BookBub Ad ~ Day 1

 

Today is the first day of my BookBub ad, and curious, I checked my stats. It's going about the way I feared.

Readers have been served 538 impressions of my book and I've received two clicks. Two. And I've already plowed through a third of my ad budget. This is going "great".

Apparently 536 people don't even want my book for free. And those two who clicked on it? Did they even download? Imagine how much worse my results would be (can they get any worse?) had I chosen Amazon US as my market.

I suppose part of the problem is that an ad doesn't allow for more than perhaps five words of copy. It's pretty difficult to convey the essence of a story in five words. I wouldn't even know how to start. Instead, I went with "Rated Five Stars on Amazon!". Sure, it would have been a no-brainer to view how other ads are presented, except each subscriber email only contains one ad, at the very bottom, and it's difficult to make a judgement based on one ad. David Gaughran's mock ad that he uses for demonstration purposes is unbelievably ugly. Perhaps his real ads have more cachet. I'm only a recent subscriber to BookBub emails, but it's clear why people overlook the paid ads. There are so many other offerings ~ with complete book descriptions. 

I'm not feeling very invested in the whole process right now. And I'm not berating myself for spending that fifteen dollars. Shoot, one can't even purchase a fast food lunch for two for fifteen dollars, and this experience was less fattening.

There is no magic bullet. This was a process I needed to go through to prove to myself that it's not marketing. Nor is it book covers. Nor is it book pricing.

There is a glut of books ~ a GLUT. That's the issue. Six out of 1,000 people in the US publish a book. As of 2021, the US population was 332 million, which means that 1,922,000 people in the US have published a book. And that's just the US! Think your book is somehow going to stand out? 

Perspective is important. I could well be doing great compared to most published (and that includes self-published) authors. 

I'm wildly successful! That's what I'm gonna start telling myself.