#10: How to Blow $250 on Ads For Your Self-Published Book TWICE
Or, the time I played with house money
This is part of a series I’m writing on the process of self-publishing my book, Spoilers. To start from the beginning, read my first diary entry.
This is a story about how dressing up as Batman helped me sell books.
But First, a Quick Update
A watched pot never boils. Similarly, sales of your self-published book never increase when you check the reports every day. That’s why I haven’t tallied total sales of Spoilers in eight months.
Sure enough, I finally got around to checking today, and I’ve sold just north of 100 copies since my last update for a grand total of 459 copies! I’m now well within striking distance of selling 500 copies by my one-year pub date anniversary on 10/2. Which, especially for a self-published book, is a win.
The First Time I Blew $250 on Ads for Spoilers
Back in January, I talked about how I’d played around with ads on Facebook and Amazon and spent nearly $250 to sell 8 copies of my book. Which, considering I make around $5 a book, was a pretty big L.
After I posted that, something incredible happened.
A friend of mine who works at Meta messaged me and said something along the lines of “Bro, your ad copy sucks total ass. Let’s talk.” Only he said it in a much more polite way because he’s an awesome dude.
He explained to me that part of his job is testing out how different ads perform on Meta’s platforms. So, if I was down, we could set up a new and improved ad campaign and spend another $250. Only this time, we’d be playing with Meta’s money instead of mine.
$250 free Zuck bucks to promote Spoilers? Heck yeah, I was down.
The Second Time I Blew $250 on Ads for Spoilers
My friend put together some new ads that were, to put it mildly, about 10,000 times better than my original ads:
He also suggested I make a video ad, since lo-fi video ads on Facebook have been performing relatively well compared to static ads (getting this kind of insight feels like it should be illegal):
We ran the static and video ads over three weeks in February (hence the Oscars tie-in) and the ads led to a sales total of…wait for it…
1 book
If you’ve followed this series, you know my journey with Spoilers has been all about taking L’s and learning from them, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise (also the section header was kind of a dead giveaway). But here’s the silver lining:
Original FB ad campaign (the one I created in mid-December):
Total spend: $189
Total clicks: 544
Total sales: 0 (the 8 aforementioned books I sold were all through the Amazon ad)
New FB ad campaign (the one my friend created in February):
Total spend: $250
Total clicks: 884
Total sales: 1
If you crunch the numbers, you’ll notice the CPC (cost per click) went from $0.35 in my original ad to $0.28 in the new ad. You’ll also notice an increase of infinity% in books sales (not really a useful metric, but I’ll celebrate a win when I can).
It was clear the ads were moving in the right direction. But if 884 people clicked on the ad and went to the Amazon page for Spoilers, and only 1 person bought the book, it was pretty obvious the ads weren’t the problem.
Luckily, awesome dude that he is, my friend offered to let me rewrite the description of the book, and, once I was ready, we could re-run the ads and see if the new description made a difference.
Another free $250 Zuck bucks? Are you kidding me? How did I get this lucky? Surely I’m not going to squander this second golden opportunity to promote my book?
The Third Time I Blew $250 on Ads for Spoilers
Three months later, I finally had the new description of the book written (what can I say? I’m terrible with open-ended deadlines). Here are the old and new descriptions for comparison:
Old description:
"Popular movies are a near-universal language, and it's the currency that drives Spoilers, a collection of essays in the style of McSweeney's or 'Shouts & Murmurs'...a book that offers pure entertainment and well-earned laughs" -- Vulture, Best Comedy Books of 2023 (So Far)
"Carlos is on McSweeney's Mount Rushmore of satirists. Spoilers is a brilliantly funny display of his comedic talents." -- Chris Monks, Managing Editor of McSweeney's Internet Tendency
"This book has way more jokes than Schindler's List." -- an objective statement of fact
Superman tries to apply for a Green Card but doesn't have the proper documentation from his home planet. The Little Mermaid writes a tell-all book about her struggle to fit in with her new siren-skeptical royal family. And an increasingly unhinged J. Edgar Hoover opens an FBI investigation into a counter-cultural rabble-rouser by the name of Forrest Gump. These are just a few of the scenarios explored in this raucous collection of essays from frequent New Yorker and McSweeney's contributor Carlos Greaves. Spoilers will leave you laughing at hitherto unexamined plot points of your favorite films, at the sorry state of the world we live in, and definitely at whoever's idea it was to open a theme park full of people-eating dinosaurs.
New description:
Highlighted in Vulture’s Best Comedy Books of 2023
Do you enjoy movies? Sharp satire? Laughter in general? If so, this book was written for you.
Spoilers is a collection of satirical stories that poke fun at thirty of Hollywood’s most famous films and franchises. The Little Mermaid writes a not-so-happily-ever-after, tell-all memoir about marrying into the royal family, Princess Leia wonders why the Jedi are always the underdogs against the Dark Side, whose political views ought to be way less popular, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover slowly loses his mind as he investigates a troublemaker who keeps popping up everywhere named Forrest Gump.
A hilarious debut from frequent New Yorker and McSweeney’s contributor Carlos Greaves, Spoilers will leave you laughing at hitherto unexamined plot points of your favorite films, at the sorry state of the world we live in, and definitely at whoever’s idea it was to open a theme park full of people-eating dinosaurs.
So what was my thought process for changing it? Basically, I tried to dumb it down a bit. I read the old description, thought “how can I make this dumber?” and then I did that.
Seriously, though, “siren-skeptical?” “Counter-cultural rabble-rouser?” Those are mouthfuls. I think the new description is easier to read. I still might tweak it to take out words like “hitherto,” but this felt like an improvement. I also tried to answer the question “why should someone buy this book?” more directly. If you enjoy movies, satire, and laughter, you should buy this book. Enough said.
Before we re-ran the FB ad, we tweaked one more variable (Change one variable at a time? What do we look like? Scientists?). Since the original video had an Oscars tie-in, I recorded three new video ads: two straightforward, informative ones, and one silly one for grins.
We re-ran the campaign over three weeks in June and this time the ads led to a sales total of…drum roll please…
11 books!
Sharp mathematicians will notice that $5 x 11 is nowhere near $250, so this new ad campaign was far from successful from a financial standpoint. My book promotion problems were not all magically solved and I would not be able to Facebook ad my way to a best-seller.
But, as usual, there was a silver lining:
FB ad campaign from February:
Total spend: $250
Total clicks: 884
Total sales: 1
FB ad campaign from June:
Total spend: $250
Total clicks: 1,354
Total sales: 11
Note the 1,000% increase in sales. With small numbers like this, it’s hard to attribute outcomes to any one variable. So it’s possible this is just random variance. But I think there’s a good chance the jump is attributable to both A) the increase in clicks generated by the ads, and B) the new description of the book. In fact, if I was to rewrite my resume, I might say something like:
Work Experience
Author, Spoilers: Essays That Might Ruin Your Favorite Hollywood Movies (2023)
Increased book sales by 1,000% through use of strategic word optimization and innovative multimedia outreach to more effectively engage key demographics.
Also worth noting — the 53% increase in clicks, and a CPC decrease from $0.28 to $0.18.
But the biggest surprise? The Batman throwaway ad I made got 433 clicks, vastly outperforming the other two videos in both total views and CPC.
The Takeaway?
I learned two key things from these ad experiments:
The new description of my book is more effective because it’s easier to read, and makes it more clear who the book is for.
The Batman ad is more effective because it shows a potential reader my sense of humor rather than simply telling them what the book is about.
I’m not yet at a point where I can turn a profit through ads, but these insights are helping me go in the right direction.
One big unanswered question is whether Amazon ads will perform better now that I’ve tweaked the description of the book. In my original ad campaign, I spent $57 on Amazon ads and sold 8 books, which is approaching break even. So, armed with these new insights, can I find a way to improve the performance of my Amazon ads?
That’s what I’m going to find out next.
Announcements
Satire Workshop on 9/14
I will be teaching my workshop, Finding the Humor in the Horrible, on Saturday, September 14th from 1:00PM-4:00PM ET. It’s a good intro workshop to topical satire writing where we’ll cover how to write about news and current events for websites like McSweeney’s and The New Yorker. It’s the only time I’ll be teaching this workshop this year, and it often sells out, so if this is something you’re interested in, sign up sooner rather than later!
In-Person Class in Sep-Oct
If you happen to be in the Charlotte, NC area, I’m teaching a 6-week in-person class called Comedy Writing for the Internet, starting Wednesday, September 18th. We’re going to cover how to make funny, short-form videos for places like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, as well as how to make funny promotional videos to highlight books, shows, or other projects. Stuff like this:
If this is something that would be up your alley, but you don’t live in Charlotte, please let me know! I’m currently gauging interest for an online version of this class, and I can keep you in the loop.
La Ñapa
I realize I was a bit glib last week when I announced my new series, La Ñapa, for paid subscribers. The series is going to offer a bit more of a window into my writing life as well as feature some extra nuggets of humor that wouldn’t fit in the newsletter. Essentially, it’s a tiny extra sumthin’ sumthin’ as a thank you to paid subscribers, since my newsletter posts are all free to read, and I’d like to keep it that way. Just wanted to clarify that.
Comments
Have you come across any ads for books or online book descriptions that made you say “I need this book NOW!”? If so, what was the book? I am always looking for sales techniques to shamelessly steal.
For those that have read Spoilers, does the new description do it justice? If not, what you would change?
For those that haven’t read Spoilers, does the description intrigue you? Turn you off? Confuse you? All feedback is welcome. I promise I can handle it!
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FB ads can be so hit or miss. I’ve run them at my day job and we get a surprising amount of people actually following through on the ask. Naturally I thought this would carry right over to comedy promotions. Of course, it doesn’t. Like you, decent number of clicks, almost no actual ticket sales. Very frustrating.
I’d definitely have some interest in the online vid writing course!
The new Amazon blurb is definitely more appealing - free text flows more easily, which suggests the book will also be easy to read. Something to consider might be a 'perfect gift for (the movie buff who loves it laugh)' kind of phrase. A lot of books are gifts, so perhaps play into that as gift season approaches?