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. 

Men in (not Gillette) Advertising

Watching the Yankees back in the late 80s, 87-88, we saw a lot of beer commercials. 

Sure, tons of them were lame. You Millennials should google Spuds Mackenzie.

But most were by men, directed to men; average work-a-day men. 

Here's one that ran all during the summer of 87, which we found and saw for the first time again yesterday.

This Bud's for all that you do...

Quite right. It's all there, challenge, hard work, adversity, acceptance.

Note the manager argues, 'He was safe!' The umpire simply says, 'He was out,' and walks away.

European readers, arguing with the umps is a time honored baseball tradition.

Later, the ump and his wife are out for a nice celebratory dinner, when who buys them around? Well the manager!

Look closely and you'll see the ump's number is 42. Well played, Bud, well played.

Advertise This

The Digital Reader helpfully lists Eight Ways for Authors to Waste Money.

Aspiring authors should read the peice and treat every word as if brought down from Mt. Sinai by Charleton Heston.

This is especially true:

Promoting an Author's First Book 

Robin gives monthly seminars in book publishing, and a couple months back she revealed that authors should not start marketing their books until after they have published the third book. 

She based this on the observation that readers don't just buy a book by an author they like, they buy as many of that author's books as they can afford. If an author only a single book out, they can only make one sale per reader, which is why they should wait until they have several books to sell.

When we published A Line through the Desert we spent a lot of money on advertising, a lot. We might as well have wiped our ass with that money, it would have been more useful.

The advice to wait a few books before running a serious ad campaign is spot on and in this day and age you can get word of your book out there through social media for free.

Advertise This

In Takimag, the great statistician and social scientist Steve Sailer notices something about advertising we've suspected for a few years now. Sailer tells us how he worked in marketing research in the 1980's. He says:

...in the second half of the 1980s, clients started to complain that very few of our tests showed that increasing TV advertising by 50 or 100 percent would move the needle on sales at all.

Sailer tells us that:

This is not to say that good advertising couldn’t help a new brand, but there tended to be diminishing returns once an identity was established.

We really agree with the above.

Sailer goes on to say how he encouraged companies to cut advertising to see what happened. The advertisers didn't want to, of course.

We've cut our advertising budget drastically over the years. Basically, we think we've established our brand, and our fans are going to buy our books regardless. Advertising does not seem very effective these days at bringing in new customers.

Our most successful book had the most advertising. We assumed  this was both correlation and causation. The book was Israel Strikes.  But what if the subject was just so interesting to readers and so timely that most of the advertising wasn't really necessary? Frankly, we wonder. Back then we kept meticulous daily data on sales and ad debuts, both print and digital. When new ads went up sales spiked.

But still.

Going back now, we ran plenty of print and digital ads for A Line Through the Desert. They didn't work and throughout the winter of 2009-2010 we wondered if we had made a bad career move.

Our next book was To Defend the Earth. Here we started digitally and moved on into print. Much to our surprise we moved product everyday. It was wonderful.

Then came Israel Strikes. When this book came out in early 2013 we bought digital ads and print ads in military history magazines. It occurred to us that they have military history magazines in Britain. So we went and bought a lot of ads over there. Voila! Where before we had few fans in the UK now we have thousands. In fact, per-capita we're more popular in the UK than in the USA. Thanks Limeys!

But here again we seem to have hit our ceiling and new ads just don't seem to be making much of an impression. To restate, saturation doesn't help. We've also tried running ads a few years after the last ad, thinking this would grab reader attention and gain new fans. Sorry, nope. There seems to be an absolute limit to an ads effectiveness regardless of time.

Our own rule now is one and done. One ad for a new book in a particular platform and then get out.

Actually, with World War 1990: ANZACs, we'll be running a little advertising experiment, so we'll see.