Ad Week: What We've Learned

It's advertising week here at William Stroock dot blogspot dot com. Gotta write about something, man? We like to think of ourselves as a combination of Baily Quarters from WKRP and Don Draper.

[We don't know who Baily Quarters is but we're swooning at the Don Draper bit]

Yes of course.

Selling books these last eleven years had been a long, hard slog and we've learned a lot. 

We've learned you can't advertise a book nobody wants. You know right away if a book is gonna sell or not, the As Seen on TV people will tell you the same thing, about what they're hocking, BTW. You can over-advertise. An ad's effectiveness diminishes by 50% with each run. One and done, run your ad and get out. 

We've learned that in this day and age, we (not you, we) don't need to advertise. After years of complex ad campaigns we got a hunch that by 2017 it was really the algorithm doing all the work. We were right. Since The Austrian Painter we've run no ads except for an occasional test and to make good with the guys that gave us deep discounts. 

We've learned that we are very good at what we do, or don't do anyway. This morning's Amazon rankings for World War 1990: Battle of the Three Seas: