Wednesday, October 10, 2012

10/10/2012 Writing Wednesday!

Hello everyone and welcome back! I hope the week has started seeing everyone well, we're at the halfway point, so that means just a little bit more to go until the weekend! If you follow me at Twitter (@ExplodingRunes) you've probably seen me spamming the internet regarding the new edition of 'The Light Rises' as well as it's FREE short-story companion 'Uncrossed Paths'. I would like to say I'm going to be slowing down, but that would be a lie...advertising is super expensive, which is what brings us to today's topic.

Advertising is expensive. I seriously can't stress this enough. If you go the cheapest ways, or the seemingly cheaper ways, you're likely going to be look at Facebook, Google, or doing actual promoted posts on Twitter, or even (awesome) Project Wonderful. All of these services charge per click, and you also set what you're daily "budget" is going to be. Sometimes you can go as little as $2.50 a day, which may not seem like a lot, but quite honestly my statements don't seem to reflect that at all. I have been completely turned away from Facebook's version of the ads, mostly because it has recently come out (and please correct me if this isn't actually happening) that their own system will click on the ads to boost how much traffic they're seeing. I have seen evidence of this on my pages, where I've seen the visits go up into the hundreds in one day but not a single sample (which is free) was downloaded. With "Uncrossed Paths" it was even more obvious since the entire story is free and there weren't any new downloads (aside from the one or two that generally happen a week) for the month. Google was a bit more reasonable, but it still didn't help with sales.

The other option that is available, that costs an absorbent amount of money, is to go through a promotional service. These are people who make it their lives to promote people's work and businesses, and they know they're good at it. A lot of the time you pay for packages (typically with the Silver, Gold, Platinum, and Adamantium levels) and each package will get you a different level of work they'll put into your product. I've looked at these as well and suddenly the cost I ended up paying for both Google and Facebook didn't seem so bad. I've also talked with people who have used promotional services before and they say the level of success is about equal if not less than average. Quite frankly I don't care for those odds.

In my experience the most successful route is the 'word of mouth' method. This is where social networking is a viking, especially Twitter. You tell someone about your product, let's say you have 20 people who follow you; if even one person tells their friends/followers, that opens your product up to let's say another 20 different people. This numbers continue to grow exponentially to the point where the amount of people talking about your product are seriously higher than anything you imagined. I always ask people to tell everyone they know and love about my books because I know this method works the best. Sometimes it's just friends helping friends, family helping family, but it's when you get that one person who isn't either talking that you're going to start making a lot of headway, since the likelihood you know any of the people they're telling isn't very high, which means your work is getting out to an entirely new audience. Facebook is similar since you can make Pages for your products and spam your news feed (guilty) until more people find it. There's also putting your links into your signatures in forums you frequent as well, since people there will click all on sorts of stuff.

Thanks everyone for stopping by again today. I hope this wasn't just seen as a rant and that it actually helped people make some choices regarding advertising. It's a tough world out there and I know that any bit of publicity helps, which was the whole point of this blog in the first place. For the most part indy authors aren't made of money, so paying some ridiculous price for advertising isn't very helpful. I'll be back on Friday though for my normal review, until then I hope everyone has a great rest of the week!

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