Advertising and Facebook

#indieauthors #writerslife #amwritingromance #RomanceReaders #paranormalromance

Start-up money for a self published author are not too great. I started out with less than $1000 dollars invested at the beginning. It is the marketing and advertising that seem to be where the money gets spent. In the interest of honesty and full disclosure, I have not spent very much on advertising. I have a free ALL author account that tweets about my short reads on occasion. I have my books listed on the Awesome Gang family of sites (Pretty Hot, Topless Cowboy, etc...) I took out a one year ad with Writer's Pay It forward for A Pack Forms. I have also paid for some advertising with Awesome Gang for Synner and Sainte, The Dark Gift, and A Pack Forms. I have spent less than $200 on all of that and I only started at the end of last year. So over the last six months. 

I took a free online class to attempt to learn how to use AMS ads. I tried it. Basically, I came to the conclusion that I was spending money, but nothing else. (My readers dropped off the scene. No one bought a book. Crickets people. So I stopped all AMS ads. I might reconsider in the future, but for now I am avoiding giving all my royalties earned back to the hosting platform.) That endeavor cost me close to a bill. ($100) The return on investment did not materialize.

Then I tried something very risky. I took out an ad on Facebook. It was only a $5 a day 5 day ad to send traffic to OpheliaKee.com. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the number of weekly visitors to my site skyrocketed. I went from the tens into the hundreds. That made me think that maybe I was on to something. But $25 was a bit rich for my blood. I scaled that down to $3 a day and began another ad. This time I started promoting A Pack Forms.  It went over really well. A few more people started reading on Kindle. So I have continued to run that little $3 a day ad in different places around the world. 

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The law of 7/11 is definitely in full effect. To buy something, a person needs to be convinced at least seven times. To remember something, the mind needs to touch that something eleven times. If I want name recognition and remembrance so that readers will choose my product over some other book, they must see my work a lot of times.

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That takes us to the Amazon Author site and on to Pinterest, but those topics are for other blogs. You came here to learn about the behind the scenes of the dream. So I have been remiss a bit. If you have not yet seen the Storyboard preview for Elementals, Check it out on YouTube! I could always use more likes, follows, and subscribers on all my social media sites. I am trying to get better at hashtags on Tumblr, but that platform is a bigger struggle than the others. Any of y'all who use any of this social media and want to help, I would love to connect with you there as well. Follow my author sites at Amazon and Goodreads if you avoid the other social media platforms. The storyboards are there as well.

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I promised more FREE stuff too. That I can deliver. This weekend, grab your FREE copy of Weaver's Tale part 1.
Meet Araack Kniid, the warlock spider king of The Longest Purple. This short read spinoff from Synner and Sainte is a four part quad exploring the life of a man who bought a lie and suffered the consequences for a thousand years. Find out if he can refund that purchase and change the course of his life.
Hurry before the offer expires. At midnight Sunday, the price returns to normal. 

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Don't forget about Dragon Masters. The full length novel is available as a preorder now and I am currently working on the PDF for the paperback. It will launch on March 23. So get ready to dive back into the dream and reconnect with the denizens of Draoithe. Blue and Torch are back. The red dragons who were secretly trying to protect Spark and wound up on a long mission to aid a gifted human, have returned to Draoithe to settle in, but when their Valkyrie arrive in the form of institutionalized slaves, Blue and Torch need a bit of ancient magic to help them claim their lifemates. Grab this full- length novel while it's at the debut price of 20% off. 

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I gotta run away. If you read, leave those kind reviews.
Be Careful!
Happy reading,
​Ophelia Kee