Variant mid-month sales figures
Since the last update, sales for The Variant have been much stronger for the Kindle version than the downloadable version.
The Kindle edition outsold the .pdf three-to-one in May, and ten-to-one for the first two weeks of June.1
I have no particular theory why that is, except that people may be coming across the story directly through Amazon. After its peak at #18, it has settled down in the 200s on the overall bestseller list — which seems pretty deep for random browsing. But it’s stayed in the #1 or #2 spot for its genre categories (short stories, spy stories, science-fiction), which is likely a help.
I consider this all found money, so I’m happy to burn what I’ve made so far on other experiments. For example, I haven’t bought a single ad for The Variant, but as its curve flattens I’m considering whether they would pay off. Any suggestions of where, when or how to place ads — and just as important, how to measure the outcomes — are of course welcome.
- The “downloads” category also includes the ePub version, but sales for that are miniscule: fewer than 20 sold. ↩
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June 16th, 2009 at 8:57 am
My partner is a media consultant for a company that does targeted Facebook ads. They have major companies as clients but have worked for individuals and he says it’s actually very easy to do Facebook ads cheaply yourself.
He’s also an analyst so he measures the outcomes too. Apparently it works very well for niche stuff; you’re welcome to his advice if you want it.
Let me know if you want his email address =)
June 16th, 2009 at 9:08 am
I think Google adwords might be the most effective form of advertising, but you might better increase sales with PR pitches to a variety of media, tech, publishing and literary magazines.
This would raise The Variant’s publicity and sales profile for a negligible cost when compared to advertising. I’m not certain where your publicity has hit beyond the Times article, but there are business implications here that might raise the attention of the WSJ.
I would have your assistant research then pitch reporters who have interviewed or written about Jeff Bezos within the past year. Send them a quick press release with links to the figures you’ve posted here.
June 16th, 2009 at 9:09 am
Have you considered http://www.scribd.com? Several writers I know (Kemble Scott, Tamim Asary, & Joe Quirk) have recently uploaded their work and are getting home page coverage. Their books are selling for $1.99 in downloadable format.
Happy to make an introduction to any of them if you care to learn more about the process.
June 16th, 2009 at 9:17 am
Two words, John:
Sign twirlers.
June 16th, 2009 at 9:29 am
You could donate the money to charity…?
June 16th, 2009 at 10:43 am
I used ProjectWonderful.com to run some ads for my blogged novel to generate some traffic. CPC was around $0.04 on average. You bid to get an ad slot on various sites at a daily rate, not per click, so YMMV. But it was much better than I could have ever seen with Google and most of the sites are web comics, web serials, gaming sites, or art/comics/fiction blogs, so it’s fairly targeted by default.
You have to really be looking at both CPC and conversion (how many clicks become sales). If you’re paying 4 cents per click, then you have to convert at least one out of every 8 clicks into a sale on Kindle, or one out of every 22 clicks for the PDF version. If you’re converting at a lower rate, you’re losing money.
With my blogged novel, I had no “sale”, so the expense was to build my brand and my name. The clicks were the point of the campaign. You have to decide whether your goal is publicity or sales. If it is sales, then you’re going to need to fanatically measure conversion and see if you’re getting a positive ROI for your investment. If it’s publicity, then whether or not you’re getting enough clicks for your dollar will be your measure of success, but you might still want to measure conversion not only on sales, but on downloads of the free sample, to get an idea if the clicks are really drawing in engaged visitors.
June 16th, 2009 at 2:47 pm
While I don’t have any constructive experiments for you to spend the money on*, I do want to thank you for taking us through this first experiment with you. It’s been some mix of inspiring and informative, and got some of my cohorts and I to fast-track our own plans for self-publishing fiction online. So thanks for that.
*(I want you to embark on some kind of adventure in POD publishing, but I’m not sure how you should expand on The Variant to make it big enough to warrant the paper and spine. Maybe a chapbook on the story and its story?)
June 16th, 2009 at 3:44 pm
You suggested that your push to #18 on the list was a result of about 500 sales in a day. You could spend your advertising money on 1,444 copies of The Variant and see if you can push yourself back into the upper rankings which might result in more sales.
You’ll make 35 cents per book which you can then use to buy 505 more copies will earn you enough to buy 176 more copies and eventually you’ll have purchased about 2,220 copies of your book which should be a significant bump.
Alternately you can change your price to free for a week and start a massive “free book” advertising campaign. This week only, get yours today. Run it on facebook, adwords and project wonderful.
I think I like the second method better. The first one seems sneaky. One of those instances where advertising becomes the twisted art of convincing people they need something they probably don’t.
Maybe you could just use the 1444 to carve out enough time to get started on your next book?
June 16th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
@Lila:
I actually did some experiments with Facebook ads for The Nines DVD. I like the interface a lot. I know folks complain that FB ads don’t end up generating results, but it’s probably worth considering.
@Bill C:
There’s already some more PR happening; you’ll see some later this week. But targeting Bezos interviewers is really smart.
I did Google AdWords as a test for The Nines, and it’s extraordinarily powerful but complex.
@Jeff:
I’ll check out Scribd further.
@Nick:
Sign twirlers rule. I might do it just to do it.
@Quinn:
My donations rate — secular tithing, basically — is already really, really high. So let’s consider this “Vegas money.”
@Greg Bulmash:
More, please. How did you measure CPC with ProjectWonderful? Did you have specific landing pages? Did you modify URLs, use one of the Google tools, etc?
@Pat Race:
Amazon actually won’t let self-publishers set the price to zero. Only “real” publishers can do that. They can also run ad programs through Amazon itself, which is obviously a huge boon.
But I agree that getting high on the list is probably a self-fulfilling thing.
June 16th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
Wow, I had just decided to get back into fiction writing because fiction on the web was looking more and more promising… and here my screenwriting guru is shining a light ahead of me again.
Since I am not famous, I was planning on experimenting with micro-blog and related marketing to build up an audience for my mystery series. Publish short stuff on the site, and try to sell novellas (or perhaps novella trilogies like Rex Stout did).
You have enough of a web following that you are ahead of where I hope to be – so I can’t really offer suggestions, but I will be following this closely. (And I’ll chime in if I find anything promising.)
June 16th, 2009 at 11:57 pm
John, as I said, I wasn’t measuring conversion, because this was branding and there was no product to sell. All the links went to the first chapter of my novel, but PW does a redirect, so you actually show the hit in Google Analytics as being from the site the ad appeared on, so they were never grouped.
But you could see it in Analytics, when an ad ran, how the number of referrers to that page would turn into a starburst of webcomics and gaming sites that, if you went and searched their site, wouldn’t have an organic link to you to save their lives.
I didn’t rigorously audit the numbers, but the traffic boosts I was showing when I ran ads corresponded pretty well with the number of clicks PW was reporting. As for CPC, that’s just a function of the ad spend divided by clicks. Since you’re not buying at a specific CPM or CPC, a budget of $6 a day might buy you day-sponsorships of 30 sites with 1,500 hits a day on a 600×160 banner. So you’re getting 45k impressions, if you pull off a 0.3% clickthrough rate, you pull down 135 clicks at 4.45 cents per click.
It’s a cheap way to test the effectiveness of creative. You can run a 100k impression buy to get a good feel for which of 2 or 3 pieces of creative are really paying out.
Anyhoo, I started blogging my novel 10 days after my son, Gibson, was born and I needed something positive to do with the late nights. I’d been working on it since my senior year for 15 years without ever finding closure. My main goal was to find people who would read it and like it enough to keep me honest about writing “THE END”.
Baby’s sleeping, Ambien is kickin’ in. Best to stop typing.
June 19th, 2009 at 11:42 am
May I suggest Facebook ads? You can start with such a small amount and do tests and see which groups respond the best. Then invest more in the high responding categories. That is our plan for our DVD release. You’re a fantastic writer. Thanks for sharing your work.
June 22nd, 2009 at 7:01 pm
I’ve had facebook for 4 years now and have clicked on one facebook ad. I know this because I can distinctly remember it, as ad-clicking is fairly uncharacteristic for me (guess it’s because of bad experience with pop-ups and all that). Have you considered marketing outside of the internet? Unfortunately I have no advice to offer along those lines (although that ad-swinging sounds pretty profitable). Maybe you could market it alongside another product, to provoke cross-sales? What about pairing the short story with another piece of work by an artist with a comparative fame level (but different niche followers) so you can both benefit by combining followers?
Just thoughts, off the top of my head. May or may not make sense, I’m in writing, not marketing