Lately I've been doing a deep dive into marketing and advertising possibilities for my novels. Mostly, this consists of mind-numbing research involving industries that suck. As unpleasant as this process has been, it's at least been productive. I now have a clear understanding of my target demographics and am getting a sense of how I might be able to do a better job of using social media to sell my books.
Along these lines, I finally broke down and created a Facebook author page, which has now received 100 likes. This figure is important, because it's the threshold for being able to see more detailed page analytics. At the same time, I'm running a test to see if spending $25 on the targeted boosting of a post about One Man Embassy results in any new book sales. The campaign is running for a week and is about half done. So far, the post has been shown to 1.2k people and resulted in no sales that I'm aware of.
Today I woke up feeling like I should be enjoying this whole marketing thing more than I have been. So I started designing ads for Psitron, the drug in Psychic Avalanche that gives people psychic powers. The idea was to make fun of prescription drug ads while instilling in viewers the desire to know more about the ad. Above and below are examples of what I've come up with so far. The base images came from Pixabay, here and here.
In Psychic Avalanche, the drug Psitron is a dietary supplement made from fish oil and naturally-occurring microorganisms. A wizard, an extraterrestrial, and a dragon are all involved in creating the drug, but the ads don't mention that. I feel like a dragon-themed ad could maybe be good, but so far all of my attempts to AI a good dragon image have failed. In a perfect world, I'd be able to generate a photo-realistic dragon handing a small pill to people in lab coats. Maybe someday.
Making ads is basically the same thing as making memes, but for higher stakes. Ideally, I want my ads to be entertaining content in and of themselves. To get there, I'll probably have to become funnier. A lot funnier.
One area I haven't explored at all yet is Instagram advertising. I don't use my phone for things and have barely looked at Instagram desktop, but maybe there's some potential there. Do readers buy books based on Instagram posts/ads? I have no idea.
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