This last week I forayed into Amazon Marketing Ads.  I also gussied up my website and added some extra cool features thanks to the Sumo Me plug-in for WordPress.  I wrote on my current WIP and outlined some ideas.  I had such high hopes for all these changes.  People that said they were going to come sign up for my email list didn’t.  People I met at a live event who said they were going to connect with me on social media skipped me but followed up with other people from that same event.  I had a severe allergic reaction to something and got almost no sleep thanks to itching and having to have a steroid shot.  Yet, I had held out hope about my Amazon Ad.  I did a lot of research.  I worked hard on it.  Over 40K people, according to Amazon, have been shown my ad.  I had twenty-five or so clicks, but Not. A. Single. Sale.

I could take nobody “clicking” on the ad, but the fact that some people were interested enough to click on the ad and the to not even have one sale?!  Come on!  So, naturally, I had a small melt down/existential crisis about my writing career.  Fortunately, I had some author friends that sent me some tips, somebody thought my book was great and bought a copy, and I read some old reviews about Athine Verses:  The Beginning.  Then I had an idea.

If you will remember, I used to have all my books in individual covers.  Then I started really trying to sell my books and found that I needed to do more; so, I bundled books 1 through 4 under 1 beautiful cover.  I formatted the book for both eBook and paper and that is how Verses of Athine:  The Daughter of Ares Chronicles was born as you can now buy it.   Yet, for a time you could buy the very first book at a discounted price in eBook format to “try” out Athine’s world.  If you were really lucky, you got the book for free on special promotion.

I pulled that title sometime in 2015 for reasons that now escape me.  As I write this, that title has 12 Amazon reviews and as long as Amazon doesn’t get delete happy, they hopefully will stay.  The point?  The reviews made me remember that I am not a bad author.

So, today I dug a little deeper in my campaign and changed some keywords.  I changed some prices on the keywords.  I changed my “about” page here and on a lot of sites.  I tweaked more on my Sumo Me plug-in.  I gussied up some more links on my site.  I reactivated The Beginning and started an AMS campaign for it as well.  It is going to take awhile for it to be back in B&N or any of the Smashwords extended distribution channels, but you can find it here for the main Smashwords store and Amazon.

Keep your fingers crossed that it does as well or better than it did before I pulled it 🙂