#8: How to Blow $250 on Ads For Your Self-Published Book

Or "How to Give Two Billionaires $250 They Definitely Don't Deserve"

---

Before I get into today’s entry, check out

Julie Vick

’s One Funny Line humor challenge this week. Ya boi contributed a prompt for Day Two!

Day 2 of One Funny Line

---

I’m basically Don Draper if the firm he worked for hired Black people

---

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.

---

I like to think I’m a reasonably intelligent human being. In my 30+ years on this earth I’ve managed to learn many skills — riding a bicycle, doing my taxes, inventing polite excuses to leave parties early. I say this because I want to make it clear that, when I set up a few basic ad campaigns for Spoilers a couple weeks ago, I’m pretty sure I did everything right. Or, at least, I did everything about as right as one could expect a reasonably intelligent person to do after spending around 10-20 hours researching how to do it.

Surely, I thought, if I follow all of the guidelines I’ve found online for how to advertise a book through Facebook and Amazon, I ought to see at least some return on that money (and time!). Right? RIGHT? RIIIIIIIIGHT?!?!?

Well, *sigh*, if you’ve read the rest of The Honda Civic Diaries, you know things don’t always go how I expected them to. If God laughs when you make a plan, then God is tuning into GodTV’s #1 new sitcom, The Carlos Greaves Show, weekdays from 9am-5pm EST to laugh at my plan-making ass on a regular basis.

But first, a quick update on THE NUMBERS.  

As of mid-December, I’d sold 352 copies of the book! And at a sales rate of 0.6 books/day, I was on track to sell 10,000 copies of Spoilers by 2070!

As I’ve said before, that's the sort of number that’s both amazing (definitely couldn’t have sold nearly that many 5 years ago) but also not exactly a “quit all of my other jobs to focus on writing books” sort of number. Not even close. Of course, as I’ve also said before, that’s not necessarily the goal, or the only definition of “success,” plus hardly any writers make a living just writing books, etc. etc. 

Given the steady but slow trajectory of the book sales, I decided to play around with ads and see if I couldn’t juice those numbers a bit.

Luckily, thanks to my amazing Kickstarter supporters, I already had a small budget set aside for promoting the book, which is also how I was able to do book events in New York and Boston last year.

So, with that in mind, I spent some time learning how to set up ad campaigns on Facebook and Amazon. Since it was the first campaign, I cast a fairly wide net of where to advertise. My thought was that I could gather a bit of data on which ads were most effective and then refine my target audience in future ads. I figured the campaigns wouldn’t be rip-roaring financial successes, but I’d at least break even. What I didn’t expect, however, was just how ridiculously badly the ads performed.

Here’s how much I spent on the two platforms:

Facebook: $189.28

Amazon: $57.34

And here’s how many copies I sold through the ads:

Facebook: 0

Amazon: 8

That means I spent $246.62 and made around $54. In other words, I paid almost $200 to give my book away to 8 people. Even worse, I gave Mark Zuckerberg AND Jeff Bezos money. And if money is going to flow between me and either of those obscenely wealthy dorks, it seems way more fair for it to flow in the other direction.

What’s worse, the Facebook ad generated 544 clicks, which means over 500 people saw my book’s beautiful cover art, glowing reviews, and hilarious sneak peak, and were like, NAH MAN, THIS AIN’T FOR ME. Which…ouch.

So that concludes this newsletter post. The moral of the story is: don’t waste your money on ads — nobody wants to buy your book anyway. And also, you suck.

Okay, so my first experiment with ads didn’t go that well, but I’m not ready to hang my hat up just yet. For starters, both ads were casting a really wide net. For the Facebook ad, I set the target audience to adults in the United States age 18-65+. In other words, literally any rando. I also tested out several versions of the ad copy, some of which performed better than others. So now I have some data in order to refine the ad copy and target audience.

Too word-heavy? It’s not my fault! I don’t know how ads work! What do I look like, a Black Don Draper?

For the Amazon ad, I served ads based on roughly 100 different keywords ranging from “humorous books” to “David Sedaris.” Interestingly, although those two keywords generated the most clicks (14 and 6, respectively), neither led to any sales.

The best performing keyword? “Satire books.” Although accounting for only 2.65% of the ad impressions served (impression is a fancy word for how many times the ad was shown), and 9.09% of clicks (3 out of 33 total clicks), the keyword led to 7 of the 8 sales (87.5%). How 3 clicks led to 7 sales is beyond me (I guess someone REALLY liked the book and bought it for everyone they know?). Maybe it’s a statistical outlier. But, it does make sense that “satire books” would be a good keyword for advertising…wait for it…a satire book. Now I have some concrete data to back that up, and can refine future ad placements accordingly.  

So, I guess the real moral of the story is that I spent $250 to collect some data. And now, armed with what I’ve learned, I can hopefully, eventually, get these ads to be profitable.

At the same time, I’ve started playing around with other strategies for promoting the book, which I will talk about in a future entry.

---

To read the next entry, click the link below: