Category: Marketing

(See the first part of this article here for background.)

How, exactly, does AMS assign the lagged sales data?

I've established, via occasional spot checks during my tests in the previous article, that it takes several days for the Orders (Units Sold) data to finalize for the AMS-reported sales.

I was asked if it trickles in randomly, or if it is assigned to the particular days that it should have been applied to originally. Since I didn't know the answer, I decided to find out.

I also now had a corrective for my “organic sales = effectively zero” assumption. 3 weeks of testing in August established a baseline for my 2 advertised products (1st book in series for 2 series (ANNWN-N1 and CHAIN-N1) of 0.2 units per title per day.

So, I used the July 1-July 29 test period (which is now over a month old) and took a look.

First, I used the AMS reports to do a day by day look at the reported units sold. I compared that with my spot check during the month of sales as-of a particular date — that ran out well past the end of the month to let the lagging data catch up.

I discovered that the lagged data is assigned after the fact to particular days, presumably the dates that would have been correct at the time. In other words, my spot checks of units sold as of date X for the month are smaller than they would be if I could do that now, because lagging data has been applied to those dates sometime between when I did the spot check and now, a month later.

Undercounting & Missing data

So, now that the data is final, what does the undercounting look like?

(This article continues here.)

For about a year and a half I had a good run with basic AMS Manual Keywords ads — those ad farms of thousands of keywords. Then, in the fall of 2018, something significant changed at Amazon, besides just the AMS reporting system upgrade, and my ads which had been running at a smallish but steady profit basically stopped working well.

At the time, I didn't concentrate on the issue, content to spend several months working on getting my feet wet with Facebook Advertising while my AMS ads ran feebly in the background (at least I wasn't losing money on them). Let's just say that two separate attempts at Facebook product ads ended unsuccessfully and I shut them down to rethink my approach.

So, there I was in June with no effective advertising running and, let me tell you, that is no place you want to be. In the absence of any recent new release, my organic sales on my primary (1st-in-series) books are, at best, less than 1 per day.

But there's an upside to poor organic sales numbers — they make a great background to test against for advertising!

It used to be easier

Oh, for the halcyon days of 2012 and 2013, when your book going up on Amazon attracted eyes, especially since the categories weren't any too large.

I still have my souvenir of being #1 in a niche category.

It spoiled us for a while. We wrote as quickly as we could hoping to outrun the “tsunami of… stuff” rising up behind us. Some of us are still trying that as our primary method of coping.

I'd like to present some more sobering numbers.

Last year I spent many months upping my game with regard to building technical engines around marketing. I tackled a lot of new tools and systems, but I ran out of steam before I got to Facebook Ads, the most complex system of them all, and one that's critical to international and target marketing.

Well, I'm paying for it now. I got revved up, re-listened to my Mark Dawson “Ads for Authors” course for Facebook (highly recommended) and started putting mailing list (subscriber) ads together.

I have a new series coming out circa year-end and a German translation in the works, and I've been unserious about my mailing list (200 people), so I'm way overdue for winding this all up again and getting back on the newsletter horse.

I'm not going to complain about the general complexity of the Facebook ads system (and it's equally impressive power as a platform for ad management). No, today I'm going to rant about the integration of technical systems that's required to actually make all of this happen.

Last year, before I wound down, I made some tool choices which I didn't put into use, but I did the research well and now I'm, as it were, unwrapping the packages and digging into them. I feel fortunate, a year later, that I'm still happy with my choices.

But look at what it takes to run a simple mailing list ad for Facebook, from the perspective of all the pieces required, esp. if you're as obsessive as I am about tracking as much data as possible.

I often write a blog post to clarify my own thinking, and that's the case for this one. It's meant to be a spur to my own thinking about what works for me in marketing. A recent marketing workshop excerpt from Larissa Reynolds was the catalyst that finally did it for me (see here to subscribe to her newsletter).

Now, when I say “what works”, I don't mean what marketing ideas, out of the vast array available, work for people, or produce the best results. What I mean is what works for me, as in something I can do comfortably and that I can reasonably have a hope of sticking to, that has measurable and useful results.

It's taken years for me to clarify my understanding of how various marketing ideas work, and which ones I, personally, should concentrate on. I've been groping towards this for a long time.

Premises

I have my own goals and standards that define how I want to run my business, and I have personal limitations and enthusiasms to accommodate. Your situation will be different

1. I want to sell my books at a reasonable full price (with very occasional discounts), because that's the audience I want to cultivate.
2. I want to sell my books on the basis of quality — good reading experience, indistinguishable in quality from traditional publishers.
3. I want my books to be available with the widest possible reach (countries, retailers, formats), with no DRM. If people look for my books, they should be able to find them anywhere, for any device, and my career should not be held hostage to any one retailer or country. This includes direct ecommerce.
4. I'm not really a people person. I like to help and I can tell funny stories, but I'm lousy at jumping into a social situation as an extrovert. I'm more of a high-functioning introvert.
5. I want to execute semi-automatic systems as much as possible. I'm an old IT career person, and I'm very comfortable with systems. I don't have the discipline to keep doing ad hoc experiments, but I have no problem going through the detailed (obsessive) concentration necessary to set something automated up.

Analysis

So, what does this mean for me?

For one thing, it rules out a broad variety of interesting marketing ideas that clutter up my thinking:

• Wanting to price permafree — wrong audience for me to cultivate.
• Wanting to focus on Amazon KU — wrong reach (not wide), captive retailer.
• Discounted sales third-party newsletter marketing — wrong audience for me to cultivate, and a huge distraction.
• Participating in bundles and similar multi-author promotions for free — wrong audience for me to cultivate, and I mostly write long-form, not stories.
• Marketing/review swaps with other authors. I'd rather cultivate my own audience and not spam them.
• Widespread social media platforms, pushing my books — not extroverted enough to make that palatable (banging on about my books).

What do I want to do instead?