For the last couple of weeks, I have been experimenting with advertising for Sovereign Knight, and most of those experiments have been exercises in patience. Amazon gave me impressions without clicks. Earlier BookBub campaigns struggled to deliver at all. At times, it felt as though I was paying for the privilege of learning exactly what did not work.
Today, though, I finally have something that looks like a real pattern instead of noise.
My newest BookBub advertisement has now been shown 392 times in Canada and received six clicks. That works out to a 1.53 percent click-through rate, with an average cost of about 62 cents per click and a total spend of $3.70.
Six clicks are obviously not going to change my life. But what matters is that they did not all happen at once. The ad has continued producing clicks over several different days as the number of impressions increased. That tells me the response is probably not random.
The advertisement itself is very simple:
Twelve Houses Rule. One Was Erased.
Military Sci-Fi • Ancient Warships
That line gets much closer to the actual mystery at the center of Sovereign Knight than some of my earlier advertising did. The book has battles, warships, fighters, Marines, politics, and all the other things I enjoy about military science fiction, but underneath all of that is a question about history.
Humanity believes the Twelve Houses have always ruled.
The ancient systems waking around Captain Teren Vaust remember something else.
There was a First House.
And somebody made sure humanity forgot it.
Apparently, at least a few Canadian science-fiction readers find that interesting enough to click.
The United Kingdom has been much quieter. The same campaign has received about 70 impressions there without a click. That is disappointing, but it has not cost me anything, and the sample is still small enough that I am not going to read too much into it.
Amazon is telling a very different story.
My rebuilt U.S. Amazon campaign has now reached 114 impressions, mostly from people searching for terms like “space opera” and “military science fiction.” That is a significant improvement over the first few days, when Amazon barely showed the advertisement at all.
Unfortunately, those impressions still have not produced paid clicks or sales.
That means I am done solving the Amazon problem by raising bids. Amazon is finally showing the advertisement, so the issue is no longer simply getting into the auction. If readers continue seeing it without clicking, then something about the presentation needs to change.
That will be the next problem to solve.
But tomorrow is the experiment I have really been waiting for.
The Canada and UK BookBub test ends tonight. Assuming the final numbers remain where they are, tomorrow I am taking the exact advertisement that has been working in Canada and launching a United States-only BookBub campaign.
No new headline.
No different picture.
No attempt to improve something just because I am nervous about the result.
The same ad.
The same hook.
A different country.
I have wanted the United States advertising to work from the beginning. Most of my actual book sales have been here, so I know American readers are buying Sovereign Knight. What I have struggled to figure out is how to reach American readers who have never heard of me.
Canada may have finally given me a message worth testing.
Tomorrow I find out whether it works at home.
And for once, I am going into the test with something better than a guess.