While writing and publishing a book is hard, marketing that book is a whole ‘nother kind of hard. Here is my most recent tale of woe:

Like most authors, I’ve done a ton of research on how to market my books. The amount of information available, including blog posts, videos, seminars, books, and classes, is overwhelming. And frankly, a not small portion of that information is from people more interested in making a buck than in giving actionable advice.

One major obstacle in marketing Agatha Annotated is that it’s a non-fiction book written for cozy mystery readers, making it tricky to get in front of the very readers who would enjoy it. Finding bloggers willing to review Agatha Annotated and share it with their cozy mystery audience has been challenging.

Certainly, I am trying all the free and inexpensive marketing options, but I am well aware that there is just too much noise out there these days. Paid advertising is necessary to rise above, but it’s economically unfeasible to spend more than the book makes.  

We’ve played with advertising on Facebook (or Meta, if you prefer) before, but with Agatha Annotated, we decided to get serious about it. Our first foray was during the Christmas season and our ads were aimed at people who needed a gift idea. “Buying for an Agatha Christie fan? Here’s a book they don’t yet have.”

Those ads worked great and were relatively inexpensive. I am pleased to report that we made much more than we spent!

As Mothering Sunday in the U.K. approached, we ran similar ads for giving Agatha Annotated to your Christie-loving Mum, starting in February. As we expected, sales weren’t as great as at Christmas time, but the ad cost was also much less, and we again made more than we spent. Another success!

We reworked the Mothering Sunday ads for Mother’s Day in the U.S. and started running them in April. Again, the ad cost was much lower than at Christmas and click-throughs were even higher than the U.K. ad campaign. We looked forward to some decent sales numbers.

But it didn’t happen.

Sure, there were some sales, but not enough to cover the ad cost. We were totally perplexed why this ad, which worked well just a month ago, failed so miserably. Looking around online, we soon found that we weren’t the only ones experiencing issues. In fact, Meta has been refunding some advertisers for April’s glitch and Mathew Holmes, who has a very successful Meta Ads history, has stopped all Meta advertising.

So what’s next? There isn’t a big gift-giving holiday coming up in the near future, so we’ll have to think of a new message. Research says that video ads are getting better traction than static images and we should figure out how to do that right. We will also explore some other advertising options such as Reddit or maybe even TikTok, although I know absolutely nothing about that at this moment.

I’m listening to what other authors are doing in various groups, but if you have thoughts, please share them here as I would love to hear more opinions. Writing is not a competition since people read way faster than we can write, so helping each other can only be good for us all!