My Experiments with Facebook Ads

For the past couple of months, I’ve been using the Ads feature on Facebook in a variety of ways, seeing if using it can help me grow my audience on my blog or Facebook page, or even to increase my book sales. I’m sure many of you have already utilized and come to your own conclusions about these features, but for those who haven’t, I’m presenting my findings in case you decide to try Facebook ads and want some advice or testimony before starting.

And if you don’t know much or at all about this feature, let me tell you about it. The Ads feature of Facebook is a way for people with businesses or Facebook pages to build followings and even sell their products. Setting up an ad campaign is very easy: you write the ad and then once you’ve finished, you can set a target audience based on criteria such as age range, country, and interests or hobbies. You then set for how long you want the ad campaign to run (five days, a week, two weeks, etc), and how much you want to pay. I generally recommend between ten and twenty dollars a day. As how many people you reach depends on your daily budget, this price range guarantees you’ll reach a bunch of people.

Once you’ve finished setting everything, you click “Done” and send the ad off to be approved. Usually this takes no more than a half-hour or an hour. Once your ad is approved, you let Facebook do the rest. It bases its algorithms on who it shows your ad to based on the parameters you sent, and then people start noticing it. Some, though not many, even click on it.

I ran three different ad campaigns through Facebook. Here were the results:

1. Blog Campaign: In this campaign I gave a link to my blog. I wasn’t trying to sell anything, just get people reading. Of the nearly seventeen-thousand reached, only about one hundred clicked on the link, which led to a slight increase of readership on my blog. Didn’t get any new comments or likes or followers, but it was still a noticeable increase, small as it was. Spent a little over $41 over five days.
2. Reborn City Campaign: This time around, I was trying to see how effective an ad campaign was at selling books, so I picked my most popular one, my sci-fi novel Reborn City, and aimed it at fans of science fiction, particularly dystopia fans. Reached a little over twelve-thousand people, but only about 140 followed the link to RC‘s Amazon page. Of these 140, no one seemed willing to pay the full price for a print or e-book copy of RC, sadly. Spent about $70 over the course of a week.
3. The Big Birthday Sale: With this campaign, I had a bit more success than the previous two campaigns, which I did in honor of my 22nd birthday. For five days, all my paperbacks were marked down, and all e-books free-of-charge, and each day I ran a new ad campaign, each one lasting a day, advertising the sale. I also expanded the criteria to include more people, leading to buyers from seven different countries. All told, I reached a staggering sixty-thousand people and managed to sell or download nearly twelve-hundred books. Although I didn’t make as much money (especially with the e-books) it was enough to know that people were downloading and reading my books. In addition, I received a huge boost in the number of likes on my Facebook page, going from 140 likes to nearly 400, most of them from India! All told, I’m pretty satisfied with how this campaign went, spending $65 total.

From these experiences, I’ve gained some insight into what makes a Facebook ad work. Firstly, it helps to be very specific with what you’re pushing. You can’t just go “Check this out! It’s new! It’s awesome! You should want it!” You have to say more than that. For example, if you want to push your latest novel, you can say “Chester Bennett was just an ordinary teenager with ordinary problems. That is, until he met Kaylie, a girl who was born into the wrong body and is on the run from the mobster parents she stole from. The adventure they go on together leads both teens to learning many uncomfortable secrets about themselves and each other, and teaches Chester what it truly means to love in Running in Cincinnati” (and that’s just something I made up on the spot. If you want to turn it into a novel, be my guest).

It also helps if you’re emphasizing why now’s a good time to buy. This is especially helpful during a sale. If you emphasize that your books are discounted or even free and that it’s better to get the books now because of these reasons, people will take notice. Of course, there’s the downside that you might not get as much back in sales as you did in spending money on the campaign, but if there are more people reading your books because they got them at a discount price and if a good number of them enjoy the books, at least some of them will review the books, tell their friends about them, and maybe buy future copies of your work.

And of course, you need to know whom you’re selling to. The reason why my last campaign was so successful was because I made sure as many people around the world as possible with the interests and hobbies I was targeting did see the ad. The result was a huge amount of people getting my books and even liking my Facebook page. So when selling, take advantage of the parameters you’re setting for the campaign. Even look in places you wouldn’t think of looking in (like I did when I decided to target Germany, India and Japan rather than just English-speaking nations). You never know who might want to check out your new book.

Oh, and use the Ads Manager page, which you can reach by finding it on the left side of your page. If you need to make any adjustments to your campaigns (and you will), the Ads Manager will allow you to do that, so don’t ignore it!

While it may seem like putting a lot of money into something that might not yield results, Facebook ads can be a lucrative means to reach readers if you allow them. You can start slow, doing one-day campaigns and seeing what the results are, seeing what works for you and what doesn’t. With any luck, it could lead to a few more devoted readers wanting to know what happens next in your latest series or to look and see what else you have available. Nothing wrong with that, right?

What’s your experience with Facebook ads, if you have any? What tips do you have for other readers?

Also, I’m happy to announce that, like I promised in my last article, I’ve set up a page called Conferences, Bookstores, & Other Resources with links to place like the Gulf Coast Bookstore that can be of service to you in promoting your works. Included on this page are stores, conferences, and websites that have the potential to be helpful for every indie author. You can check the page out by either clicking on its name here or you can find it at the top menu under “On Marketing & Promoting”. I will be steadily adding other entries to the lists there as I find them, so if you have any you’d like to recommend, leave a name, a description and links in a comment and I will put it up as soon as possible. Hope you all find it helpful!

So Many Excuses…

It took me over two months to write my newest manuscript (it’s now waiting to be edited.) But, truthfully, it didn’t take that long to write. It took that long to get written. Why? Because I had a lot of excuses. I had book covers to do. I had family crisis to deal with. I had a house to clean. I had dishes to do. I had a dog that had to go out constantly. I had a thousand million things to do for other people… and of course all of that was more important.

But here is an interesting thought. Let’s say that instead of being an independent writer, I worked at a job outside the home. Unless I took days off, that family crisis and those book covers and all the rest of it would have had to wait until I got home. All the dishes, all the laundry, all the phone calls, all the fetching and taking care of and all of the emergency emails I got from people would have had to just sit. But, because I’m home all day that makes my writing a hobby, not work.

Ha!

Says who? Writing is work. Just because we don’t punch a time card or drive to another building doesn’t make it any less. We know this, so why do we let other people or other things distract us from it? If we want our writing to be treated like it’s a job, then we have to  act that way, too. That may mean that someone has to wait for us to do something. That might mean that someone has to cook their own dinner, or do their own laundry. It could even mean that older children or spouses have to help around the house, or even babysit the younger children for a couple of hours a day.  After all, if you were working outside the home those things would have to happen, so why shouldn’t they happen now? I’m not talking about real emergencies, or disasters, like hospitalizations, but the day to day things that we “have to do” because “no one else can”. Truthfully, is it really going to hurt Johnny Jr. to give up an hour of his TV or video game time and do some of the dishes? Or for our spouse to have to make dinner sometimes?

No. It isn’t.

If we want other people to take our writing as a serious job and not just a hobby, we have to take – and treat –  it serious. It isn’t necessarily life that needs to change, but perhaps how we react to it and how we order our priorities. In the end, we get what we put in. If all we ever make are excuses, then excuses are all we’re going to have, and those don’t sell very well.

What keeps you from writing? Are they really things that you have to deal with, or are they just excuses?

Committed to…. Changing?

“Charles’s favorite book, the one about Claudius’s epic quest to destroy Carlos’s magic hat, is missing.”

For the last thrity years I’ve had sentences like that corrected. No, not because it’s long and confusing, but because of all the ‘s –  but no more!

I am vindicated!

Okay, not really vindicated, but they have “changed the rules”, as they do periodically.  Or at least, the The Chicago Manual of Style: 16^th Edition has.  According to Mary Keeley of the Books & Such Literary Agency, the goal was on consistency with this edition, hence the final vindication of the possessive ‘s’ after names that end in ‘s’.  There were lots of other changes, too. Commas can now follow other punctuation (how would that work?), website is one word, prepositions in headlines are now always lowercase, no matter the importance of the word, and more.

What’s my opinion on it? Hm. They say that as writer’s we should keep up on every subtle change in order to show our commitment to our readers and our craft. I don’t mean to diminish the importance of good grammar or punctuation, but I wonder how many average readers buy – or read – The Chicago Manual of Style? Is it a commitment to our readers and our craft, or a commitment to proving to the other authors/industry people that we’re “with it”? After all, how many average readers  would know whether website had been officially ruled one word or two? Until you read this, did you?

You can read the rest of the article here: http://www.booksandsuch.biz/blog/news-from-conferences-grammar-shrammar/

(Special thanks to Barbara G. Tarn for finding the link to this article!)

Why Do Some Authors Dislike “Indy”

That’s something that’s preyed on my mind for over a year now: Why do  some authors, and wanna-be authors, come down so hard on the self publishing/indy publishing movement? It’s a question I’ve had no answer to, until recently. To illustrate, though, I feel the need to tell you a boring story.

Growing up I was known for only one talent, and that was drawing. I was “destined” to be “an artist” because, as far as the tiny world I inhabited was concerned, that was all I was good at. They identified me as “someone who could draw”, and I eventually identified myself that way, too, whether I wanted to or not.

Enter the computer age with something called “computer art”. Back at the beginning it was forecasted that this magical computer generated art would level the playing field and make it so that anyone could create art – even *gasp* people with no discernible talent! If you’ve ever attempted this, you’ll know that it’s not as easy as everyone thought it would be, but reality is never as good as the forecasts.

At the time, I was outraged at the idea.  Yes, I know, me? The big proponent of “anyone can draw”? Yep, it’s true, back then the idea that anyone could draw – that they could enter into the exclusive little “drawing club” –  it was a horrible idea.  It would be like setting tigers loose on defenseless little antelope; the blundering, talentless creatures would chase off all the little antelopes with “real talent” who’d “spent years honing their craft”.

 

Run, run away! (c. Stig Nygaard)

But why did I care *so* much? Because my identity was so wrapped up in that ability, that it defined who I was. It, and it alone made me special and if everyone could suddenly do it,  then what did that make me?

 

Of course, I’ve since grown up and moved past that phase, but I think that some writers haven’t.  If just anyone can walk in and publish a book, then what does that do to someone whose self identity is wrapped up in the fact that they’re a published writer? If anyone can join the club, then that means it’s not so “special” anymore, doesn’t it? After all, they had to “pay their dues” and “spend years honing their craft” it’s only fair everyone else does, too.

But, just like computer art, that self publishing thing isn’t as easy as everyone thinks it is. To get a quality book out, it’s a lot of friggin’ work! In fact, unless you’ve hired out, you’re doing everything yourself, so it’s more work than a “traditionally published” author has to go through!

Of course, I’m not saying that this is every objector’s reason, but I think it’s the cause of at least half. So, the next time you find an author, or worse, a wanna-be author, running on about the evils of self publishing, just stop and realize how very, very threatened they may feel. There’s nothing to make you feel calmer than knowing you’re the tiger.

 

Run antelopes, run! (image C. Keven Law)