Category: Life of Secrets

For those who haven’t heard of it, goodreads.com is a social network for readers and writers. It’s like Facebook, but with a focus on books instead of cat pictures.

Given the subject matter, I naturally thought that Goodreads would be a great place to advertise Death of Secrets.

As far as I can tell, I could not possibly have been more wrong.

I must state upfront that I did not create a specific url to track goodreads purchases. In fact, they prefer that people buy books through their system, so the specific URL wouldn’t really have worked.

That being said, I pretty much never saw any spike in my daily sales numbers that correlated to people “adding the book” on goodreads. It’s possible that a purchase or two snuck in while I wasn’t looking, but I never saw it.

One thing Goodreads does is manage giveaways. You can offer copies of your book for sale, and through the goodreads system people enter to win one of those copies. I did not take advantage of that system this time, but it’s the one thing I might try again on Goodreads. Other than that, this advertising market doesn’t really fit into the marketing plan for Life of Secrets.

The launch of Death of Secrets has been a great opportunity to learn about what works and what doesn’t work for selling books. My conclusion is pretty simple: Social media was almost useless. I did some things with the URL in the ads so that I could have at least some idea of where sales come from. The number of sales that could possibly have come through Twitter ads?

Eight.

That’s infinitesimally small compared to actual sales.

It’s a little harder to exactly track how Facebook and Goodreads performed, but my opinion is not super high so far.

When Life of Secrets launches, the ad budget is going to be allocated much differently.

I have some very specific ideas for the cover art for Life of Secrets, and nothing I have seen so far really fits. The gentleman who did the cover art for Death of Secrets for me did great work, and I would like to work with him again. My struggle is that his pre-made covers that are available right now don’t quite fit Life of Secrets, and getting a custom one done gets expensive fast.

I am giving some thought to trying it on my own. I’ve learned a lot about this since the last time I tried to do my own cover, and I think I know the tricks that make it look professional.

But I love this story too much to put it out with anything but a first-rate book cover, so I’m not sure whether I’ll be willing to take the risk or not.

Here’s a great bargain: the Kindle edition of Death of Secrets is now only 99 cents! If you haven’t tried it yet, now is the time!

I want to build up as many readers as possible in the run up to launching Life of Secrets. This should help get as many people as possible looking forward to the next book.