Amazon advertising: beginning to suspect I’m wasting my time here

On February 20, 2015February 20, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing2 Comments

(Warning: Inside baseball.)You may need to click on that to make it legible. Not too long ago Amazon announced that they were creating an advertising program for books in their Kindle Select program. It read a little… hmm… I’ll say suboptimally designed at first. Amazon already makes money from every book I sell, right? They take about a third of my sales, plus a little bit more that they pretend is a “delivery fee.” Now, I don’t actually mind the cut that they’re getting; as my distributor, they’re entitled to a piece of my sales. I don’t find it unreasonable.

I do find it slightly unreasonable that they want to directly charge me for an advertising program that makes them more money if it succeeds. It feels… unkosher, somehow, in a way I don’t like very much. But, hey, Amazon’s a business partner, here. They’re not my friends. They’re allowed to try and make as much money for themselves as they want regardless of whether or not I like it.

I’ve run two campaigns with them (and, I should note, not actually spent any money yet, because they charge per click) and both have, thus far, been literally completely useless. The first time through, I timed it around Skylights going on sale and specifically targeted it to people who looked at certain other books– I had a list of about forty. This time, I’m targeting by genre and not by specific books.

The first time, I got 728 impressions and not a single click. This time… well, they don’t seem to be able to keep their numbers straight. I had 21oo impressions a couple of days ago, which fell to 820 this morning and now is back up to 1414, but never more than the one click… and that click also disappeared for a time this morning. (6:00 PM edit: I’m down to 1200 impressions, and the click is gone again.)

I have not sold a copy of Skylights since the sale ended. Scarily, this is still a really good month– even independently of the sale, the first third of February was stellar enough to make up for a genuinely crappy middle third. And I’ve had 2142 impressions through this “advertising program” that has resulted in (maybe!) one click, for a return rate of .047%. In other words, less than a twentieth of a percent. Industry standard is 1-5%.

“But Luther!” you say. “Maybe your ad just sucks! Maybe it’s not Amazon’s fault!”

Which could be true– except for the part where Amazon generates the ads themselves, and they all look exactly the same: the book cover, the title, author, and star ranking. Skylights has a decent star ranking on Amazon right now, so unless people hate the cover I can’t really blame the ad.

The only good news is that they charge by the click, and if they never get any clicks, I never get charged. I’m not going to cancel this one for a while, but they’re gonna have to find a way to pick up the pace if they really think they’re going to hit my advertising budget (or even come close) by April 1st.

In which I employ people

On February 11, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

I think one of my favorite things about being a “small business owner” is the junk mail. This was attached to a rather thick catalog full of office supplies that I have to imagine cost at least a few bucks to print and mail. Sorry, dude; it’s just me, and there’s a Target like right over there.

Briefly, on the sale

On February 10, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing6 Comments

Not going into my usual numberwanking on this, just a few bullet points, mostly because I was teaching again today and I’m kinda tired and crabby and shot for other stuff to talk about. I’d like to promise I won’t mention writing again for a week or so around here but who the hell knows if I’ll hold to that. You got a poop post yesterday; quit whining. 🙂

In general: that went well. Sales every day, a couple of days down from others (the second and third day of the sale in particular) but it went well.
Interestingly, while I haven’t sold a copy of Benevolence Archives in a while, I had seventeen free downloads of that book from Smashwords during the sale. That’s impressive for that time period, so I’m going to say it was because of the countdown deal.
Amazon marketing appears to be literally and entirely useless, but more on this later.
Skylights also picked up a new five-star review during the sale, which was gratifying.
I also had my first day of more than ten actual sales. Even my launch days haven’t hit double-digit sales yet, although I’m fairly certain BA 2 will.
What did work? Twitter, believe it or not, and Facebook. A larger-than-expected number of my sales came about through good old-fashioned schmoozing. The other interesting thing is that while casting out sales Tweets generally doesn’t get you anywhere, people seem to notice and respond when they’re part of a narrative. My clickthroughs on my sales Tweets closely track with my actual sales. I had thought Twitter mostly useless for this; I may have to refine that viewpoint.
And, finally, I’ve made some sales today, so the end of the sale didn’t kill my momentum dead for a week, which I’d suspected might happen. The last day where at least one person didn’t download at least one of my books was January 26th, which is awesome. Also awesome: one more sale in February will make February a better month than January was, and it’s only the 10th.
I will moooostly be going quiet on the marketing front until April, at which point I’ll start ramping up for The Sanctum of the Sphere. So if you’ve grown tired of my yammering over the last week, I’ll be giving you a break for a while. 🙂

So, yeah. All told? I’m pretty pleased with that. My deepest thanks to anyone who downloaded, shared, RTed, or helped out in any way during the sale.

It’s impossible to photograph well, but…

On January 24, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography2 Comments

… I feel like my new Prostetnic Publications mug has improved my lifestyle.

In which my divorce just got more complicated

On December 5, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing10 Comments

Vogon_jeltz (NOTE: I am not getting divorced. Not even close. Calm down, Mom.)

However, if I do ever get divorced (I’m not ever getting divorced) my wife and I now have to figure out how to split up my small press that I just brought into existence today and which we are co-owners of. I’d like to announce the existence of Prostetnic Publications, a small press that exists specifically to publish the work of a certain independent author who all of you are terribly familiar with.

Note, here, that I have always been my own publisher, and that in fact the vast majority of independent authors are their own publishers. Amazon.com and Smashwords and the like are technically distributors, which is an entirely different thing. Prostetnic exists mainly to solve the legal conundrum I found myself in over the last week or so, which is that I need a legal entity other than me working under my real name for my money to go to. As I now have a legal sole proprietorship company with a bank account and everything (I did that today too,) I can now open a business PayPal account, which means that when I start selling my books directly from my website (Oops! Did I admit that I was doing that? Yeah, that’s happening soon.) you will be paying Prostetnic and not me. Only Prostetnic is me, so… yeah.

Sooner or later, I’ll set up a website; for now, prostetnic.com and prostetnicpublications.com both resolve here.

And since Prostetnic is a sole proprietorship and not an LLC, its money is my money, so no corporate taxes. I think. Need to double-check on this with Dad. And maybe an actual law-talker.

In closing, have this video, which runs through my head every time I talk about lawyers.

In which the internet breaks my head, and I need a lawyer

On December 4, 2014December 4, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing6 Comments

AvI_0yPCAAII5dD So, without getting into any details, because details would be terribly premature at the moment, I’m investigating another couple of avenues to use to sell my books, and my investigation of those avenues is leading me down a rabbit hole (yes, an avenue that leads down a rabbit hole, roll with it goddammit I’m tired) of all sorts of lawyerly nonsense and financial nonsense that I’m not used to having to think about. I’ve had to open a new PayPal account, for example, and I hate PayPal with a fiery, flaming passion; I’ve been trying to get these assholes to allow me access to some of my money that they have had since 2006, and they are insisting that I provide information about a bank account that has not existed since 2004 to get into it, and now they have another account from me under my current bank, only going through Luther’s email address.

(If that sentence confuses you, remember that Luther Siler is a pen name, and occasionally I will refer to him as if he’s a separate person.)

Anyway, point is, my name has to be on Luther’s PayPal account, which is also annoying because I don’t quite understand how PayPal works (because I haven’t used it often, because I hate it) and I don’t particularly want my real name splashed all over any transaction that I do using PayPal– which means that I need a PayPal business account, which is kinda okay since I was thinking of setting up a sole proprietorship publisher for my books anyway, and then I could just use the name of the company for all my PayPallish dealings and not my real name.

Only then I have to learn how to do that, and pay fees and visit county recorders and file paperwork and open a new bank account and– oh– file goddamned taxes, which terrifies me. Now, my dad is a CPA, so I assume he can help me with this shit, but I’m still generally not great about financial stuff and I don’t want to have to learn to get better so that three times a week someone can send me three bucks, y’know? And while I’m generally pretty fond of my dad and I know he would help me and this is literally what he does for a living, there’s also an aspect of Some Grown Ass Man Shit going on here and I prefer to figure things out myself rather than running to Daddy for help. Which is dumb.

Then again, getting my books into some of these pipelines I’m looking at would actually be pretty nice. And, let’s be honest here, my taxes in 2015 were going to be a nightmare anyway.

So what I need is a free lawyer, who knows her shit and is willing to just deal with all this stuff and then tell me that it’s free of charge because she thinks I’m awesome. I need my wife to become a lawyer, in other words, because ain’t nobody else gonna work that way.

Or maybe I just need to go play Dragon Age for a couple of hours and forget about all this nonsense for a while.

(Also, speaking of my books, I know I’ve been super-extra-harassy lately, but I’m one sale away from having sold books every day for a week, which would be really neat and has never happened before. If you happen to have been on the fence, today would be a great day to hop off of it.)

In which I am full of contradictions

On November 22, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews12 Comments

So I discovered today that I can’t handle Costco. I’ve never been in one before, and one just opened nearby, and my mom and wife wanted to go, so I tagged along. I’ve never in my life had such a visceral negative reaction to a store before. I hated the place– from the fact that there aren’t any damn signs anywhere (even the bathrooms aren’t labeled) to the fact that the place where you walk in is nowhere near any registers to the utter fucking randomness of the layout– within a 15-foot radius you could find housewares, fresh seafood on ice, liquor, and piles of leather jackets, an item that should never be in a pile. I’d had enough after five minutes and told Bek and my mom that I’d be in the car; I had my phone with me to keep me entertained so they could take as long as they wanted.

On the way back to my car, it hit me just how much the place is like a casino. No signs, no markers, everything is set up to disorient you and keep you lost and wandering. And the $50 a year fee for the right to shop there as the icing on the cake. No thanks; I’ve had enough naked capitalism lately and this place, despite having a stellar reputation for how they treat their employees, is one of the most grotesquely capitalist places I’ve ever had the misfortune of entering. And I’m not even generally that down on capitalism, although it does get worse this time of year; it should be noted that the very next thing I did after leaving Costco was go to Best Buy and buy a new iPad. But, still… guh. If a store is going to try and manipulate my behavior I’d prefer it if it wasn’t so goddamned obvious. I don’t give a damn how cheap their diapers are, I’d rather go to fucking Wal-Mart, and I have literally never before in my life said the words “I’d rather go to Wal-Mart.”

Actually, that’s not true, because I still won’t be going to Wal-Mart. But walking into a Wal-Mart doesn’t immediately give me the creeping screamers the way Costco did. And note that all this is before we get to the fact that it was the second Saturday the place had been open and it was crammed full of filthy, stinking humanity. I’d have hated it empty; the people had nothing to do with it.

So. I’m crabby today, is the point. How’re you?

In which I am the winnar

On October 16, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

idoe-featured-image Today was State Visit Day. They were basically coming to see me, which was interesting; I ran the first part of the morning and tagged along with the visitors all day long. I also had to pull together all of their materials, and I was dumb enough to leave the photocopying and printing of same to this morning, believing– reasonably, I thought at the time– that there were likely to be some last-minute adjustments to the stuff we were providing to them and that I’d be wasting my time were I to try and get everything done yesterday.

Well, pff. Cue every kind of technical issue you can possibly imagine, including a color printer that was stubbornly refusing to come online so that I could use it (it took the combined efforts of two nerds to discover that the damn thing wasn’t physically plugged into the network properly– the cable had pulled unseated at the wall) and then once I got that taken care of, a fifteen-minute search for a functional color ink cartridge (insert swearing about printer ink) only to discover that whatever dillweed had put the cartridge in had failed to pull the plastic tape off of it, meaning that the cartridge was in fact full and just, y’know, couldn’t print through tape.

I got the packet finished at 9:45, with the IDOE folk patiently waiting in the conference room. They were, naturally, early, because that is how these things work. If I’d been done last night, there would have been a dozen changes this morning and they would have been even earlier.

The good news is that once the packet issues got dealt with and ironed out, the rest of the visit went literally as smoothly as I could possibly have hoped for. No unexpected questions, a couple of places that I thought we might get dinged on did not produce dings, a handful of compliments at the right times, and even damn near perfect behavior from the kids. When all I have to complain about is a couple of shirts that aren’t tucked in, we had a good day.

I’m exhausted anyway, mind you. But the day went well. My brother’s soccer team is up for the city championship tonight, so I’ll be heading off for that in half an hour or so; I will likely go to bed early tonight when I get home.

Whazzup witchu?