The Day I Turned Off Every Ad
A Field Report on Book Sales, Momentum, and Making Smart Marketing Decisions
Hey Revenue Writers,
Recently I ran into an issue where I was doing several marketing strategies at once and unsure which was getting me the results.
So I just kept doing all of them. I became afraid that if I stopped any of the marketing channels my sales would plummet and I’d lose my “best seller” badge on Amazon.
This is stupid ego driven logic by the way, I freely admit it.
I was burning through more marketing dollars than I was making.
Basically for every $1 I spent I’d make $0.50 - $0.75 back.
Not a terrible investment, but thats what it was, investment. Eventually you need to recoup what you are investing and have cash flow. So I worked up the courage, raised my prices on my books (had several at $0.99 to run ads to) and lowered the ego and turned off every source of marketing.
Kept posting, kept podcasting, but no paid ads.
Creating a New Baseline
Part of this goal, other than stopping bleeding money, was to create a new baseline of sales.
How many books just sell through word of mouth, read through, etc.? You need to know this as an author otherwise you might be attributing more credit to your paid marketing than it deserves. By turning everything off you see what the momentum you’ve created is bringing you.
Now you can objectively document how many sales come in without paid promotions.
Here is what happened to me when I turned everything off. (revenue wise)
The red arrow shows where I roughly turned off all promotion.
You can see I had a terrible revenue day on day 1 after turning it off. Gave me a good disheartenig $8 day, but then since the it returned to the same or HIGHER revenue levels. ($25 - $50/day)
I had increased my prices so was my sales continuing or just the increased price?
Take a look below.
BEFORE
AFTER
Almost exact sales as when I had dialed back my ads to lower levels.
How is this possible?
How could I make as may sales as when I was spending $30/day on ads?
My theory is… momentum.
For 3 months I did run some type of promotional ad.
I enrolled a book in Kindle Unlimited (which has kept it at #1 in it’s category because each “borrow” a reader does counts as a sale and boosts my ranking)
And I got to keep my stupid ego drive orange badge to boot.
So… whats all this mean, why am I telling you this.
Book marketing relies on knowing a few things,
Where your sales are coming from
Knowing how much your spending
Knowing how much your making
This means how much you are earning per reader on a promo (are they eventually buying the full series? If so how many out of a 100 are?)
What is your actual royalties?
Don’t be so stuck in promoting your book that you lose track of where your sales are coming from.
Otherwise you might be stuck like me buying ads to infinity and beyond!
I’m now showing that I should make $1000/mo. if I do NO MARKETING outside of my organic content marketing.
Now when I do run a Bookbub Ad or a Book Promo I can see what actually changes, what improves, what worsens.
This is the fundamentals of scaling your marketing and I’m not great at it, but I’m learning and passing on what I do to you all.
I can move books, but doing the hard work of tracking, analyzing fixing… ugh I hate spreadsheets.
But if you need help moving books grab my latest book Mini book Marketing.
It’ll show you how to find your first 1000 readers… and beyond!
UPDATE
Now some of you have been around here long enough to remember my big gamble early this year.
I decided to change my book title on two of my books and republish them.
This wiped out all of my reviews… 🤯
But I had a theory I’d sell more books if I changed the titles.
I went from → to….
Mini Book Straitjacket → Mini Book Marketing
Dam the Amazon → Mini Book Publishing
I was super scared of messing with Mini Book Straitjacket because I knew that book was a core of my business moving forward.
The result?
I’ve got 20+ reviews now for Mini Book Writing (had oly 12 for Mini Book Straitjacket when I deleted it)
I’ve sold 3824 books of Mini Book Writing! (Mini Book Straitjacket had only sold 584 when I deleted it)
It worked!
Lessons?
Make hard decisions early on in your books life.
Be CLEAR not clever with your book titling
Trust the process
SURPRISE!
One final little Easter Egg for those still hanging around.
You may have seen me playing around writing a book in a software called “Publisht” that I was creating.
It’s getting close to roll out to paying members, but that isn’t the surprise…
The surprise is I changed the name, focus, and overhauled a lot about the platform. I’ll reveal more later, but figured I could reveal SOMETHING to you now.
I’ve been working on it obsessively. (just ask my wife)
So… whats’s this mysterious name? I’ll just show you the salespage design of Smart Publishing Studio.
I’ve got a new logo design (not the one up there) still tweaking it, but this is the vibe.
Ok, soon you’ll see much more premium content coming back out, but had to direct much of my time to Smart Publishing Studio because that is my big gift to our Revenue Writer Community… then I can get back to writing more books with it!
Chris Stanley
P.S. AI didn’t touch this post, just in case you were wondering.