One of the
most famous advertising aphorisms ever has been attributed to many people; the
first time I came across it, it was credited to F. W. Woolworth: “Half the
money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which
half.”
It’s been
coming into my mind lately as I’ve been thinking about the ways I’ve been
promoting my mystery novels. Before self-publishing the first, The McHenry Inheritance, on Amazon, I
hired a social media consultant to teach me the ins and outs of Facebook,
Twitter, Linkedin. I don’t like those things, but they’re not going away soon,
so I figured I’d better learn the basics.
For the
past two years, I’ve been aggressively promoting my two books on social media
to the best of my learned ability. They seem to be slowly gaining a modest
audience and helping sell each other, but the one thing about which I have no
idea whatsoever is how much, if at all, my social media efforts have helped
sell the books. I haven’t an atom of hard information on that point.
What if No One Advertised?
Back in
1989, when I had just become editor of a daily newspaper, our corporate group,
Scripps-Howard, held a gathering of all the editors and publishers. A featured
speaker was Christopher Whittle, who at the time was attempting —
unsuccessfully, as it turned out — to launch a TV channel aimed at
schoolchildren.
In the
course of his presentation, Whittle said something I’ve always remembered for
its boldness. I’m paraphrasing, but it was that the dirty little secret of
advertising is that it doesn’t work. He maintained that Ford, General Motors,
Procter and Gamble, et. al. could
eliminate their advertising budgets altogether. If they did, he claimed, the
worst that would happen is that they would lose about 1 percent of their sales,
but the money saved on advertising would more than compensate for that on the
bottom line.
Was he
right? I don’t know, but he certainly could be. And lately, I’ve been
entertaining the heretical question of what would happen if I stopped using social
media to promote my books. If nothing else, I’d certainly have time for more
writing.
Try It for a Month
To hone in
on one area, I looked at Twitter. Do I see more book sales on days when I tweet
about a book and get retweeted extensively? Some days yes, some days no. But
even on a day when Twitter is kind to me and the sales are good, I still have
no way of knowing whether there’s any causation behind the correlation.
The one
conclusion I’ve drawn from running free-book promotions on Kindle is that how
well my book moves seems to depend on how many people are shopping in the
Kindle store that day. I’ve been in the top 50 of Kindle free crime fiction on
days when I had 50 downloads, as well as on days when I had over 500 downloads.
The number of people looking for free books on any given day seems to matter
more than what I tweet.
In any
event, I’ve decided to take a sabbatical from social media for a month, and
will not be posting anything in October. I doubt that anyone will notice, and I
doubt that it will give me any relevant information on the impact on book
sales, but it may clear my mind a bit and help me go back to using it more
effectively.
And if
nothing else, I’m hoping to get more work done on my third Quill Gordon mystery.
