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Adventures in advertising: Can anyone beat Bookbub? Part II

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This is part II of a two-part series on advertising with the site Bookbub.com Please check Part I out here.

Results
Several friends–Amanda Brice, Karen Cantwell, and Misha Crews–had amazing results using Bookbub for Romance and Mystery. Misha, in particular, had great success featuring her novel Homesong, garnering 68,000 downloads in just three days. So, I had high hopes going in…and not just for the book on sale–the main thing was to get lateral sales to Marty Singer #1, A Reason to Live, and the brand-spanking new #3, One Right Thing, e-published the night before the sale.

I wasn’t disappointed. Blueblood was featured for free March 12-13 via KDP Select. Here are the sale and post-sale numbers as of 3/24/2013 at noon:

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Adventures in advertising: Can anyone beat Bookbub? Part I

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bookbubMy forays into advertising my self-published books continue. I know I’m tardy on reporting on many of my ad buys (like, by a few months), but I’ve recently had such success with Bookbub.com that I wanted to tell you about this out of order.

Background
Writer friend Karen Cantwell (of Take the Monkeys and Run fame) heard from other pen-smythe and colleague Scott Nicholson (he of The Red Church, Liquid Fear, and a google of other books) that young upstart book-bargain site Bookbub.com was a great place to advertise for indies. The skinny: Bookbub’s price was steep in comparison to almost all other advertising venues of its kind–maybe the highest–but the returns were worth it.

Since I’m in the “it’s time to advertise or get lost in the shuffle” camp, I checked it out, blanched at the price, but dove in anyway.

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Turn Music (and Books) Into Money

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I just came across this intriguing article in The Atlantic via the singer John Owen-Jones’s Twitter feed (how’s that for a tenuous connection?):  How You Turn Music Into Money in 2012 (Spoiler: Mostly iTunes).

As fellow creative types, it behooves writers to pay attention to how artists and musicians are monetizing their careers online. Although the industries and distributions are different, take a gander at how avant garde musician Zoe Keating sees her six-month income rolling in.

My takeaways: distribution diversity is good, assumptions are dangerous, and the digital landscape if far from being predictable or settled. None of that is a surprise, but it’s good to see concrete numbers to back up some of my thinking.

What did you get out of the article?

Caveat Writer

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Image

Warning: Image link goes to fake Amazon page.

Successful paranormal author Ilona Andrews recently had her short story “Questing Beast”–offered free on her website for fans–swiped and re-posted to Amazon, where some unscrupulous magsman was selling it for $5.99. Since it reached a rank of 60,000, quite a few poor folks were rooked.

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Amazon opens its doors in India

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Interesting news today from Amazon: KDP authors can now reach the world’s largest English-speaking democracy. Amazon announced that, in partnership with Croma retail stores to sell the Kindle, Amazon’s digital bookstores have thrown their doors open to the 1,000,000 books available for the Kindle e-reader at www.amazon.com/kindlestoreindia.

“We are proud to launch this new Kindle store for Indian customers — offering Kindle book purchases in rupees and the ability to buy and read the work of many great Indian authors,” said Russ Grandinetti, vice president of Kindle Content, Amazon.com. “In addition, we are excited to work with Croma to make Kindle available at retail outlets across India.”

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