My first attempt at advertising Star Riders was underwhelming, so I increased my bids to see if that helped. Here are the results after a week and a half on October 10:
So you can see pretty quickly I’m losing money here, even disregarding that I don’t get all the sales money. I’m spending more on clicks than I’m selling books, without even accounting for the fact that I don’t get all the sale money.
But that’s OK. I’m in this for the long haul, and the idea here is to get exposure. Also, this doesn’t show all the sales, it just shows e-books and paperbacks. Here’s another view of that:
What it doesn’t include is the Kindle Unlimited (KU) page reads.
So this revised campaign sold 4 e-books and 4 paperbacks (although the advertising page shows 5 e-books and 2 paperbacks), for a total of $23.08 in royalties. The KU page reads totaled 3,734, so at 0.4 cents per page, that works out to $14,94 for KU, and a total royalties of $38.02.
I’m still behind, having paid $53.49 for that, but at least I got my book into the hands of at least 14 people (assuming 6 people read the entire book on KU). Since the sales were quite sparse before the campaign, I’m fairly confident any sales are due to the ads, even if the AMS dashboard doesn’t connect them.
So, what’s next? I’m going to try to improve my conversion rate. You can see I paid for 119 clicks, so 119 people were interested enough in my thumbnail cover and micro-blurb to look further, but only 14 of them were interested enough to buy it (or spend their time reading it on KU).
That probably means my blurb isn’t enough to entice them to buy, or maybe the low number of reviews (yet averaging 4.5 stars) doesn’t give them enough confidence that the book is any good.
I’m now going to try an experiment: I’ve added three quotes from the reviews to the top of the blurb (I was originally thinking of putting them at the bottom, after the description, but I checked several other books, and almost all of them put them at the top). Here they are:
“…a roller coaster of adventure…”
“…truly fresh and original…”
“…held me captivated from the beginning to the end.”
I’m also disappointed in the number of people responding to my “Call to Action” at the end of the book, where I ask for reviews, and offer to send them a free short story if they sign up for my email list (currently at 14, having added only 5 since the book launch). I really think they’re stopping at “The End”, even though I didn’t even include a page break in the e-book version. Or they just don’t want to.
So I’ve updated this part to start with “Wait! Don’t leave yet!” and to add a sentence explaining why I need reviews. Hopefully, I’ll see an uptick in the email list and reviews. (The update also included a couple editorial corrections a helpful reader pointed out to me.) Here’s the new Call to Action:
Wait! Don’t leave yet!
If you enjoyed Star Riders, there’s more coming soon.
A sequel is in the works, and I already have a short story about Moovik’s first experience with Throngans at Del Veranno, years before he met Bacary. If you’d like to get a free copy of that short story, and to hear when the next Star Riders novel is available, please join my email list by clicking here. You can also sign up for my email list from my blog, at www.rickaallensf.com.
Also, if you liked this book, please consider writing a review on the Amazon page where you bought it, which will help encourage others to try it out. I’m a new author, which means I’m not well-known, so reviews are very important to let readers know it’s worth taking a chance on me. Click here to get to that page.
Thanks again for reading!
Rick A. Allen
I’ve also used a highlighter pen to emphasize the main points in the paperbacks I have and occasionally give away.
Please leave a comment if you have any thoughts or suggestions!
Rick A. Allen - SciFi Author 
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