In order to try and sell my books, I advertise through Amazon. It makes a sort of sense… that’s where my books are available, that’s where I should advertise them.
My success has been… limited with ads. They tend to cost me a very significant sum of money, and I’m doing my best to try and limit the amount of money I spend on ads that don’t covert into sales. That has proven… tricky. There’s a real art to doing proper advertising, and I don’t really have the brain for that kind of art. I’m a writer, not a sales person… in fact, even when I worked in sales, I always took the approach of trying to talk people out of buying stuff they didn’t need or would enjoy, rather than trying to talk people into buying stuff. I dunno, I guess with how tight money has always been, it’s just kinda the way my brain works.
But I’ve had to put more time and energy into this. If I want to be a successful author (spoilers: I absolutely do want that) then I have to figure out a way to not only get my books into people’s hands, but also to make money while I’m doing that. My 5-to-10 books a month isn’t cutting it, and writing more books of the quality that I’m satisfied with takes too long for success to find me that way alone. Gotta figure out the ads.
Part of that is going to be redoing a few covers. Now that I have a cover I really, really love… it’s making me question some of the other covers I have. The Queen of the AIs, in particular, I’ve never been a fan of (but it was the best I could get at the time)… but that’s a future-me problem. Current-me is just trying to figure out a way to nudge my ad campaigns away from “This Costs a Fortune for No Sales” into “This is At Least Cost Neutral for a Bunch of Sales.”
Baby steps. We’ll get there, I hope.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!