As my adventures in advertising and marketing my self-published books continue, I thought I’d share some lessons from my latest $0.99 promotion of the first book in The Conjurors Series. For this attempt, I clustered five different advertisements within one week in an attempt to push up my ranking and visibility on Amazon, particularly for certain subgenre lists.

I was reasonably successful (by my modest standards), and for the week that I ran the promo, I had 87 people purchase my book. My highest ranking was around 6,000 for paid books on Amazon, but I was in the top 20 of three key subcategories that my book fell into.

A good percentage of the people who downloaded my book have now purchased the second (and even third) book in the series. Overall, I have recovered the money I spent on advertising with sales, but not with much left over profit-wise. But I consider the promo a success, because I now have a better idea where to focus my limited budget for future ads.

Below are the sites I used to advertise, and the success I had with each one.

The Fussy Librarian, $14
I’ve used this site for various free promotions, and it usually gives me a noticeable bump in downloads. For the day I advertised on Fussy, I had 7 downloads of my book at $0.99, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it did help push me up in the rankings. Overall, I would use this site again, especially in conjunction with other advertising as a way to increase my visibility on the Amazon lists.

Free Kindle Books and Tips, $25
This was my first experience with this site, but it came recommended from a fellow author so I decided to check it out. On the day I advertised, I had 15 downloads of my book, a decent percentage of which I assume are from this listing. For my meager budget, I found this a little pricey, but ultimately worth it, as it helped push my ranking in Amazon’s paid lists up to about 17,000 (from 100,000).

Ereader News Today, $15
Without question, this was the most valuable advertisement I’ve paid for. It’s hard to say exactly how many people came from this source, but I estimate around 30 downloads, which brought my rank up to around 6,000. It was in the top 20 of three subgenre lists, which may have also increased downloads.

Bookgoodies, $35; Bookgoodies Kids, $35 (home page feature for one week)
Bookgoodies was my biggest investment, and also my biggest disappointment. I estimate that it drove a couple of sales of my book a day, which isn’t nothing, but didn’t have the same impact as any of my other advertisements, in spite of being more expensive. This surprised me, because I’ve found Bookgoodies to be very helpful in driving traffic for the free promos of my books.

Are there any places where you’ve had great success with ads? I know Bookbub is awesome, but I haven’t managed to get them to agree to list my book yet.