I'd meant to wait until I had three books up before I tried this experiment but the latest book isn't moving -- and the book I have yet to write is moving very slowly.
So I put the eBook of The Fox Knows Many Things on free giveaway for the weekend and popped up an Amazon ad campaign over the same period.
Got 50 click-throughs at a cost to me of $100. That's out of 15,000 impressions so 1 out of every 300 people who had my cover pop up during their browsing for books said, "hrm" and took a closer look.
I'm using the stock Amazon ad. I think I'll cut this campaign short and start a new one with a customized ad instead and see if that changes the numbers. Still 1/300 ain't bad.
During the same period as those 50 click-throughs 25 people said "what the hell" and downloaded the book for free. This pushed my sub-category numbers as high as #16 (and broke 100 in Action Thriller).
The payoff is going to be if I get subscribers. If any of them go on to Fox and Hounds. Or leave a review, for that matter. My gut says that 1 in 10 to 1 in 20 will go from downloading the first to checking out the second. And the numbers seem to say that no more than 1/100 readers will review. Closer to 1/1000.
So here's what the numbers don't tell me. If anyone read to the end. If the downloaders even saw the ad. How many clicks there were on either book page. How many downloads of the free sample chapters took place.
Amazon is in the business of making money. They are happy to make money through authors, but they are also happy to make money from authors. They will release enough information for an author to have confidence the ad money is actually returning value. No more.
At the heart of this is that I want to know if I'm doing it right. If I'm doing anything that people actually enjoy, or if I am fooling myself and should stop (or at least, go back to fanfic.)
***
Despite my confidence being near rock bottom I'm slowly getting excited about A Fox's Wedding. I'm still having bad guy trouble, though.
The cult at the center of the thing is morphing. For a bit there I was looking at an MLM -- basically the Cult of Amway. I think I've moved away from the UFO cult. The silver jumpsuits will have to wait for a different book. For a while there the conception was more a small group of friends, like the true story for most of the evolution of Heaven's Gate, or the structure of Theosophy groups before things got big and weird.
That still has attraction but what I'm playing with now is something that I think lets me talk more about Japan and some of the massive social changes it has been through. And it is a direction I thought of while brushing my teeth -- with a new tube of Dr. Bronner's.
There are at least three people in my list of potential bad guys. I'm half tempted to do a reverse-Yojimbo plot in which my protagonist has to get really clever to keep them from killing each other. But I really want a full-up bad guy and that's proving really hard for me.
That's the weird way fiction works. All ideas, I guess. You start out inchoate, drifting between possibilities (or even drawing a blank entirely). Then some of the things you think of anchor themselves and start growing. They attract other ideas. At this point I'd have a hard time completely letting go of Mog, or the Prince and his two bodyguards.
And I'm quite fixed that I'm going to have Ichiro, his friend the takaresienne, the ninja club, Aki on headset, and Hanae the landlady.
I've got way much material already. The problem is focusing down on what makes for the strongest story.
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