Helping Fellow Authors- Weekly Blog Hop

Do you like to read? Wouldn't you like to know more about your favorite authors? Well you came to the right place! Join the MMB Open Book Blog Hop each Wednesday and they will tell all. Every week we'll answer questions and after you've enjoyed the blog on this site we'll direct you to another. So come back often for a thrilling ride! Tell your friends and feel free to ask us questions in the comment box.

If you're coming here from Christine Ardigo's blog, welcome! Have you checked out her books yet? Her Amazon page is here.

This week we're giving back with advice for fellow authors. I'm talking about my experience with a website for book advertising, RobinReads.

I've not had much luck with paid advertising, and as a result. I'm always shy about doing it. My last book launch, I hired a company to arrange a blog tour for me. They warned me up front they wouldn't guarantee sales, I should look at it as a way to get my name out there. It was good they made the statement, because I didn't see a jump in sales on any day I was featured on a blog stop.

But I've been hearing good things about RobinReads in various groups I'm a part of, and decided to give it a try. The cost was withing my budget, and I wanted to see if it would increase sales.

First off, it was incredibly easy to sign up. Their criteria for accepting a book is posted and easy to understand. Here's what the sign-up page says is their criteria for a listing:

All the information they need is included in their short and simple sign up form. I got an email accepting my submission within a couple of days. Once I'd paid for my ad via PayPal, there was nothing else for me to do except to wait for the day it ran. (Saturday, May 3rd)

When I checked the web page early in the morning, I was disappointed to see my book was listed at the bottom of the page.I worried that the readers wouldn't see it. I was wrong.

I'd thought about tracking sales hour by hour, but that didn't work out. So here's the statistics I have. All times listed are Mountain Time.

           9:00 AM      3 books sold (All in the UK. The rest of the days sales were from the US)

        12:00  PM     19 total books sold

           2:00 PM     31 books

           5:00 PM     36 books

           6:00 PM     39 books

           7:00 PM     46 books

           8:00 PM     47 books

            9:00 PM    51 books

And that was the last sale I saw while I was up. One more copy was sold overnight, bringing the total to 52 books. The one thing I didn't do was track my Amazon sales rank from the beginning. The highest my book ranked 5755 in the overall paid books. 

So I made the cost of the ad back with some to spare. As the book I listed is the first in a series, I'm hoping that selling it cheaply will result in sales of the second book. So far, I haven't seen that happen, but I still have my fingers crossed.

So now to the important question—would I use RobinReads again? And the answer is yes, absolutely. It may not have propelled me into any top 100 lists, but it certainly introduced me to some new readers.

To find out what Stephany Tullis has to say, head on over to her blog.  http://www.stephanytullis.com/blog.  And don't forget to check out her books too! Stephany Tullis