The other week, I wrote a post about a free promotion I ran for a limited time on my first book, Oak and Mist. It was a pretty successful promotion, increasing my readership and leading to further sales, so I was happy with the result.

I decided to test out another marketing option by placing an ad on Goodreads. It’s a pay-per-click ad, where you set a price to pay each time someone clicks on your ad (I bid $0.60 per click, a little above the average of $0.50) . There were three things I liked about the set-up:

1. Control. I wrote the ad, set the price-per-click and the maximum number of clicks I was willing to pay for each day.
2. Budget. The ad is pre-paid, so will run until my maximum number of clicks is reached, and I won’t be charged any more. There is an option to automatically renew once your credit runs out, but I opted out of that.
3. Flexibility. You can change the copy or appearance of your ad whenever you choose, or change the cost-per-click or maximum number of clicks per day. When you do this the ad needs to be approved again, but this happens fairly quickly.

So far, I’m going to be honest and say that it hasn’t set the world on fire. I’ve only had a few clicks so far, and garnered a lot more interest when I ran my Goodreads giveaway. However, it’s been a great opportunity to test different taglines for my book and see which ones gather the most attention. Goodreads sends me a daily report listing how often the ad was viewed, how many clicks for that day, whether any one added my book as a result of the ad, plus my remaining credit, so it’s easy to see patterns when you change any aspect of the campaign. This is invaluable information that will be very useful when putting together future campaigns, as I’m essentially testing my ideas on a huge live audience and getting immediate feedback.

When you self-publish, it’s important to choose your promotional avenues wisely, as they are all part of the brand you are building in order to sell your books. There’s also an enormous amount of learning on-the-job, and I’ve been extremely grateful to the many writers out there who share information about their experiences.

And how about you? Has anyone else out there had experience advertising on Goodreads? And how successful was it?