everyone has to do what they’re comfortable with
and obviously I’m not 100% comfortable or I would have done it already
because
this is how I would look at going into paying someone to talk about my books
on social media
I’ve paid at least $3,000 to Facebook for ads
and over $4,000 to Amazon for ads over the course of my career
and those ads have had a very low conversion rate to sales
um
the last Amazon ad I ran my CPC was like $1 21
and the book was on sale for 99 cents
which means a 35% royalty for me
so um
that was not money well spent
I need to get my books in front of people
that’s the only way new readers are going to discover me
and I write good books I see what people are reading
and I have several books that are comparable
I have 21 books published
not all of my books are stellar
you know my first books
I’m a better writer now than I was 11 years ago
13 years ago when I started writing
I should be I’ve written
you know couple of million words since then
I should have gotten better and I did
but with 4,000 new books published every day
the market is saturated I am on this app every single day for over 3 years
I make content every single day
the average number of views on my videos
about three hundred and I have ten and a half thousand followers
um I have had videos go viral
generally my viral videos have nothing to do with my books
um sometimes they’re bookish related
but I’ve never had a video where I’ve actually like
shown you a copy of one of my books that has taken off so if I would pay
Facebook if I would pay Amazon
if I would pay to boost a post here on TikTok
which I’ve done I tried it
and it got views but it had zero interaction
so like
it wasn’t being sent to the people that I needed to be sent to
but I could pay someone to make content for me
that would get sent to the intended audience
and it would talk about my product
but it wouldn’t be me talking about my product
and maybe it would get seen by new eyes
it’s kind of the same as like
having a TV commercial right
um
if I could find someone who I trusted
I would pay them to do the work
because that is also what they’re doing
like a free book isn’t enough to um
to do the work if someone wanted to read my books
yes I would send them
um I would prefer these people with these big booktok accounts
to stumble upon my books organically
and be like oh
my god I saw this book
and everyone has to read it
because that’s how that’s how books go viral here
it’s the word amount and that’s what I would pay for is the word of mouth
but again I’m not 100% comfortable with it yet
because people sometimes can be really crappy and can scam people
and um I’ve been scammed enough in my life
in this career in my life too
so I don’t I can’t afford that
I mean I probably gross 150 to 300 dollars a month
um it doesn’t cover my book expenses
I’m operating in a loss
and you can’t operate a small business at a loss indefinitely
the only way to not operate at a loss is to sell many
many more books
and I can’t sell the books until people know about the books
and people aren’t gonna know about the books until they hear about them
and see them
and that’s that’s why I would consider it
again not 100% there yet
but that’s my rationale for it um
because I have a lot of really great books
that the world just hasn’t discovered yet