It’s been an ad-focused week, after last week’s trials and tribulations to get Facebook Pixel conversion Optimization ads (hella mouthful!) to work.
Now they’re working. But are they working?
And let’s check in with word count on Wren 5 – Firestorm. I’d hoped to hit 15,000, and looks like I hit 12,000. That’s not too shabby. I almost certainly could have hit more, but I’ve been slacking. We’re through the initial intro action, and into the turn to the main rush.
Wren 5 progress
My target release date for Firestorm will be end of September. That’s 3 months. then book 6 by end of December – 3 months apiece. How’m I looking for wordcount, then?
It’s week 27 now. I’ve got until say week 39. That’s 12 weeks. Say 8 of those weeks for writing, 4 for revisions and launch prep. If I get 10k a week, I’m golden. I’m basically on schedule. That’s maybe 1,300 words a day.
Yeah.
So far in this 12k we’ve had 1 big death, 1 big fight, 1 big psychological ‘crack’ and some fun back and forth.
Facebook Pixel
So I set up my Facebook Pixels – they link to squeeze pages on this site, and optimize for anyone clicking through AFTER they’ve seen the price.
These webstie conversions are proving pretty expensive to get – around 80c. Each one is not a guaranteed sale by any means, but so far they’re looking good.
Yesterday in the US I had 60 raw clicks at 27c per click, which resulted in 18 clickthroughs on my site for 85c. How many of those became sales? No way to know precisely, but in total I had 15 sales/full readthroughs in the US yesterday.
Not all of those will be from the ad, so knock it down to 10 maybe. 10 out of 18 website conversions seems good. Hmm. Each sale then costs me $1.60. I make $1.90 on each sale. So that’s a profit of 30c.
Not perfect. But pretty good. I anticipate those 85c website conversions coming down in price too as Facebook’s algorithms finetune my target.
Comparing to previous figures, the conversion is way up. I had 60 raw clicks lead to 18 sales, basiclaly 1 in 3. I was getting between 1 in 7 and 1 in 12 before. Profit per click and such get involved too, but generally, if I can scale up 1 in 3 conversion, in profit, yeah.
I also made a few other ad changes:
- I put the Amazon and Kindle logo right on the ad image. I know everyone sees the image. They may not read the text, but they do see the image. No point people clickng if they’re not an amazon ebook reader. So qualify them up front.
- In the headline, which is the next thing they’re likely to see, I add that it’s a thriller, it’s an ebook, it’s $2.99 and it’s free in Kindle Unlimited. Again, no point FB makes any effort to optimize for clickers who aren’t into amazon, ebooks, thrillers, or who aren’t willing to pay.
We’ll see how this works out. I did this for my zombies as well as Wren. Here are those ads:
Click price will probably go up, but if conversion and profits per click also go up, yeah. Efficiency is key. Margins are razor tight.
Saint Justice notes
I had a couple of useful notes on Saint Justice. I haven’t had too many complaints about lack of realism recently, but a positive review mentioned a few:
- Wren would struggle to do much with cracked ribs – I get this, but I’ve had cracked ribs and could do a fair bit. True, I did slow down. So I change cracked to bruised. Easily done.
- Wren has a gunshot in his thigh, gets treatment, but then does action hero stuff. So I scale this down further. He does everything hobbling or limping after that. Seems reasonable to me.
- The burning building at the end is a little oversold. It’s true, if the stariwell was black with smoke, nobody would make it out. So I just scale this down a little. That’s what firedoors are for, anyway, to prevent spread of air/smoke.
In other news, my narrator Nick Cracknell has started on the audio for book 4, Ghost War, and he’s already 2 hours in! I need to catch up with my proof listening.