The question then is, is it effective marketing? How many sales resulted from this blog post? Zero? A handful? Tens? Hundreds?
I would guess a handful at most.
And I am not saying that to criticise the author. Marketing is genuinely difficult. Hell I even did a marketing campaign with paid ads on Reddit to get more people to use one of my pieces of open source, free of charge, pieces of software and even with a bunch of ad impressions and clicks I can still count the amount of new stars on just a few hands
7 ebooks ordered as of 10:15 PST, and 10 subscribers for the free novella.
I have no idea how many people read the post, I assume lots? I'm hosting on Github pages and haven't added any tracking. It seems like anecdotally a front-page post gets ~20k views, so some tiny fraction of a percent of readers went on to purchase.
Honestly, this small number of sales is still far more than I was expecting. I wrote a longer response on my motivations higher in the thread, but my primary impulse was sharing, not marketing. I tacked a marketing pitch at the end, figuring I might as well, but I did not expect the post to spend any time at all on the front page of HN.
It is also probably true that this "marketing" was worse than ineffective, it was likely detrimental. I'm guessing that substantially more people clicked through to Amazon to see what the book was, despite being a poorly targeted audience that is unlikely to convert. From Amazon's point of view, the book just got a ton of traffic and very few sales, which is probably treated as the signal "this book is not a good seller, don't show it to people."
Similarly, the members of this poorly targeted audience that did buy the book are unlikely to be typical readers in the genre. This will degrade the "also bought" signal for the book, and to the extent that Amazon does organically show my book to other readers, it will likely show it to the wrong readers, further hurting organic performance.
I would think if Amazon has any sort of decent traffic analysis ranking it would have the understanding of unknown/random spikes and discount negative data from that as noise (unless it led to a bunch of negative reviews etc. in that spike)
but maybe I'm just too hopeful about stuff.
Wish I could sell some books though but as I don't ever it seems unlikely I know what I'm talking about anyway. :)
It's possible the only people who bought were technothriller enthusiasts, but I think it's likely that at least some of them are not.
Traffic spikes are actually a common occurrence in book sales. My understanding is that some of the most effective marketing is through paid newsletter inclusion – sites like BookBub/Freebooksy/Fussy Librarian. These newsletters absolutely drive big spikes in traffic, and the conversion rate is going to correlate well with how well the book will sell overall. It's possible Amazon does something with the referrer to try to segment these kinds of traffic, but impossible to know from the outside.
If you just want to move copies, you should look at the Facebook group 20BooksTo50k. It has lots of informative posts by self-published authors doing six figures in annual sales. I can distill it down for you though. The people finding "quit your job" levels of success generally:
- write to market
- in a consistent genre
- for several years
- and publish five or more books per year, mostly in a series.
Some people reach that level of success faster, though they tend to be in the largest genres (mainly romance), or publishing at truly breakneck speed (a book or more per month).
Personally, I write things that don't slot quite cleanly into a genre, and I have a tendency to genre hop. I know it's sub-optimal, but I'm pretty sure I'd just burn out trying to do it the other way.
I'm also not yet at the point where I can write work I'm proud of at that velocity; the last book I wrote took me two months to get a first draft, and it's probably going to take another two months to get it to a "finished" state. So I'm on a "three books a year" pace, and it already feels exhausting/I may need to slow down.
