A recent marketing goal of mine was to launch my Amber Fang books onto the USA Bestseller List. It’s perhaps surprising how easy it is (um, until you try it). In order to hit that list, a book has to sell in the vicinity of 6000 copies on three different vendors in the US in the space of a week (in my case the vendors were Amazon, B&N & Apple Books). My reason for aiming for this “feather” in my cap was to get a bit more buzz about the book. And, quite frankly, I was just curious what it would take to get onto that list.
I blustered full steam ahead, full of confidence!
I’ve read the accounts of several authors about how they hit the list—one of the best is by Nicholas Serik: Bestseller Mini Guide (sign up to his newsletter for more advertising tips).
The very basic method is to stack newsletter ads (that is have them run on the same day), run Facebook, Bookbub, and Amazon ads during that week, let folks on your newsletter know, and cross promote with other writers. Oh, and one more big thing, you need to get a featured deal with Bookbub (it's the Olympic Gold Medal of book promo). You pay for that honour, but Bookbub is such a large newsletter with so many readers that you are almost guaranteed to earn your money back.
I submitted The Amber Fang Boxed set to Bookbub, promising to drop the price to 99c during the sale week (it’s normally $8.99 for all three books). And it was accepted! They at first put the featured deal on a Saturday, which meant the promo wouldn’t benefit from the long tail of sales (Since USA Today measure from Monday to Sunday) so I asked them to move it to a date earlier in the week. And they moved it to a Tuesday, which was very helpful. They placed it in the Supernatural Suspense category, which goes out to 1.2 million people. Their chart said, on average, this promo would account for 1700 sales.
Being in supernatural suspense was perhaps the best fit for this series. That said, it is an odd trilogy—a mixture of spies, assassins, vampires, and more scientific than supernatural (vampires in this world evolved alongside us—so no one is turning into a bat in this book). So it’s a hard series to classify. More on that later.
I also applied for a grant to help offset the costs of this promotion. I live in Saskatchewan (it’s a prairie province in Canada) and we have a government agency called Creative Saskatchewan. Their motto is Create Export Succeed. If you are a Saskatchewan artist, writer, publisher, filmmaker, singer etc. this organization helps you get your product out to the world. I sent in a proposal and the jury awarded my project a grant that would pay half the expenses. This was both timely and particularly helpful because the grant meant that I could push the promotion further than my budget would have allowed on its own.
This was my budget (this is in Canadian dollars, so if you’re in the US don’t freak out! Just subtract about 25%). I believed this would be enough $ to reach the USA Today Bestseller list.
I followed the pattern of stacking ads leading up to the Bookbub Featured Deal. Amazon ads were hard to get going (they really don’t work well for big promotions) and Facebook, as per usual started costing more per click each day as it burned through the audience. There must be a magical meta world where Cost Per Click stays low forever, right?
Alas, not in this world.
Here are a few of the ads:
This was the most popular one. The “Buffy” quote really caught people’s attention. And the quote combined with the sell line, I think gave new readers a good idea of the contents of the book. And, judging by comments on the ads, only a few were readers who'd seen my work.
And that’s about it. Oh, except for the conclusions:
The Good News:
Bookbub was right when it predicted 1700 sales! The book sold 1421 copies on the day the Bookbub Feature Deal came out. I’m sure the long tail has added several hundred after that so it would be well over the average amount. Promo that day shot the book all the way up to #46 on Amazon, which is the highest point any of my books have been on that store. Amber also clawed her way to #14 on B&N and to the top 100 on Apple Books. Oh, here, why don’t I just show you too many screen shots of the successes:
Overall, in all markets, the book sold 5785 copies. I really wish every week could be like that. I’d be living in a Scottish castle. Of course, I’d move it to the Caribbean.
The Bad News:
I’ll cut to the chase. The book didn’t make the USA Today Bestseller list. Alas! And darn! And maybe a few of those other words my dad taught me (I call them tractor fixin’ words). During the sale week it sold 3757 copies on Amazon, 253 on Apple and 264 on B&N. That’s 4274 copies and short of what was needed. By about Thursday of the sale week, it was clear that it might not make the numbers needed and I decided at that point not to press down on the gas, as far as spending. Or pour on the gas, either. I did go over budget on Facebook ads (it’s too easy to do that!). Am I disappointed? Yes. It’s like mentally stubbing your toe. Or your ego. And I’m now hoping the long tail will keep the book selling.
The Conclusion:
Why didn’t it sell more? One reason is that many of my readers in Amazon read my Dragon Assassin series and aren’t interested in vampires. So if Amazon sent them an email about this book, they’d look at the cover and see an assassin, but no dragon. No thanks. Readers don’t tend to follow authors on Amazon as much as they follow genres. And I also didn’t do any author swaps, which was intentional because most of the authors I have connections with now are doing dragon stories. And a third reason is that the book might exist in too many genres. It makes the book great fun! But, again, readers who expect Twilight won’t like this book. Or even readers looking for supernatural Urban Fantasy, won’t find the supernatural in this book. That said, the readers who love it really love it. And the readers who meh! it, really meh it!
There are always meh sayers.
Would I do it all again? Of course. Not with this book because a second push would give diminishing returns (then again, never say never). But someday, I’ll try again.
Cheers,
Art