Well, New Year, New Ad Experiment

So I do have a little t-shirt shop on Cafe Press called CrazyPanterT's. Surprisingly, the best seller is my Read a Banned Book shirt. Ok, maybe that wasn't a surprise. I like that shirt, too.

So, while on Facebook I see an ad for Shopify and investigate. Eh, as much bad reviews as good. Then I look into Big Commerce. And on their site it says they have an Amazon link. So I link on over to Amazon and look at the pitiful performance of my 3 and a half books. So, this little thing pops up for Advertise on Amazon. And so it goes....

It starts tonight so I'll update as it goes.

The ad I tried for No Apologies didn't even make it past the review stage. My guess was the cover had a nipple. Most romance writers know the nipple is not allowed to be exposed in certain ads/venues. (Yes, even man nipples) Walmart will not carry a book with even basic skin showing and nipples, so maybe I should have thought about that before I okay'ed the cover.

Submitted for review to the Amazon staff tonight; Soul Mates. By tomorrow I should either be rejected or accepted. There's a dog on the cover so I should be clear on the nipple issue.

Blizzards, Chocolate Wine & Ad Campaigns

I blame the wine. And the Blizzard. Maybe cabin fever?
The east coast got walloped by high winds and 2+ feet of snow and ice. But hey, we're Jersey Strong so this Jersey girl don't care.  We stocked up on soup fixin's and wine and we're good. Besides, snow removal in NJ is a twenty-four/seven job from the first flake. We clear out fast. Today the roads are clear and everyone is probably going to work tomorrow. Some schools may close but that's only because of the school buses and amount of snow piled up on the sides of the streets.

So whatever possessed me to do another  ad campaign for one of my books???

This time I'm trying an Amazon ad.

Really, it all started when I saw Robert Gregory Brown say on facebook that his book Linger was at #5 on Amazon's best sellers. So that made me curious to see what else was up there. I found #1 The Good Neighbor and read terrible reviews. (as I check it now that book is #8) So I started to wonder how a book with over 4000 reviews got to #1 with so many bad reviews. Hmmmm, curious. Could it be marketing? Some reviewers said they got the book for free. So perhaps there was a small, "Take this book for free" campaign?

Eh. I've done that and it didn't lead anywhere great. Lots of downloads, not a lot of reviews. I don't remember what it did to my rank and probably didn't check it at that point.

So, I looked at Amazon ads and had another glass of chocolate wine and made some popcorn. For a minimum of $100 you can run an ad, say how much a click through would be, and pick your dates. Recommended click throughs are based on competing ads.

Quick! I ran over to my bank website and slipped another $100 on my Amazon credit card so as not to blow it out, and started the ad process.

I had to pick my target audience. Since No Apologies is kind of like Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels, half suspense, half humor,  I toddled on over to check out her page. Her's had tags like Romantic Comedy, Romantic Suspense, and mystery. I used those target audience tags for my book.

You pick the money, I did .45 per click and set the limit at $100. I set my dates from today through Feb 13th. I also clicked the button for Amazon to set the pace of the ads. See the help button is popped to explain what that means.

The hardest part was the name and blurb. At 150 characters my regular blurb wasn't going to work. So I wrote this;

"Romance, Suspense & the man she left at the altar! Throw in a crazy rescue dog and you got a page turner full of laughs & surprises. "

Please don't laugh, that was my third glass of wine blurb. The wine helps, right? Right?

Then you hit submit and it goes in for review.  Now I wait and see.
I'll keep you posted.

Maybe I'll switch to Moscato for the next blizzard.....