Authors, Writers, Publishers, and Book Readers

GoodReads.com Marketing

I've recently started using Goodreads.com's self-serve advertising and was wondering if anyone else has had any luck/success stories with it? For those of you who don't know about it, basically you choose how much you'll pay for ad space (ie: $30.00) and then you build your ad. After your ad is built you decide what genre's or author searches cause your ad to propogate. Then your ad begins showing up as people conduct their searches. What makes it nice is that you can choose how much each add pays to Goodreads per click (ie: if I see your ad when I'm looking for a book, I can ignore it or click on it. If I click on it, Goodreads.com gets paid out of that original amount you paid for the ad space). I set mine to the average of $0.50. So everytime someone clicks the ad I only pay $0.50 out of that original $30.00 until the $30.00 is gone. At which point the ad shuts down until I fill the coffers with another $30 or however much I choose.

So far, a lot of people have seen my ad, but my sales haven't jumped up considerably. I think it's very similar to ads everywhere in that they are easy to ignore. But the fact that they only charge you when they get clicked means that a lot of people are seeing my book now, which is great.

The included stats page does a great job at showing you how many people have had your ad pop up on their page, and the ability to target customers via their author they searched for (I write horror, so I chose Stephen King and Lovecraft for a few) or genre is getting me a lot of coverage.

This is me, just trying to strike up conversation regarding how it has been working for other authors, or if there are similar or better services out there. I'm a self-published author who wants to broaden his reach.

I've used Goodreads Self-Serve on only two of my books: The Trials of Obed Marsh and Random Stranger.

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Permalink Reply by Craig Brummer on January 22, 2013 at 8:57pm

Hi Matthew,

Thank you for sharing this it's good information. My novel will not be ready until probably April 1st, but I'm collecting marketing ideas now. I'll complete the writing by the end of Feb. but use the month of March to do the editing.

I would be very interested in hearing how this works for you and Arthur Mills who also commented on this entry. Thanks again,

Craig

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Permalink Reply by Matthew Davenport on January 22, 2013 at 9:09pm

A day later and I've learned a few more things: you can add as many ads as you want under that grouping. I currently have two that will run until the money runs out and both are getting around 1000 views a day right now. Views aren't clicks though, and I haven't seen an increase in sales or additions to people's "To-Read" shelf on goodreads.com. Goodreads states that it only has an average click-through rate of .05%. So I'm not surprised by my results. The major positive is that I've at least put my book in front of that many people. In the end, I think that's the best process. I'm going to be putting out a blog post this week detailing my marketing strategy, but in short, it follows a model similar to Sean Platt and David Wright over at Self-Publishing Podcast. Basically, exposure is everything, so I'm attempting to put out a story every week (In the form of a serialized short) to drum up business. If you can manage a funnel, you can direct them to the rest of your works. There's more to it than that, but it is all based off of that premise. The more people that see my name, the more people that buy my books. (blog is http://davenportwrites.com )