So, to try and boost my follower numbers, I bought some ads on RR. I will let you decide for yourself if the expenditure was worth it. First of all, I am going to assume that I would be able to get at least 20 followers on my own, since I had about 15 before I started the campaign.

So, I had about 1,500,000 views, and when my campaign was done, I had 70 followers. Like I said, I assume that the campaign was responsible for about 50 of the 70, so that translates to 30,000 views for a single follower. At RR ad rate of 330,000 views for $50, that translates to about $4-$5 for a single follower.

So, some caveats:

1) I didn't track it closely, but my impression was that the rate that I was gaining followers decreased as the campaign progressed. Saturation, perhaps?
2) I was getting an average of two or three followers a day during the campaign, but in the five days since the campaign has ended, I have gotten two.

Takeaway: The ad campaigns do seem to have an effect, but the cost may be too high for a lot of authors.

Now, I realize that part of the problem may be me. My campaign was just the book cover I have in my signature with "Japanese Historical Fiction" added at the bottom. I am certain that there are more effective things I could have done, but I was mostly interested in seeing what a simple campaign could accomplish.

DCHaru

Thank you for sharing your results.  I do think a large part of your success will be to choose an ad design that gets a lot of clicks.  Of course, if the only people clicking won't be interested in your story, that won't be very helpful.  You'll be more likely to get a low rating than a follower!

edit:  I'm getting ready to experiment and perhaps share my results.

James Wrote: Thank you for sharing your results.

Again, this is not a post to condemn RR advertising, although I am obviously a bit disappointed at the somewhat lackluster results. I just want people to get a datapoint on which to make their own decisions regarding the advertising.

DCHaru

I do think the ad itself makes a difference. 

I ran a Christmas-themed ad for my fiction. The day before Christmas, it got 950 clicks. The day after Christmas, the exact same ad got 385 clicks. 

I believe your results are more related to the very niche nature of your story on RR. I've had varied experiences with the ads here with some stories doing exponentially better than others but even at its worst for me had a significantly better conversion rate than $4-5/follower

Your view to follower ratio is very good, imo. As well as the likes, favorites and ratings. All are above "average". You should be proud over that.

For me, the point of adverts is not to get you followers, it's to get you onto the front page of rising stars as early in your story as possible. So for me, it's about how many chapters would I have had to release to get that far on rising stars without the adverts.

So maybe the advert saved you 20 chapters of your backlog, $50 for possibly 2 months of writing is not bad. You can then use frequent posting of your backlog to maintain your position and continue to climb on rising stars because that's where the real views come from, not from adverts.

If the adverts don't get you high on rising stars, then I would say they were a waste of money.

When you say you got 1.5 million views, do you mean on your story, or on your ad? I assume you mean that the advertising statistics showed you that the ad had been viewed 1.5 million times just because I don't think that you'd only have 70 followers if you had that high a readership. That's.... interesting to me for a lot of reasons.

A few years back youtuber Drew Gooden spent 20k on youtube adverts for his channel, making intentionally weird ads in an attempt to mock weird mobile game ads and see how effective they were. The results were interesting, and while I could go and start pulling out a number of sources to make my point, I don't think it's necessary here. He paid for three different ads and between them all they were seen only 1.3 million times. The highest engagement one of those ads had 0.39% engagement, or... roughly 5,070 people? That's interesting because Drew also linked to one of his most-watched videos through those video ads. Using those statistics he saw 30-50 new subscribers a day, and he only ran those ads for three days each; youtube video adverts are expensive. He also saw diminishing returns on his ads the longer they ran.

So the numbers actually line up... sort of. I remember seeing your ad more than once across a period of time longer than three days, though I don't know for sure how long you ran your ad for. Two weeks? A month? You got a similar number of views on your ad to Drew and saw an (in isolation) similar increased in followers. But ads on RR aren't comparable to video ads on Youtube. Youtube is a site which sees an absurd amount of traffic every day and, more than likely, has much better targeted advertising than RR. And was the number of views your ad got unique viewers, or total views? I'm willing to bet that, on top of the fact that Royal Road receives much less traffic than youtube - some readers might check for updates every other day, some might only visit when they're looking for something new or get an email notification, so forth and so on . Your ad was probably shown more often to a smaller number of people than a youtube video ad.

If all that data helps somebody make a decision then I've done good. Because all I have left is speaking to my own habits as a voracious reader where Royal Road ads are concerned. And in case you're confused about me calling Danny Gonzoles Drew Gooden because you don't know about the joke, its just that they look similar and people confuse them.

So. Personal thoughts on how I respond to ads. We all know the saying "Don't judge a book by it's cover". But all readers usually have when it comes to even deciding which book they want to read the synopsis of is the cover. Books are objectively the one thing which you are meant to and supposed to judge by their covers. Even when people give a cover a second glance there's going to be some who are testy, judgemental, and quick to dismiss or move on from something. I tried giving Dragoneye Moons a shot about a year ago and bounced off of it, hard, yet read the entire thing in three days just last week when I gave it another shot because I misremembered a friend recommending it.

Dragoneye Moons is now one of my favorite works of fiction.

Presentation is important when it comes not just to covers, but ads, because whether or not something catches someone's eye is sometimes a matter of luck and chance. While I normally fucking despise adverts with my whole being, the fact that almost all of Royal Road's advertisements come from authors trying to promote their stories means I'll at least take a closer look at an ad which catches my eyes. When I do so, however, I usually don't click on the ad from the front page? I do so from the bottom of another story because I've seen it a lot and I'm thinking about what I want to read next. That's most definitely not a universal experience, but it's mine, so that's what I'm sharing.

Even then. Even then! When I saw the Dig Two Graves ads and eventually clicked on it, I recall simply shrugging and ignoring it afterwards just because it wasn't the sort of thing I was in the mood for. There is a non-zero chance I'd have completely forgotten it existed were it not for this thread. I can't even say for sure why I clicked on the ad. The cover didn't particularly grab me; I just thought, arbitrarily, to give it a fair shake because I'd seen the ad enough times. Only a "fair shake" was skimming the summary and not seeing anything that appealed to me. The only ad I remember grabbing me, the only ad I can say for sure worked, was Final Core's ad.

Because I thought it was funny. Much like Danny Gonzalez's ads, it stood out by being something that showed a deliberate but genuine intention to be odd. And that worked. I remember Demon Core having ads that caught my eye in a similar way but I was already reading it so.

So. I hope this helps in some way?

Some_Guy_In_A_Robe Wrote: If the adverts don't get you high on rising stars, then I would say they were a waste of money.

Yeah, except from what I have seen, the rising stars list seems to have a hard bottom limit of 700 or so followers. With less than 1/10 that, I don't see any ad campaign, no matter how successful (unless it gets me a thousand followers instantly), can catapult me there.

As to the niche nature of the story, I agree that is an issue. One of the things I am wrestling with is, when this story is finished on March 9, whether to continue with it or to transition to something a bit more litRPG/progression oriented. On the gripping hand, there should be people here who aren't that interested in litRPG and might appreciate a change. I guess that only time will tell.

DCHaru

DCHaru Wrote: Yeah, except from what I have seen, the rising stars list seems to have a hard bottom limit of 700 or so followers.

I don't know how important raw follower count is (if at all), but you definitely don't need 700 to get on the main list.  I got on the main list with well less than half of that recently.

James Wrote: I don't know how important raw follower count is (if at all), but you definitely don't need 700 to get on the main list.  I got on the main list with well less than half of that recently.

Huh, that is good to know. I will definitely keep it in mind. Maybe I'll try another campaign to see how that works.

DCHaru

Smuts Wrote: Your view to follower ratio is very good, imo. As well as the likes, favorites and ratings. All are above "average". You should be proud over that.

Thank you for the kind words. We are pleased with the reaction among the people who have read the work. It is actually better than we hoped for.

DCHaru

Lear Wrote: So. I hope this helps in some way?

Yeah, it does. And, you are right, the 1.5 mil was the number of views the ad got.

As to the description of the book not grabbing you, that is also completely fair. We knew when we wrote this that it was likely to sort of fall between the cracks because it was a sort of offbeat approach to both fantasy and historical fiction. The people who will like it will like it and other people won't. Of course, the problem is that we are not entirely certain who will like it. In a way, Dig Two Graves is a novel looking for an audience.

Thanks for your thoughts.

DCHaru

DCHaru Wrote:

Some_Guy_In_A_Robe Wrote: If the adverts don't get you high on rising stars, then I would say they were a waste of money.

Yeah, except from what I have seen, the rising stars list seems to have a hard bottom limit of 700 or so followers. With less than 1/10 that, I don't see any ad campaign, no matter how successful (unless it gets me a thousand followers instantly), can catapult me there.

As to the niche nature of the story, I agree that is an issue. One of the things I am wrestling with is, when this story is finished on March 9, whether to continue with it or to transition to something a bit more litRPG/progression oriented. On the gripping hand, there should be people here who aren't that interested in litRPG and might appreciate a change. I guess that only time will tell.

DCHaru

Rising Stars is related to all aspects of story growth, that includes pure word count, average page views, follower count, and finally ratings. It's based on your own story increase in relation to others (that's why the better a story intitially performs, the faster it drops off) if you want a successful RR story, it needs to feature something absurd or novel, like an unusual MC or setting, or it needs to be within the popular genres, such as litrpg/progression/dungeon core/isekei but even then it needs something out of the norm to stand out. My most successful story was an isekei twist in that instead of another world, the MC was reborn in Hell

James Wrote:

DCHaru Wrote: Yeah, except from what I have seen, the rising stars list seems to have a hard bottom limit of 700 or so followers.

I don't know how important raw follower count is (if at all), but you definitely don't need 700 to get on the main list.  I got on the main list with well less than half of that recently.

Mine only had 137 followers when it got onto the Rising Stars list. It had 521 followers when it got into the top ten of Rising Stars, and 700 when it made it into the top seven.

As much as I want views, I've been too shy to use advertising.  It feels forbidden and taboo to me.  I don't know why, but I can't shake it.  Something feels gravely wrong about using advertising.

I did some ads for 330,000 views a while back, and I got like 90 followers. I had a tailored image and a byline so maybe that's what worked

I just finished an ad campaign for 330k views, and spread it throughout a few weekends (started it on sometime Friday, paused it Sundays). Gained about 50 follows, 10 favorites, and a couple ratings (no reviews yet). Overall, I'd say worth it. It's disheartening to see the rank/rating alter unfavorably, but I did expect that. The more people see something, the more people aren't going to like it.

But considering the amount of people that have seen it in exchange, I'm fine with it! It looks like I got nearly 1500 clicks. I wonder what someone who's actually good at marketing and advertising could do with this sort of power :o

It was a thrilling experiment, and something I'd consider doing again. Since you have control over when it appears, you can be more strategic to make it last longer, too.