This is either a nervous writer…or someone scored a touchdown.
Okay. Let’s start with the big one. Yep, back in February of this year of woe (2020) I spent $11,153.98 US in advertising (mostly for my Dragon Assassin series) but earned back $15,340 for a profit of $3341.88 US. Those are all insane numbers, especially the first one, so let me explain how I got into this.
I started self publishing my out of print books back in 2011 and I have also experimented with self publishing my Amber Fang series and have made a few thousand dollars each year in extra income. I’ve taken several courses on advertising (Self Publishing Formula Advertising Course being one of them) and read far too many books on marketing (David Gaughran being a favourite). About two years ago I noticed that there were several people doing well on Amazon with “dragon rider” books, that is books for YA that feature characters riding dragons. I had been writing more fantasy, so I wrote a series called Dragon Assassin. Scholastic Books has the rights in Canada, but I self publish the ebooks in the US, UK, Germany, Australia and NZ on Amazon. I am what they call a hybrid writer.
Hybrid always makes me picture a writer with feathery wings and a long scaly tail. But I digress.
You could add wings to this author if you want. That would make him a hybrid. Also, which Macbook is he using?
In 2019 I first released the ebooks as episodes (about 100 page stories). People will buy them outright or use their Kindle Unlimited account to read them and I get paid for the page reads. They were well received and earned back the invested money and a tidy profit. This is what the whole episodic series looks like:
Each episode had its own cover. Click the images to see what they look like on Amazon.
Every three episodes can be combined into a traditional novel. So this year I released them as “omnibuses”—and this lead to a much higher reach in audience. This is what they look like in that format:
Look upon these omnibi and despair. Sorry, I do like that Ozymandius poem.
I was still finishing writing the series (last one came out last week!). But the release schedule for these omnibuses started in February. That’s why I spent that crazy amount on ads: to get the books as high in the charts as possible (I used Facebook for 80% of the ads and Amazon Ads and Bookbub ads and various newsletters like Bargain Booksy for the rest). The only reason I felt comfortable spending that money was that I used Readerlinks, which tracks sales and income. And so I knew every day I was making a profit and could pay off the debt two months later when Amazon paid me (okay, I make it sound like I wasn’t sweating that whole time, juggling money around—I was).
Normally, I wouldn’t give exact numbers (and I won’t for the whole year). But this does give you a clear idea of how expensive that month was. And shows how it can be sometimes misleading when we only hear the amount an author makes in a month (without seeing the expenses). All of these graphs are from Readerlinks.
And this graph will give you a good idea of where all that advertising $ went.
I don’t know if the big splurge was worth it. The books hit #1 in various fantasy categories and started getting positive reviews. People with more advertising finesse than me probably could have accomplished the same result with less, but as long as I was making a profit, I kept charging ahead. I call it my “Cannon Fodder” advertising method. Each month I cut back on the spend, but continued to make around $US 3K profit. So that this last month my spend was only $780.00.
The series itself has sold the equivalent of 55,605 novels. I say equivalent because I am dividing the page reads on Kindle Unlimited into the pages of each novel (again Readerlinks does most of this addition for me). So the 9 Million or so page reads turns into about 30,000 books. And the other 25,000 or so is the “book” sales.
My next step, which is to promote the super omnibus (it’s already out) which gathers together the first 8 episodes of the series. I feel confident that it will do well in the new year once I give it a good push and that it will lead readers to the last collection in the series (that has episodes 9&10).
The first 8 episodes in one big omnibus stuffed with snark and dragons…
The biggest lesson for me is how marketing is quite a bit easier when you hit the right niche. My steampunk series, Mission Clockwork, did well, but anytime I tried to ramp up the spend to get more sales I ran out of people to market to. My Amber Fang books also sold well, but they didn’t hit the niche perfectly because they were more spy novels than vampire books. Whereas, with the “Dragon Rider” niche, there is almost always a profitable return on investment. Eventually I will run out of audience.
I have also learned that a niche really is a niche. My other books (steampunk and vampires, respectively) and even my fantasy novel, Crimson, didn’t get a huge burst in sales from the success of Dragon Assassin. These books didn’t have dragon riders on the front, so they weren’t of interest to my new readers.
The majority of these readers, judging by the all seeing eye of Facebook Ads, were ages 40+ with a good portion being in their 70s and at least 60% were female. I find that really interesting since these are older middle grade/younger YA novels. That means I haven’t even touched the “intended” market for these books. A traditional publisher in the US could publish them and find the younger audience much more easily that I could (since I’m marketing to people with credit cards).
This is a very happy dragon. He’s a bestseller.
Finally, this success came at the perfect time. This year nearly all of my school readings were cancelled and my traditional book sales in bookstores vanished. Plus, contracts I had with publishers were delayed while they waited to see which way coronavirus would shake the market. It would have been a very worrisome year without these developments. So I am thankful that the right things happened at the right time.
Now this “dragon” experiment is mostly done. Which means I’ll have to write something else, I guess. : )
If you have any questions, feel free to write them in the funny question boxes below.
Art