At the end of February 2020, having changed the covers back to the swirly house in the wood type covers, the sales rank through February slowly climbed and abruptly dipped. The high for the month was 1993, which was the highest it had been since November 7, 2019, when it hit 1912 for no obvious reason. The general trend, though, was steadily up, suggesting that yes, the older covers are more effective covers.
On March 1, I advertised Ghosts on a site called kindofbook, which was a free ad. Since I’m writing this on March 1, I can’t say whether there’s been any result, but I’ll check back in with myself in a week or so and see if there was any increase in downloads.
During February, I ran an ad on A Lonely Magic. I spent $15 on Digital Book Today, on February 18th. In the preceding week, ALM averaged 5-10 free downloads a day; on the 18th, it had 252 downloads, with 81 on the 19th and 27 on the 20th, and an average above 10 for the next week. Yesterday it was back to 8, so it’s returned to where it was, but it definitely had an impact. Sadly for me, it didn’t do anything for sales of A Precarious Magic: in the first 18 days of the month, I sold 11 copies and in the next 11 days, I sold 5. I did get one nice email from a reader, so yay for that, but no new reviews on either of the books. So it goes.
March marketing goals, I think, will be to revise the blurbs on both ALM and APM. The covers are beautiful, IMO, although my cover debacle on the Tassamara series probably proves that I don’t know what I’m doing when it comes to covers. With the books not selling at all, my next best thing to try is changing the blurbs. Well, and running more advertising, but there’s only so much money I should spend on giving away a free book when the sequel is getting no sales. (Actually, that amount of money should probably be $0. Alas.) But either way: goal for March, new blurbs.
