News that social media followers probably already know! For around a day, dawn to dusk on Thursday 12th March 2015, my self-published crime epic The Girl Who Tweeted Wolf was the most popularest, bestest book in the Dark Comedy category on Amazon US. If you don’t believe me, here’s a screenshot.
BEHOLD THE ORANGE STRIPE OF VALID LITERATURE
Now, much as I’d love to pretend this was an entirely natural spurt of love for me, I did require some advertising to achieve this. For anyone who wants a tiny wee glimpse into the inner workings of the self-publishing DIY promotion world, harnessing the resources available to reach the very top of a fairly uncompetitive Amazon category, this is your moment.
Quite cool, as the bulk of my existing readers are in the United Kingdom, so sales across the Atlantic had been quite modest until now. This is an important step in breaking America. If Doctor Who and Sherlock can do it, then so can Hobson & Choi!
As you can see, I also placed in some more challenging crime-related categories
Also, I was in the mid-80s of the overall humour (or “humor”) category on the site, which I was quite pleased with.
Anyway – long story short, I advertised the book with Fussy Librarian on Tuesday 10th (costing $7) and Ereader News Today on Wednesday 11th (costing $35), and by the morning of Thursday 12th, I was atop my category, so mission accomplished.
If you’re wondering how many book sales this requires, it’s about 85. So for my total $42 investment, that’s about two books per dollar. Not bad, although due to the first book in the series being a cheap hook-them-in deal, I didn’t quite make my initial investment back.
I found the people to advertise with by lurking for a while in the Writer’s Cafe section of KBoards. Although actually posting isn’t mandatory, a lot of people do share their experience, particularly of different promoters. There’s even a spreadsheet here if you just want a big list.
Obviously, the long-term dream is for the book to either sell itself or make a huge profit on advertising. More short-term, it’d be pretty sweet if some of the 85 people who bought the first book just now leave a review and/or pick up the second one.
So yup, this is the ultimate plan. Promote first book, hope it fires through to later books. Ereader News Today is one of the biggest and most reliable promotions, it seems, so future efforts may not be quite as huge.So, in case anyone was interested, that was my achievement this week. We’re still at #12 in Dark Comedy as of this writing, so that’s nice. If you want to help me achieve pleasure via numbers, feel free to buy the Hobson & Choi darkly comic crime books, but no pressure. I blog for love.