Ad results October 2023

It’s almost the first of November, so let’s look back and see how my ads did for October 2023.

It was a pretty weak month for sales for a variety of reasons beyond anyone’s control. For one thing, the economy remains bad and inflation high. For another, the international news in October was very bad, which always puts a damper on discretionary entertainment spending like books. Amazon US was consistently glitchy throughout all of October and still isn’t working right. I can’t prove this, but I think the books category faced strong competition from video games in October, specifically SPIDER-MAN 2 for Playstation and SUPER MARIO WONDER for the Switch. (Full disclosure: I am playing WONDER, and it’s excellent.)

On the plus side, GHOST IN THE SERPENT had a strong start, and SILENT ORDER did very will on October on the strength of a Bookbub Featured Deal back in the first week of September and the lingering halo from PULSE HAND coming out. People are generally more willing to start a finished series than an unfinished one, especially in the SF/F space. And all my ads for October turned a profit.

Here’s how the Facebook ads did.

FROSTBORN: $5.44 back for every $1 spent, with 44% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

THE GHOSTS: $7.46 back for every dollar spent, with 8% of the profit coming from the audiobooks. (If you take out GHOST IN THE SERPENT, it comes to $2.95, with 20% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: $3.19 back for every dollar spent.

SILENT ORDER: $4.45 back for every dollar spent.

For Amazon Ads, I advertised DRAGONSKULL: SWORD OF THE SQUIRE.

SWORD OF THE SQUIRE: $3.41 for every dollar spent, with 27% of the profit coming from the audiobook.

So we see once again that audiobooks, once you have them, are usually a good addition of profit for series. (For some reason I can never really get the CLOAK GAMES or CLOAK MAGE audiobooks to sell.)

I think in November I’m going to do things a little differently. I’m going to try advertising FROSTBORN entirely on Bookbub Ads, which I haven’t used for a while. Facebook has been making some changes to the way targeting works on its ad platform, and I can see it rapidly becoming less useful for books. Additionally, Facebook has also begun testing a subscription service for an ad-free experience, which obviously would make Facebook way less useful for book advertising.

The advantage for Bookbub Ads is that some of the targeting has already been done for you. Like, with Facebook ads, one of the keys to success is to make sure you’ve targeted your audience correctly. With Bookbub Ads, everyone looking at a Bookbub email is already looking for discount books, so some of the work has been done for you already. Anyway, if Facebook is considering pivoting away from ads in favor of paid subscriptions, it will be good to have a backup ready.

And, as always, thanks for reading! I’m closing in on 100,000 words of CLOAK OF EMBERS and hope to have the rough draft done soon.

-JM