Goodreads Ad Campaign

I put some money into a Goodreads ad campaign, to try it out. How it works is you give them your budget and how much you want to pay 'per click'. I think it's a bid - someone who pays more per click will be given priority for ads. The good thing about this ad campaign is you only pay for clicks, which means you aren't being charged just for your book title showing up on someone's list. At the end of every day I get a report that tells me how many times the ad was seen, and how many times it was clicked.

This was discouraging at first, because I wasn't getting any clicks. I was getting 150 views or so a day, but for a few weeks no clicks at all. I read a post that said ).03% was a good click rate, or about 3 in 10,000 ads. I don't know how accurate this number is, but it's what I've been using as a base line. Anyway I was approaching 5,000 views with no clicks when I finally got my first. And then - lo and behold - two clicks the following day! So I'm at about 0.06% clicks as of this writing. I don't know if that's translating into sales yet, but at least awareness of my book is increasing.

I'll mention here, if I haven't mentioned before, that August may be an interesting month for me. I got an email regarding a review request I sent out a couple months ago, and have now sent a book to another reviewer! Bloggers are good reviewers because they almost always leave reviews, and generally do so on both Amazon and Goodreads. In addition, I go ta message from Locus Magazine in San Leandro to send them a copy as well! Not sure if they are looking at doing a review, a spotlight, or what, but this could be good publicity either way (fingers crossed). And I have paid some company to represent my book in a book fair in Hong Kong. Not sure if that's legit, but will find out. I mean, I'm pretty sure there is a book fair, and I will be represented, but only time will tell if that was a worthwhile expenditure. Will keep you posted. Bear in mind, if you are just getting into publishing, there are scammers all over the place. In traditional publishing you need to watch out for shady agents, and in self-publishing there are nefarious people that will offer marketing services for a fee but not do anything for you. Not sure which end I'm on in this Hong Kong deal, but keeping my hopes up for now.