Goodreads Authors/Readers discussion

Hi all - I just wondered if anyone has used a Goodreads self serve ad campaign. I'm dropping the price of my ebook for a week and wondered if this might be a good way to promote it?

All advice gratefully received.

I haven't yet, but am seriously considering it, at least as a starting point. I need more marketing on my book.

I ran a campaign, and plan on doing so again. Here are what I took away as pluses and minuses:

- on the minus side, it didn't result in a lot of sales.

- on the plus side, it's an extremely cost-effective way to advertise, since you pay only for the clicks, and not the ad impressions. You can set the cost for a click extremely low - say $.25 a click - and get tens of thousands of ad impressions

- running the ad alongside something else, such as a free book giveaway, adds up to a lot of impressions, and may bump someone over the line to read your book

In my case, running a book giveaway and an ad campaign resulted in about 1200 people adding my book (The Alexandria Project, currently the book of the month for the GoodReads Thriller book group) to their "to read" shelves. Several eventually got around to reading it and posting reviews.

I can't tell how many of those to-read adds were attributable to the ads, but they did continue after the giveaway notice had sunk out of site. But given that you can display the ads c. 10,000 times for about $10 bucks, its certainly worth the price at a site like GoodReads, where everyone that sees the ad is actually a potential buyer.

So to sum up, I'd say that running a self-serve campaign is extremely cost effective for marketing (i.e., letting people know about your book), but not necessarily very effective for selling your book. From from that perspective, it may make more sense to think of it as part of a larger whole, rather than as a discrete tactic that will immediately translate into identifiable book sales.

A couple of extra thoughts: you can target the ads at the exact categories of readers you want, and you can run several different ads at the same time, with different catch lines. I'd suggest doing both.

Good luck!

Keep trying all avenues ! I got lots of clicks on my ad when I raised the bid to a little more than 50 cents ( Goodreads gives priority to high bids ), but the sales conversion rates were dismal, so I have to work on that. I reduced my bid, in spite of the high visibility, since it was burning through my budget. I am working on my author page at Amazon and even imported a new blog into it.

I would like to try out http://montecarlosolutions.com/authors/ after I am done with my current campaign on Goodreads. Has anyone had a shot at their offer ? What was the experience like ?

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Thanks, people - that's really helpful. I may well give it a go!

Jane wrote: "Hi all - I just wondered if anyone has used a Goodreads self serve ad campaign. I'm dropping the price of my ebook for a week and wondered if this might be a good way to promote it?

All advice gra..."

Hello, you mean that campaign where your book appears at the side of pages? I do. They send me reports on a regular basis and you can check how many people have seen the ad every day (but I don't..,can't check everything).

Ade

I always come across it when I'm editing my profile and while it looks intriguing I don't know that I'd do it. For starters I'm not sure how it all entirely works and two I don't usually throw money into promotion unless I know there's a good guarantee. You would think I would consider it given I'm an active member of goodreads but then again id rather use goodreads in other ways and self serve ads is just not my thing.

I used the advertisement option when I did a giveaway here on Goodreads the other year. I did another giveaway more recently and, comparing the two, my book was added on more To-Read shelves the time I used the advertisement.

However, as someone else pointed out, it didn't result much in the way of actual sales, but it was mainly exposure I was looking for.

And, as Lakshmi mentioned, the higher price you bid for your ad, the higher priority GR will give it. So if you put in a low bid like .25/click, your ad will show up less frequently than someone who's paying $1/click.

After 2 1/2 years of research and writing, my new novel THE GOLDEN PEACOCK is up and running on Amazon: amzn.to/1rYegrP. Just a small warning: Adult content may not be suitable for children. Currently, it is with two mainstream publishers The Golden Peacock by Lauren B. Grossman. Until then, I have it available as an eBook on Amazon only. My apologies to those readers, like myself, who like hard copy, or have different eReaders. However, you can download Amazon books to your computer or mobile readers. I understand the program is a free download (i.e Kindle for PC). As always, I love to hear feedback and encourage reviews on Amazon. I will let you know when the hard copy is available. Thanks for your patience.

Hi Jane
I've used the GR ad campaign and I found it worth the money. Certainly it's cheaper than a lot of advertising and it does create exposure. It's hard to be sure how many of my sales came from it directly, however, but it is quite adaptable - you can pause it whenever you want and change the wording of the ad if you want/run another alongside. I went for 50 cents per click. That seemed to work quite well. But it takes at least 24 hours usually for it to be ratified so you need to plan ahead. :)

It looks like it works by putting change to clicks? I'm not really sure how it all works as I've never truly looked into it but I mean if someone can benefit from it I say why not. I tend not to get into things involving complicated promotions where money is needed to keep it going but that's just me.

I've used it on my books. I got a lot of clicks and a lot of readers adding them to their to-read lists (the numbers continue to grow every month)

Just how much of that adds up to sales, I really couldn't tell you. But if readers keep clicking on your book and reading your book's description, at least it's getting exposure.

So, I would do it just for the exposure.

Thanks!

Good day!

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Greg Thain,
[email protected]

I've put about $70 into self-serve advertising on Goodreads over 3 years. I think I get the odd sale from it, I certainly get people adding the books to their shelves who probably wouldn't otherwise have come across them (though they rarely actually buy the books as far as I can tell).

For basic exposure I'd say it's pretty effective.

Andrew wrote: "I've put about $70 into self-serve advertising on Goodreads over 3 years. I think I get the odd sale from it, I certainly get people adding the books to their shelves who probably wouldn't otherwis..."

Hi Andrew,
I appreciated your comments on advertising through Goodreads. It doesn't sound as if the experience was an overwhelming success and that you probably didn't make enough to cover your costs. That doesn't sound like an effective advertising promotional program and the comments made by others would appear to support that.