The Book Promotion Blues

When You Don't Screw Anything Up but Fail Anyway

I hate marketing.

Like most activity I don’t enjoy, I’m also not very good at marketing. Unfortunately, the success of a book is a lot more dependent on marketing than the quality of the writing, or the story told. (Guess which of those skills I spent decades honing and polishing?)

So, the last book in my series was nearing completion. It also might be the last prose project I’m involved in for a while. I wanted to go out with a bang.

I’ve written some Amazon category bestsellers, but Amazon’s algorithms are so quick to hide my books from shoppers after a sales spike, that I never get any momentum out of a successful promotion. Such is the lot of a right-wing author who wasn’t grandfathered in before the woke Thought Police cracked down.

For the debut of my possibly last prose project, I came up with a plan to fight those algorithms and maintain visibility long enough for readers to discover it. I would stack multiple promotions over time in an effort to keep my book in a top ten spot for at least a week.

With that in mind, I timed the release of Confronting Fate, and the promotion, to coincide with the quarterly Based Book Sale—the one timed to coincide with “Based Con,” in fact. Having put my books up for the sale before, I knew that most of the sales happen on the first day, or day-and-a-half, so that would serve as my first day of promotion. It was a brand-new release, and so easily qualified for the “new to the sale” category.

Confronting Fate was published on September 2, and got a little sales bump just from being a new release on Amazon, to a rank of about five gazillionth. (Okay, that’s not true. It got up to #50 in the Kindle football category, amidst a bunch of what look like bodice-rippers about Strong Female Characters getting romanced by football players.)

The BBS started on September 4, and with some good fortune, would boost the book to the top ten in at least one category. Then I had a Kindle Nation Daily promotion scheduled that I hoped would maintain that top 10 position and hopefully even bump it higher going into the weekend. Then a Written Word Media promotion should carry it through the weekend where a Book Rebel promotion would pick it up. Finally, a BookBub New Release promotion would end the week and, if I was still in the top 10, or near it, should boost me to #1.

Remember that phrase “with some good fortune”? Ahem.

I got home from work on the 4th, took care of chores and other mundane stuff, then got online. “Whoah—Vox Day gave the BBS a shout-out on his blog! This first day should have even more sales than usual!” I checked my sales dashboard.

My numbers were far below expectations. That sucked, but there are no guarantees in this business and the best laid plans of mice and men yada yada yada.

I surfed over to the Based Book Sale to shop for some more editions to my towering To Be Read pile.

Confronting Fate was not listed.

I had triple-checked that it was submitted correctly, and even got a response that it had been added. I hadn’t dropped the ball, so what happened?

I sent a DM to Hans.

Got a reply later that it was now added to the list. That was 11 minutes before Midnight EST and I was already asleep. I saw the message the next afternoon after work and sent my thanks.

But maybe I better check, sez I. It was now listed, but not under Science Fiction New Releases—under “literature and drama.” I DMed again, asking for correction. By this time Hans was on the road headed to Based Con and couldn’t get to it until that night in the hotel.

My book wasn’t even listed for the biggest day of the sale—after I had chosen the publication date, and promotion schedule, because of this very sale.

It finally got listed in the right category, but by that time the bulk of the shoppers had gone through the list, bought what interested them, and moved on. Sure enough, on September 7 a list of the books sold at the BBS was published, and not one single copy of Confronting Fate had been sold from there.

There’s no point in getting irritated at Hans. The Based Book Sale is needed. It has helped me find new readers in the past, and Hans goes through the trouble to set it all up on his own time for no fee—his only monetary compensation is some sales commissions from using affiliate links.

The KND promotion picked up some slack and I got a modest sales spike from that on Thursday, but that spike started from a #50 ranking and didn’t have enough juice on its own to bump me over #22.

Friday, which was when the Written Word Media email was supposed to go out, my rankings slipped lower and lower throughout the day. This was not boding well.

Saturday people began to open those emails from WWM, I guess, and sales started climbing again. Also, Anonymous Conservative gave me a plug on his daily news aggregation, and I probably got a few sales from my fellow lurkers there. I was pleased and relieved. Still, I had been hoping for a steady, consistent high plateau (until the dramatic climax with BookBub), not this wishy-washy roller coaster.

Confronting Fate reached #16 that night before I went to bed.

On Sunday the rank-climb stalled, then slowly began to drop. I had anticipated this, actually. But if my plan had worked out, the descent would have started from a much higher ranking. It did not.

Monday was the Book Rebel promotion. All I knew about them was that I had submitted a few books a few times, all of which had been rejected until this one, this time. In my silly fit of optimism, I imagined their selectiveness meant that if your book did get selected for their promotion, it would get a nice boost. Roughly equivalent to a KND bump, perhaps.

Sales and ranking continued the downward slide all Monday.

Well, the huge, superpowered heavy-hitter was coming up Tuesday the 10th. My last, best hope to salvage this flop of a promo stack.

Talk about selective: Bookbub promotions are not easy to secure. In fact, this time they had rejected the book under the genre I submitted it under, but offered me a promotion slot under a different genre. It cost over 4X as much, of course, but I accepted the offer. I really, really wanted to build some momentum this time. Past BookBub promotions had gotten me enormous sales spikes. Their New Release promotion of Defying Fate had disappointed me (only 300 clicks), but that might have been my fault for only dropping the price to $2.99. This time I was taking no chances, and lowered the price to 99 cents (which provides Amazon the excuse to withhold half of my earned royalties for themselves…but the extra sales and exposure would make up for that, right?).

The Bookbub deal was solidified back over a month before. Despite the disappointing absence at the Based Book Sale, the underperformance of Book Rebel, and the roller coaster failing to even nudge me to where I had hoped to remain for a while, BookBub was powerful enough to launch sales like a rocket, anyway. I had high hopes for Tuesday.

I brought my personal laptop with me to work on Tuesday so I could check during lunch and other breaks.

I picked up sales now and then during the day, but not enough. Not nearly enough. My ranking continued to fall. Book Rebel was a dud. Now BookBub, the huge (and very expensive) champ, was proving to be an even bigger dud. It has never underperformed this badly before. This was such an epic flop, I’m not sure I’ll ever try another (ridiculously-overpriced) Bookbub promotion ever again.

“Maybe people just haven’t been checking their email yet. Maybe I’ll get a sales explosion around lunch.”

“Hmm. That wasn’t it. Maybe people will start opening emails around quitting time.”

“Nope. Um…maybe readers need some time to unwind after work, and then they’ll start.”

“Nope. Maybe after supper…?”

“Well, this sucks.”

I’d had diminishing returns on BookBub promotions in the past, but they still performed well enough to be worth it. This was just pathetic. The super “heavy hitter” had been soundly spanked by Written Word Media and even Kindle Nation Daily! (And both those promotions combined cost just a fraction of what BookBub does.)

As bedtime approached Tuesday night, of course my mind scrambled for the “why.” All that is meaningless, of course, because I’ll never learn the “why.” It just is.

I did get a pitiful bump overnight, that had my book inside the Top 20 again when I checked the next day. But that rank started sliding down again. Despite the futility of speculation, I still speculated on possible reasons:

1. Maybe my potential readers were too distracted by the debate that night. The nightowls among them checked their emails after the debate (accounting for that last sales gasp) while the rest just deleted the emails unread once resuming their routine the next day.

2. Bookbub has just lost their fastball. The diminishing returns I noted from years ago, combined with the underwhelming results from that first Defying Fate promotion were pointing to this and I just didn’t interpret it right.

3. I shot myself in the foot by trying to sustain a sales plateau for a week. The Thought Police at Amazon noticed Confronting Fate when it cracked the Top 20 the first time and they began hiding it from the “also boughts” lists, and maybe even messed with the page somehow to block additional sales. As should be obvious by now, the staffs running these woke companies (Amazon, Disney, Netflix, Marvel, DC, etc.) are self-righteously willing to sacrifice sales for the cause of Narrative Control and the associated virtue signaling that it enables.

Whatever. This promotion was obviously snake bit from Jump.

Instead of going out with a bang, the Paradox Series is going out with a “meh.” And, with a pitiful review/ratings count, it will soon be buried under the Consumer Slush Pile where no readers will find it without typing in the exact title and author name in the search bar.

I’m still glad I wrote it. I enjoyed the creative process throughout. And nothing ventured, nothing gained. I ventured.

It’s time to switch brick walls to beat my head against.