Ads from the ongoing
Clarkesworld campaign.
(size reduced)

I’ve run three online ad campaigns to try to get the word out on my newest novel, The Red: First Light, published last March. For those new to me or my website, the novel is a very near-future, high-tech, military science fiction thriller — and it’s indie-published, so I’m on my own for publicity.

I had a couple of good publicity opportunities when TRFL was released. This helped sales in the first six weeks, although the novel never got anywhere near qualifying as an “indie success story.” So, having no luck getting the book reviewed***, I decided to experiment with online ads.

(***Update: The Red: First Light has since been reviewed at both Tor.com and Locus Online.)

I’m going to guess that most of you reading this never click on online ads. I’ve clicked on a few, but it’s rare. So why would I even consider spending meaningful amounts of money on web ads? I had a few reasons:

1. I HAD TO DO SOMETHING –this was a big reason. “Something is better than nothing” & “Try stuff” — Right? Yes, it costs money. On the other hand I’ve already made a huge investment just in the time devoted to writing the book. What’s a few hundred dollars more?

2. I’m not entirely unknown in the field. In the mid-nineties through the early 2000s I had six hard science fiction novels published by Bantam and Tor. I have a couple of awards. I’ve had short fiction published recently in Asimov’s, Analog, Lightspeed, and Nightmare. My thought was that I might be able to capture the gaze of readers who’d enjoyed my books during my “first career” and were interested in what I was doing now, along with those who’d read some of my recent short fiction, and might be curious about what else I’m up to. This was the factor that really convinced me to try it.

3. I had some awesome blurbs from name writers that might help sell the book — but the value of those blurbs was limited if the only people who saw them were those who visited my website. So the possibility of putting those blurbs in front of a new audience was the third main factor in my decision to try advertising. (more…)

I’ve been running some online advertising for The Red: First Light. It’s the first time I’ve ever tried this, and for this book I think it’s been a worthwhile exercise. If you noticed the ad, PLEASE let me know in the comments, and if you remember where you saw it, I’d like to know that too. I’m really curious, about it because I know that we (me) tend to use the “mental ad block” so that we just don’t see what’s there.

Anyway, I was talking to my daughter, Dallas Nagata White, a few days ago. She looked at the ad, clicked on it, and was not remotely impressed with my landing page, which was just the page on my website that talks about the book. She felt the page didn’t convey anything about the feeling, the flavor of the book. I think my response was something along the line of, “Yep, I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t really have time to do anything.”

Then out-of-the-blue last night Dallas called me up and said she’d created a digital painting to be the background of a new landing page. Given that I have only a few days left on my current ad run, and that I wanted to see if a new landing page had any effect on sales, I put aside what I was working on and dove into designing the page layout. It went up at midnight. Take a look at it here. It’s more spectacular anyway!

Like nearly everyone else, I have no idea what it takes to sell books — but I’m willing to try new things.

Please let me know if you’ve noticed the ad!