My First Foray Into Paid Advertising, Part Two

It's been an exciting week.  Having E on promo has been fun to watch, though excruciating at times.  It's all part of the lead-up to my next book release. You can still sign up to be part of the release:  http://goo.gl/forms/tjSVtfH3yp  Anyone with access to a blog or social media can take part.

As promised, here's my sales chart during the promo.  Now that I'm up to $1.99 the sales have slowed tremendously, but I did get a decent boost from the advertising.  I also did a lot of Twitter promo, shared on Facebook and Google+... so it is hard to separate out those factors.

My conclusions:

• Not sure the Fiverr promo did anything for me.  Tweeting + Facebook + Google+ +Countdown Deal could have easily resulted in 6 sales on its own.
• Ereader News Today was definitely a good one.  I had 21 sales the day I advertised.  Now, I have seen people do A LOT better than this with EReader News.  There are a lot of factors that can affect this.  One thing I didn't know about was that there was some pretty steep big-name promo competition in the same genre going on as my promo ran.  So yeah, not the best.  Another factor could have been the list I advertised through.  I chose the YA list.  Next time, I probably will try a different one.
• The numbers:  I spent $20 total on advertising.  Royalties off of sales so far amount to $29.10, so yeah, I broke even and made a small profit.  But more importantly, I got a nice handful of people to read my book, and hopefully they will want to continue on to the second one.  I'm calling this a success.
• Rank:  I made it to #7 in YA/Sci-fi/Dystopia (possibly higher, I didn't look at the peak).  I made it up to #9,573 in ebooks overall.  Not enough to sustain, but a nice little hop for a while.

I hope this is helpful to some of you!  Please feel free to comment about your experiences with paid advertising!