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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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Adventures in Advertising: Can self-published writers advertise effectively?

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ad_hereBefore the holiday season derailed my progress here on the blog, I was tackling a critique of the various advertising channels I’ve tried to bolster my self-publishing sales. I started with my adventures with Goodreads self-serve ads, but I realized after writing those 2,000 words that what I should’ve done is give an overview of all of the services and outlets I’ve tried first, then delve into the specifics of each outlet. This post is that summary.

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Advertising Your Book on Goodreads: Thoughts, Numbers, Questions

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I’ve embarked on a number of low-cost, (hopefully) high-impact advertising ventures to boost my book sales. Over the next few days and weeks, I’ll examine what I’ve done and try to draw lessons and conclusions from the experience. First up…Goodreads!

Basics
Goodreads advertising currently comes in two flavors: tiny, highly-affordable self-service ads and large-scale page campaigns coming in at massive cost (when asked about “premium advertising offerings,” Goodreads replied that, unless my budget was over $5,000 per month, I was likely to be more interested in their self-service option. Well, no shit.).

For obvious reasons, I’ll only talk about my experiments with their self-service advertising.

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