Soul Sucking Things that Get Writers

Covid 19 is a soul sucker. It's an on-edge feeling of fear, want & confusion. We fear the virus (or we should.) We want to be normal. To go back to our day to day life and to our old goals and ambitions. Right now all that is on hold. We face confusion every minute of the day. Information overload from all directions.

I was a that real job thing the other day when a man told me about those Americas Frontline Doctors who said that hydroxy-whatever can cure Covid. Wow, wouldn't that be great? So as soon as I could get to a computer I looked it up. A bunch of doctors said it's so. So I looked them up. Each. Individually. I wanted to know if they were people I should believe. 

First I saw that Facebook and Twitter had deleted the postings. hmmmm, why would they do it? 

Well it call came out that 2 of them were ophthalmologists and not regular medical doctors. One of them doesn't even have a license. The main speaker has publicly stated that she believes dreaming about demons can get a woman pregnant. 

Did I really have to read further? 

Ok so the ball of confusion is everywhere and by the time you research -- we are writers after all, that's what we do; research -- maybe an hour or two has passed. Then where are we? Certainly not writing or editing.  We all know social media is a soul sucker so now on top of all that we have Covid-land. So, how do we get our drive back? 

Back to basics; 

1. Schedule your writing time and go to it like a job. Every great writer does this so it's #1 on the how to get your writing mojo back. 

2. Close the door. Not just on the people in your house but on all that static from social media. DON'T OPEN IT! Consider it a demon ready to snatch your writer's soul. 

3. Set a goal. It could be 20 minutes it could be an hour. I like pages. Setting a goal by pages makes you get it done. I could daydream for an hour and then wrap it up. Done. But if I say I have to write 10 pages before I get up... well, then I'll have something to show for the time. 

Stay strong my writer friends. You are creative and the world needs your words. 

Facebook Ad Fail

The Facebook ad for No Apologies was a bust.

I set the ad to run midweek to midweek encompassing one weekend. I figured this would give me a wide view of how it did on what days. I also got to choose a target audience by age, gender, interests, etc.  For my budget of $60 I spent $59.81 total for 164 click through to website. I put the click through right to the Amazon page to buy the book. As you can see from my Amazon sales chart, out of the 164 that clicked through to see the book, 11 books sold. Bah!

So was it my fault this ad tanked or Facebook's?

Above you see the ad. One of the issues I have with the Facebook ad rules is the amount of space words can take up. I think it was like 22%, so I had to keep shrinking my book cover to get it under the 22%. This was a detriment to the ad in general because the title is part of the grab in selling a book along with the cover art. So I don't think the visual of the ad was that good. Facebook fail for stupid word rules.
Next I look at the words I put with the picture on top and below the ad. Did I not grab the reader's attention? Too tame? Too common? This would be my fail.
What about the where i wanted the ad to go? I chose all ages over 18. Although there's no actual graphic sex scenes in the book there are some sexually suggestive scenes so I thought it was better not to target the younger market.
Here you see the demographics of who actually clicked through the website. I also included men in the party, which could have been wrong. A very small amount of men actually clicked through. I did include the UK and Australia because they are English speaking countries. Should I have made this wider? I don't know.

Here's the Facebook and Amazon reports. There was a slight spike in click throughs and sales on Friday.

In conclusion? I don't think Facebook ads are that great for books. Or I did it wrong. I think I need a better photo for the ad. The book was too small and I doubted it caught any attention by the cover. The reports also showed the ad did better on the news feed than on the side bar. Which is where it would show bigger. If I can't get that cover bigger then maybe I should have just ran it on the news feed and taken it off the sidebar.

I finance my book ads with my Fiverr editing. When I get gigs on Fiverr the money there goes to book promotion. Sometimes I have more money to do it with, sometimes less. I want to save for a BookBub ad which is expensive, but I hear it's worth it. I've done a free book on Pixels of Ink and that gave away 80 books. Would that have generated more sales than Facebook if it wasn't free? Maybe I'll try and see what happens. Pixels of Ink wasn't that expensive. Gotta go check my Fiverr account to see what I go for next.