My First Facebook Ad Day

After all the hype about Facebook ads, I assumed they were the magic bullet. I'm not a Facebook user, so I never gave its ads a second thought. Not until every single newsletter from David Gaughran went into minute detail about them ~ creating them, "scaling" them (whatever that means), ad nauseum. Then I read the results of Written Word Media's reader survey, which listed some outrageous number of people who actually pay attention to Facebook ads, in contrast to other social media sites. I began to wonder if my stubbornness and insecurity led me to discount them.

I like book ads that are straightforward, uncomplicated. I pay a promo site its money, it slaps my book cover and blurb into its newsletter and there you go. That rarely produces results, but at least it's simple. My feeling is, if you're a writer who enjoys solving intricate puzzles, well...you must write thrillers, or you're in the wrong line of work. Writers write. Maybe they don't know how to do anything else. The thought of slogging through a one-hour tutorial on creating ads was excruciating.

As you know, however my sales have not been stellar, and since I'd vowed that this novel would be "the one", I had no choice but to grit my teeth and watch the video. (I've detailed in another post the issues I had with screens that didn't match Gaughran's and ads that Facebook kept rejecting for no reason. Suffice it to say, this was not my loveliest day.) And no, I simply couldn't wade through all the minutia, so I employed the slider at the bottom to get to the "good parts". 

Somehow I got my ad created and successfully processed, and now all I had to do was sit back and watch the sales roll in. The day did not start out well. Lots of impressions; zero clicks. I've been there before with BookBub ads, and it's demoralizing. And I'm talking about clicks; not actual sales. But for the piddly amount of money I chose to spend, Facebook did its job. I'm still mad at Mark Zuckerberg for stealing one of my novels, but his ad department appears quite competent.

I decided I'd stop looking. Now, this morning, I find that I did get some clicks ~ 12, to be exact. According to the ad manager, that's "average". Yay ~ I'm average! And both my engagement and conversion rates were above average. Now I'm a B student! (Apparently, that's a low bar.) Just like Gaughran's tutorial, Facebook's ad manager screen is difficult to decipher. I wish it showed the number of sales, but perhaps that's the conversion rate. Who knows? Not me. So I pulled up my KDP report. I sold eleven copies out of 12 clicks. That's actually pretty good. Not good enough to make me rich, but at this rate, I just might clear $15.00 in royalties for the month. Don't scoff; that's far more than I've ever earned. My book's no longer in the Top 100, but it is this:

#189 in Contemporary American Fiction

That's not bad ~ for me. 

My ad still has six days to run, and I may have sold all I'm going to sell, but I'm not desolate. I put myself out there and didn't crash and burn. 

That's really all I can hope for.