Sell This

Steve Sailer has another long post about advertising data and a hunch he's had since the 1980s that advertising really doesn't work. Those interested in selling books, or anything else should grab a coffee and read, What if Advertising on Google and Facebook (or TV) Doesn't Much Work? We agree. We're thinking one day we'll write a Substack piece on everything we've learned about advertising. But for now here's our experience. 

You can advertise all you want, but it won't matter if people just aren't interested. This was our experience with A Line Through the Desert. Advertising worked with later books. We found ad effectiveness reduced by 50% with each run. By 2017 we had a hunch that we didn't need to run advertisements anymore. We were right, and haven't since. The most effective form of advertisement available to us is getting mentioned by Instapundit. This is a well known thing. It's called an Instalanche. 

Speaking of selling books, Kurt Schlichter, who is always right, released his latest, The Split. He reports  855 sales in 12 hours. That's really interesting. We wonder if he's including presales. We guestimate that his KU page reads amount to tens of thousands in that time span.

Yet more advertising...watching broadcast TV in the New York metro area means getting bombardment with 'get vaccinated!' ads. It's total saturation and it isn't working. These ads talk to citizens like they're children.  Because we're a normal human with interests, things to do, etc, we haven't been paying attention to the national vax rate and are stunned to learn it stands at 56%. In New Jersey the rate is, 64%, because Governor Murphy isn't a condescending A-hole. No wonder Biden and left are furious. That is a complete total failure for an admin that promised a 70% vaccination rate by July. 

Will Runs the Numbers

So we decided to crunch our book sales numbers and the results yielded some very interesting data.

World War 1990: Battle of the Three Seas came out on 1 May. Sales of Three Seas, and all other books combined this year peaked in June. Since then Three Seas sales declined by 22%, 24% and 22% through September. Total book sales declined by 12%, 13% and 20%. As noted previously, sales stunk in April, so this wasn't because of the Wuahn Virus from Wuhan China.

About the only other correlation we can find is, June, July and August being summer time here in the Northern Hemisphere, these were people's summer reading.  Alright, our third biggest market by country is Australia, which, for the geographically challenged, is in the Southern Hemisphere. Let's see what the number say...

Nope, Australian sales numbers roughly correlate with the rest of the English speaking world. The bottom blue line is Three Seas. As with other Anglosphere nations, sales of the other five books in the World War 1990 universe match the Three Seas total. This means that Australian readers are acting like American, British and Canadian readers. 

Sales are weakest in Canada. Now before you people blame Prime Minister Justin*, Canadian sales were last under Harper, too. Which is not to excuse Justin, he's the biggest wanker in the Anglosphere. Also, Fidel Castro is his real dad. Do the image search. 

Anyway, for now we conclude sales are great this year because Three Seas is great. 

*Last name not left off in error. He a !@#$%#%% 12 year old

Sales Updates

Absolutely stunning sales data coming in. KU reads of the other five books in the World War 1990 series nearly double KU reads of Three Seas. This means we're getting a lot of new readers. A lot. Boy is that great news. These readers will finish the World War 1990 series and then look around for more of our stuff to read. Fade in....

He wrote a technothriller about a war between Israel and Iran? Wait, he wrote a pair of books about alien invasion? Wait a minute, what is this Blooms....what is this, chick lit? Was he drinking a glass of chardonnay in his yoga pants while he wrote it?  Wait, it's a sequel? Hey look at that M-1 tank!

Exit question: why are we getting all these new readers now?

Behold:

No Ads, Still Spike

We complain* about being trapped in the World War 1990 vortex but cranking out new novels in that universe has a great side effect. Sales of the old novels spike:

Each color represents one of the previous five World War 1990 books. Those massive spikes of the last few days coincide with the spike in Three Seas sales. All this without ads. 

Here's what's happening. New readers see World War 1990: Battle of the Three Seas and think, Battle of Three Seas....aircraft carrier on the cover...wait, there's more just like this. Wow, oh wow....where do I start?

It's branding at this point. We know we like Jameson's Irish Whisky, so they don't have to advertise to us. Everyone knows Japanese cars are high quality vehicles you can drive into the ground. They don't need to advertise that fact. Alternate history fans know what they're getting when they see the next World War 1990 novel is published.

We are very good at what we do.

*Having ideas is like having pitching, you can't have too much of it.

Ad This One

It's Advertising Week here at William Stroock dot Blogspot dot com, where we'll be discussing everything we know about advertising.

As mentioned yesterday, we've learned we don't have to advertise any longer. Which seems strange. Yet it is true. You see, the algorithm is doing all the work, and it is in the algorithm we've believed for three years now.

But we have to admit, during the first week of this month sales were slow. Not disastrous, but slower than unusual. We chalked it up to the Wuhan Virus from Wuhan China and everyone being stuck at home. But about ten days ago things really kicked in and daily  sales of World War 1990: Battle of the Three seas are fabulous. We're in the top 20 in Australia and Canada (top 10 with 'Trudeau's' people, actually) but not yet in Britain. Which means there's room for growth. Let's see, in the USA we're #17 as of two PM. USA! USA! 

We have another nagging fear, this one about advertising. During the first five years of our writing career we learned tons about advertising. We learned right on through to our final advertising lesson in 2017: you don't need to advertise. But we're concerned that we haven't learned anything new since then.

There's always something to learn. We're in real Rumsfeldian territory now. We know what we know, but we don't know what we don't know.