Not for profit advertising

When I wrote my first two novels, I relied exclusively on word-of-mouth - specifically, my mouth. If I didn't tell someone directly about my books, they did not purchase them. For my last novel I wanted to try out advertising. My goal wasn't to make money (sales > ad spend). It was just to tell more people about my book. To do this, I have tried two different services.

Your mileage may vary with Reddit, but I visit it a lot for different communities (including multiple writing ones like PubTips!). They were offering $100 in credit for new ad accounts, so that's where I started. I wrote the ad to the left (obviously not a post about writing copy, I didn't do many revisions and published. Reddit, like most online advertising platforms, allows you to select types of users to target. I picked some preset groups based on interests: books, comics books, and roleplaying games. I ran this first version of this promotion for 8 days in early December.

It's amazing to me that for $46, almost 60k people saw my ad. 189 clicked on it, a non-zero percent of that group by accident. With online ads you pay for click, not impressions, and I paid on average a quarter every time someone clicked on my ad. Unfortunately I couldn't track conversions - how many of those clicks also purchased a book - but it seems possible to do so...just complicated.

Reddit has some amazing data on ad activity, ripe for testing. So I created a new ad using the same copy but a much more targeted group. I also lowered my bid of what I was willing to pay per click from .50 to .25, the average of what I actually paid in my first ad. This ad ran for the last two weeks.

Besides almost a quarter million impressions (though I'm sure most of those didn't even register the ad, the volume on Reddit is still crazy to me), click-through-rate (the percent of people who saw the ad and then clicked on it) is only slightly higher at .347%. Cost per click, however, is about half. This is due to both a lower bid and a more targeted audience. Given the $100 credit, I spent about $50 to get 1000 clicks on my ad. However a very, very low percent of those would have purchased a book. Based on my own guesswork, I would put the number around 8 copies.

Given my experience on Reddit, I wanted to branch out. I already publish on Amazon and they were already trying to sell me ad space, so I created an ad for Kindle lock screens (thinking that if someone is picking up their e-reader, they may be more open to getting pitched a random book than if they are perusing the site itself). I submitted about the same ad copy with a targeted audience of sci-fi readers and a bid of .25 cents.

And I got nothing. First lesson I learned is that Amazon's ad market is more competitive than Reddit's. So after a week I raised by bid to .50. And I got this:

Second lesson, Amazon's volume (at least for the lock screen) is incredibly smaller. I get it - I'm comparing a lock screen to an infinite site scroll - but after almost 300k impressions on Reddit, the 660 here was a bit of a shock. The click-through-rate is higher, either because folks on an e-reader are more open to a book or because with this tiny sample size the number is statistically insignificant. Amazon helpfully connects sales to ad clicks, so without a doubt I can say that no one has purchased a book from this ad. On the bright side, I'm spending at a much slower rate on Amazon, so I can afford to run this ad longer.

Let's math this out: $148.36 spent on Reddit + $1.13 spent on Amazon - $100 credit on Reddit = $49.49. Generously assuming 8 paperbacks sold from ads for $1 profit each means I spent $50 to make $8. "Not for profit". But that is the theme of my writing practice and this website - writing is a hobby that I love and I'm ready to spend some money on my hobby.