent laughed after she saw it, and before she said, “But we can’t change it.” Trad pubs!
Friday 15 Jan
So, today I posted the best design from my 99Designs contest for ON FIRE on pinterest, alerting FB and Twitter followers to check it out.
Sat 16 January
Though this has been the week of technology meltdown in my house, I persisted, not wanting to be caught out making up for weekend work on Monday. The theme for today and the coming days is ON FIRE cover art. 99 Designs is great for a number of reasons: 1. You get a lot of choice for the same price most decent artists charge 2. It forces you to stay on a timeline, which is helpful for people like me, who hate to make decisions, and 3. It makes social media sharing and involving your mailing list in the process simple by offering to create polls for readers, friends, watchers, etc, to vote on which cover designs they like best—and because of the timeline, you can’t put any of this off. I did this today. I keep hearing how readers want to be involved today, so this is the most involved I’ve ever had them, and over 40 people voted in my poll! By the time they hear about the book release, they’ll already have a connection to it. 4. This is good validation for my instincts; responses seemed to prefer the same designs as I did.
Sun 17 January
Mulled over the poll results, suggested edits to designers, viewed some new designs and adjustments, and sent out another poll to some contemporaries, who I believe would enjoy my books and spread the word. Also shared some interesting social media links for my self-pub followers.
Monday 18 January
Got to the final round for the 99 Designs cover art contest. Sent out a constant contact email to my readers and close circle contacts to ask for their opinions. Updated the style of my emails from the old lazy template I was using last year, which made a huge difference in the clean look of it.
Tuesday 19 January
Today was all about engaging with the overwhelming number of responses I received in response to my poll (which I added to my fb and twitter feed), most of which liked the same cover that I did (see image up top here). Cool.
I had listened to a podcast episode of The Smarter Artist earlier, and one of the pieces of takeaway was to think about the social media outlets where you naturally engage and excel at doing so. For me, this is pinterest, mainly because I use it all the time—to find fashion items, to look at room designs, party ideas, and lots of other random searches, but also because I like the visual format of having all of my internet favorites organized and in one place. I find it easy to use and visually stimulating. So, funny enough, when I went to post this latest cover poll favorite to Pinterest, I took a look at my visitor numbers. I regularly get more visitors on Pinterest than I do on any other social media outlet, so why aren’t I doing more there? Probably because it isn’t as easy to post to Pinterest on my mobile as it often is with other outlets, so I adjusted some settings to make it easier to “forward” pages to Pinterest on my iPhone, and that was probably my biggest hurdle. Hopefully we’ll get even more engagement here in future.
In other news, my amazon ad finally attracted a sale—yes, ONE sale! That’s $2.99 sale after a $7.72 spend, and over 10K of impressions. Doesn’t sound great, but if that keeps up and my ranking significantly increases, it might snowball. I’m not holding my breath just yet.
Wednesday 20 January
Today, in addition to signing up for tumblr, where I’ve heard long format posts are appreciated, I want to post and share this next installment of the 30 days of marketing actions blog, so I’m having a moment of reflection, now there are only 10 days to go. I think the truth is that marketing is never going to be my favorite thing to do, but this accountability really did work for me, and I think I’m going to try to keep it up even after the 30 days because you’re in there, and it doesn’t therefore seem like some enormous, insurmountable task; it’s often just a few minute thing if you know just what to do and have all the passwords and prep in place to get it done quickly (how to find and format photos, etc.)—which is what you’ve got if you’ve been checking in regularly. I looked on amazon, and it’s pretty pathetic the scale of my numbers, but we’ve tripled last month’s book sales, and last month was Christmas. So . . . ten days left to see how we go with this experiment.
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