Happy Friday! I hope you all had a great week. So, if you've been following along, this is my last month update about KU. If you've missed the other two, never fear, you can read Month One and Month Two.
Each month I was trying different advertising avenues to see what would help and what's a dud. Month one was all about the Facebook takeovers but no paid advertising. Month two I tackled AMS ads, and for month three I did Facebook ads.
Let me just say, that Facebook ads have WAY more hoops to jump through mainly because it's not romance friendly. They gave me trouble with my covers, mainly the updated one for The Lists. So I attempted with the old cover, still had issues. So then I used a video I'd made only featuring Not Broken, they still tried to give me issues because the links I supplied went to both Not Broken and The Lists. I was able to successfully appeal and that ad ran. It was a boosted post, which is different than a direct ad, something else I learned.
Now this first ad ran in conjunction with my Kindle Countdown, one of the "perks" that you get when in KU. Besides the paid ads, I did the typical things, post on social media to advertise the sale on my own account and in a few Facebook groups that allow promotions.
How did it do? Let's see shall we...
The Facebook ad: Now I don't know what all this means (the impressions, to the reach, to the play throughs) I'm not a numbers person. What I do know is I did not have enough sales during the countdown to make up for the money that was spent. It was a fail like the AMS ads. $13.64 spent and only 4 sales.
On to my overall numbers. Sales. And I realize now I have been giving overall numbers which include my non-KU book. Apologies, but hopefully the picture shows the breakdown. Fiendish (non-KU) continues to sale more with no promotions.
Month three has been my best for sales so far with 17 total sales. (Month one-9, Month two-13)
Like with last month, sales went up, but the pages reads went down having only 1,161. (Month one-2,672, Month two-2,201) I don't understand the consistent drop, but I don't understand a lot of things LOL.
Sales
As you see Fiendish still carries the sales royalties. Now the big question, would I have made that extra $12ish dollars I earned from being in KU and getting page reads if I had been wide. Probably not. Looking back at month one when I pulled my numbers from Smashwords, I'd sold ONE copy of Not Broken during that time. So, yes in theory I did come out ahead by being in KU, but it's not really a landslide.
My final decision? Well, after talking with Vania Rheault who is running her own 'experiment' by going wide, I'm giving it another round. She advised that it can take 6-9 months for a platform to take hold so to speak. Since at this time I do have a slight win in the page reads area, I'll give it another 90 days and re-evaluate then.
That's it for now. Undecided if I'll do monthly updates again or just do one final update in August when my next round is finished, but either way, I'll keep you all posted.
Until next time
~Meka
You know what works and what doesn't. That's half the battle.
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