Greetings all,
The bad news is that the streak of weeks with reviews has officially ended, which is sad, but not too discouraging. Not having reviews to share lets me offer insight into other things.
A while back, I posted a blog explaining a marketing initiative I wanted to complete. I reached that mark in early September, and now I wanted to share the results.
One thing I noticed is that I’ve doubled my monthly sales. I have to word it that way because that’s the positive way to say it. However, I was only selling an average of two books a month online, so now I’m up to four. But when I think about this information, I’m still more encouraged. I know that the more people I can get my book in front of, the more sales I make. That gives me hope that more work in this regard will yield more fruit.
In the month of September, I had 1,849,502 impressions and from them 749 clicks. That honestly cost me $157.30, and the four sales and $15 I made hurt a little bit, but we can’t get too carried away because this was always the first step.
So far in October, I’ve had 428,790 impressions and 212 clicks (in just nine days). This means I’m getting views, and I’m getting clicks. Now as expensive as it is, I could absolutely have more clicks, but improving my click-through-rate is something that just takes time and attention.
What’s interesting to not is while I have one sale so far this month, and I had four sales last month, only three of those five sales were from AMS marketing, at least not directly. My theory is that people may see an advertisement and make note. Then then come back when they are ready. I also think that the more I work to increase visibility on my end, the more Amazon responds. I can’t prove this theory. I don’t even know how to test it, but I do know that I am doing more now than I was.
The biggest question is how to turn more of those clicks into purchases. One thing I need is your help. A lot of people on Amazon base their purchases on reviews. If you’ve read my work, leaving a review is your way of recommending the book to other readers, and I need those recommendations. I have to try and find a way to generate about 50 reviews per book to have a chance.
The other way to get more people who click on my add to buy my books is to do some work on my book description. I posted a blog about this a while ago. So I have to make time to do that.
So where do I go from here? Well, I want to improve my click through rank and increase my impressions. The way I’m doing this is seeing what key words are being clicked and generating new campaigns based on those keywords. This will easily give me more impressions, but it will hopefully get me some more clicks.
I also have to be patient. Right now I’m losing money much more quickly than I’m making it, but I have to stay this course. People can’t buy my book if they don’t know it exists. The quicker I solicit reviews and get my book descriptions improved, the (hopefully) quicker those clicks will net returns.
Honestly folks, I’m just doing my best here. I don’t know if there’s a better way or not. This is just the approach I’m working on to help my business grow. There were and are a lot of other factors that contribute to my low number of sales. I can’t rewind time and make different decisions, but I can put in the work to to start changing things. Stay tuned to see how the efforts worked out.
Thanks for reading,
Matt
M.L.S. Weech 
Ugh, thank you for a detailed post on what I’m probably going to be looking forward to, when my novel comes out on Amazon.
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My hope is that my post showed you how to avoid such disappointment. I know you have one product in development, but what have you been doing to build a following? How have you started growing your brand? How many books do you already have out, and how many are you planning to write? These all need answers, and I didn’t do that. I didn’t understand that. I still don’t really know how to build a platform, and that’s what’s hurting me. If you don’t have a platform, I strongly recommend you continue to develop product while you work to build that platform. Then, when you publish, you will already have a following waiting for your book.
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My platform is still a work in progress. The first thing I started doing to develop it, was participating more regularly on social media, and using that to connect with other writers and book lovers. I hate Twitter, but really enjoy WordPress. Facebook is OK. However, I plan to join more writing groups through them. It was great to learn about all the painfully technical details of what it takes to build your author brand, and get your book noticed, through my sister’s writers’ support group on letsgetpublished.com.
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I also would wait. (If is had it to do again) until I had three-six books ready to go before launching. If I traveled back in time to tell myself that, I’d STILL probably ignore the advice. But you need follow-on products, and you need products on the shelf.
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