Quick update on Gods Fare No Better: the novel has hit a hundred sales! My goals was to reach that in the first month. Reaching it about five days early was a nice bonus. Thank you to everyone who bought the book. When you’re done with it, leaving a review on Amazon and Goodreads would be a huge help.

Okay, with that out of the way, I wanted to talk a bit about what I’ve been doing for the book.

I was determined not to just throw this book out into the world without a plan. I’ve done that for all of my books, with diminishing returns. The last book I wrote that sold well (about 2,000 copies) was Black Gum ten years ago. At that point, I was still in good with the writing world, and their word of mouth helped to gas the book along.

I had to take things a bit more seriously with this one. There isn’t a pre-built-in word of mouth network anymore. So I got to work trying to understand the wild and wonderful world of book sales.

There is an inborn pushback to most of the ideas I’m going to put forward. People have called it stupid, a waste of time, etc. Books either “hit” or they don’t. But how can this be true? Is it really all luck of the draw? Some books connect, and others drift off into the abyss of the internet…no, I don’t think so.

My belief is that good marketing will help a bad book fail faster, but there is no world where a well-written book with a great cover somehow wouldn’t sell, no matter how much effort you put into the marketing.

With GFNB, I knew I had something special on my hands. Early feedback was positive in a way that wasn’t just “friends being nice”…it was ecstatic. While I know that does not guarantee a massive seller (and I don’t expect GFNB to be one), I knew that realistically I could get this book into several thousand people’s hands, and maybe more if those several thousand people really, really love the book.

And maybe I could make a little beer money along the way.

First, I learned Amazon ads. “Learn” is a weird way to put it, I suppose, because I still don’t feel like I have a good handle on the process. But I’ve gotten over the first hump: Amazon is showing my book to readers, and they’re clicking and buying. Amazon, unlike Facebook, will NOT show your ad to readers if it doesn’t think it can sell the book.

Of course, it doesn’t tell you what it’s looking for. You’re just given a screen with “negative targeting,” “automatic targeting,” a space for a little tagline, etc. The trick to this is to get to work finding the keywords that books similar to your book use, then bid a respectable amount per click for those keywords. Publisher Rocket is great for this. Just type in the ASIN of your competitor’s successful book, and PR will show you all the keywords it uses.

Analyzing the data is tough, but I’m starting to get a feel for it. For example, I noticed that people were clicking the ad (which I pay for) but were not purchasing the book. They were bouncing off something on the landing page. I worked on the ad copy for days, honing down to a fine point, but potential readers were checking the page, seeing something objectionable, and getting out of there.

I thought, well shit, it must be the price. So I dropped it from $10 to $5 ebook, $30 to $18 print. That hurt, because I’d gone into this project hoping to make around $8-10 per copy sold…but that wasn’t going to work. As soon as I dropped the price, customers began converting.

It is what it is.

So far the best converting keywords are, perhaps unsurprisingly, “cyberpunk books” and “altered carbon.”

What else have I been up to? Well, I sacrifice $15 a day to the black hole that is Facebook Ads. I paused them for a while, then restarted them when the price dropped, but ultimately I might not use Facebook Ads for a while. It’s too scattershot. FB doesn’t give a shit, it’s going to spend your ad budget however it can. The pro of this is that I know for a fact new readers have discovered my book. The con is that I don’t think that is converting readers.

I started a King Sumo account and began a weeklong book giveaway. In exchange for an email address, I will give one lucky winner a bundle of three print books: GFNB, Only Forward by Michael Marshall Smith, and Cyberpunk 2077: No Coincidence. If you listen to any self-publishing podcasts, you will hear this ad nauseum: the most important thing you can do as an independent author is build an email list. Social media throttles your posts, but a newsletter shows up in your readers’ inboxes. So unless they unsubscribe, that is THE tool to have in the toolkit once a book launch comes around. I’m hoping to build mine to 1,000 subscribers by the time my next book, American Shinto, drops in six months.

I am not above bribery! Win three books! Unless you’re already subscribed here, of course. This is what you’d be subscribing to.

I have been on several podcasts: Rare Candy, Getting Lit, and upcoming episodes of Threshold Saints and Soapbox. The list of things goes on.

Basically, every day I will perform a few actions that will potentially get my book in front of a few more people. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Thanks again to everyone who purchased.