Adventures in advertising

Afternoon folks,

I've been making actual effort this afternoon.

Since I began my little adventure into Indie Publishing I've continually said the goal was to make enough money to enable me to write full time. So far that hasn't happened and, as I earn more at work, it becomes less likely.

But every now and again I have a word with myself, just a quiet reminder of the long term goal, my reason for being if you will.

With that in mind I've finally done something about it. I've danced around using paid advertising for months and today I finally took the plunge. It's nothing major but it's a start. I've bought $100 of pay per click adverts on Goodreads. The idea being I can create as many ads as I like for my campaign, target them to specific groups within Goodreads membership and see what happens.

The risk is that people will see my adverts and click on them only to not purchase the book. Either way I pay for the click. The goal for this first campaign is merely to break even, or as close as I can get. If I make a profit, bonus.

I'm at home for the duration of the campaign so I can monitor it. I am also able to tweak the ads in real time so if one seems to be working better than another I can adjust. Worst case scenario I've wasted $100 which is less than £65 in real money. Not the end of the world.

However at least I can I've tried. The campaign is only for The 24 Hour Jazz Cafe but if sales increase I'll try the same thing for every book. I also have another site lined up which works on a subscription basis. It's more expensive but again, the potential is there. We shall see.

In other news I have also submitted The Trust to our chums at Smashwords. What does this mean? Well, in a few days The Trust will be available in all formats i.e. Sony EReader, Kobo, Apple, Barnes and Noble, as well as Kindle and paperback. So there will be no excuse.

I'll keep you posted on the adverts.

Now I might have a quick snooze before tea.

London 2012 and pink grapefruit

Afternoon everyone,

So then, how good was the opening ceremony then? Apparently 26.5 million folk stayed up to watch here in the UK. The wife and I sat pretty much mesmerised by the whole thing. I can only imagine Danny Boyle and his team will receive some sort of mention in the Queen's next honours list.

It seems that our American chums struggled to see the opening of the largest sporting event on the planet owing to NBC not showing it live. I don't know details only what I've seen on Twitter etc, but a lot of people seemed pretty unhappy that it wasnt being shown live. If it wasn't, it begs the question, what's more important than showing the opening ceremony of the Olympics?

I'm established on the couch today for a full day of olympic viewing - I am going out tonight though. Outdoor showing of Woman in Black in a local park. Hope it stays dry.

The BBC have pulled out all the stops with the coverage. They've got a fancy menu TV guide thingy where you can just click on the sport you want to watch and away you go. Epic.

The other bonus was that I discovered a tin of grapefruit in the cupboard so that became a late breakfast.

Since this is a writing blog I'd best mention the books. I've written 30,500 words of the new book so I'm still on course to have it published this year along with another from the back catalogue. My existing books are also still available on Kindle, Createspace, Smashwords, Kobo, Apple Ibook, Sony Ereader, Bibliocracy and doubtless a few more. They're all priced to sell too, except the paperbacks which are vastly over priced but look superb on a shelf.

Oh, one last thing. An associate of mine went to the local library yesterday and asked if they could order in a copy of one of my books. He was, I believe, armed with the necessary ISBN info. From what I can gather they seemed to suspect that he was, in fact, me trying to abuse the library and use them as some sort of self-promotion tool. I have to admit to being a bit miffed. After all, I thought libraries would order in pretty much any book if a customer asked for it. Add to that the fact that I'm local and it's win win all round. If I end up selling millions all of a sudden they'd have "local author" posters all over the bloody place to drag people in. Poor form!!

Now stop reading this and watch some Olympics!