Current News

Not much in the way of news, actually, but a few things:

1) Iron Age America, about the mysterious iron furnaces in southern Ohio, will be finished up in a couple weeks, it looks like. Interior is almost done.

2) Almost finished with Raptors of the Northeast, also. Edits are on their way, and I should be able to finish those up next week.

3) Looks like the images for the Mokele-mbembe book will be finished up in a week or so. Then final edits and some other things have to be finished up. I'm thinking this may be a December title.

4) Varmints is lagging, I just haven't had time to spend on it -- another December book, probably. (Late December.)

5) Plugging away at layout for the Cleek mystery reprints.

Looks like the online advertising experiment was a bust. Haven't seen any spike in sales. Right now, most sales seem to come from general web browsing for certain subjects.

Online Ads

I've never really done much with online advertising, as it has never appeared worth the money sunk into it. But, this month, I'm testing two different venues.

First, I'm trying a "long tail" version of Google Ads. I've got about two dozen very basic book title ads that direct to the book detail pages. They are running primarily on the content networks, at a fairly low cpc (usually $.10-.20). The ads are not optimized for click-thru, as I really don't want everybody and their mother clicking on them; I'm just looking for serious clicks. I've been getting 50,000-60,000 impressions a day at my current per diem budget, with a very low ctr that still usually manages to reach the daily budget. I get very few impressions on the Google search -- not happy about that, but Google has a money-grubbing scheme that apparently doesn't allow search impressions from low bids, even when there are no other impressions showing up on search.

My second venue is Project Wonderful, which has an interesting advertising methodology, but appears to be focused mostly on a community of webcomics and the like. Right now, I'm bidding one book ad (skyscraper for Historical Bigfoot) on a single webcomic, Real Life.

I won't know if there's any positive outcome from these until end of month, to see if there has been any spike in sales numbers. Of course, I readily admit that my book title detail pages are not optimized for best click-thru's to Amazon. But, it's an interesting experiment.