On 9th July I made a big ol’ pubic declaration to sell a thousand copies of my fantasy novel The End of Magic by Christmas, and I promised to keep folks in the loop with the ups and downs of sales and marketing with a weekly update.
A few caveats…
- I can only do this in the USA… Unbound have the UK rights and I have no visibility on sales other than the twice yearly statements.
- I’m going to stick with Kindle and Kindle Unlimited.
- I’ll be counting both Kindle and Paperback sales.
- Here’s week four!
Okay, so this is half a week, as I was still on holiday or travelling, so couldn’t keep my eye on the ball, but at least sales got into double figures!
These last few days have seen the final push of a 99c/99p campaign in the the US and UK to drive visibility and it kinda worked as I managed to sneak into a chart for a short while…
But it does mean I’ve been spending too much on Bookbub promos…
Bookbub is the only thing that really seems to drive sales, but it really comes at a cost that I just can’t sustain. Today is the last day of that promo and I’ll be putting the price back up to $2.99 and cutting the ads. My feeling is that price promo works better when you have a series and more expensive books to sell once readers have enjoyed book one.
With that in mind, I think the next phase is try and build my readership and, from looking at the usual forums and chit-chat, the best way to do that is to use FB ads to target readers and send them to your book/website. As of yesterday I started running two ads targeted at Terry Pratchett fans in the US with a budget of $5 per day.
The first offers a free short story…
The second has a packshot of the book…
It’s early days, but the packshot ad is getting more clicks…
Both ads are driving readers to my new squeeze page for the book. A squeeze page is a single web page dedicated to one topic (in this case, my book) and with the URL theeendofmagic.com it should give the book’s SEO a boost and make it more visible. Please check it out and let me know what you think!
In other news, the Amazon AMS ads keep trundling along with another 2 sales per week, and again these are now too expensive and I should knock them on the head…
Though the KU page reads are still fairly strong…
Here’s a summary of last week’s sales
Kindle units sold: 20
POD Paperbacks: 0
Kindle Unlimited Pages read: 1792
Royalty: $7.35
Advertising spend total: $108.02 (and £14.37 in GBP)
AMS: $33.01
Bookbub: $75.01
Facebook: £14.37
And here’s the running total…
Kindle units sold: 85
Kindle Unlimited Pages read: 4943
Royalty: $35.36
Advertising spend total (since 9th July): $464.00 (and £14.37 in GBP)
AMS: $99.92
Bookbub: $272.70
A mere 915 units to go!
That’s a little over 6 a day between now and Christmas.
Thanks again for all your messages of support and to everyone who’s bought the book or spread the word.
If you would like to help, then please do any of the following:
Buy a copy here in the US, or here in the UK
Leave an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads
Tell your friends about the book
If you have any thoughts or comments on what I might be doing wrong, do please leave them below! Until next week…
Update…
I got this wonderful Tweet from the mighty Tim Clare not long after I posted this. He’s not wrong…
Stay tuned for a change in strategy!
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Mark Stay Writes 
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