I had an interesting conversation over the weekend about AMS Ads for Authors and writing in general. And one of the points we discussed in that conversation is something I specifically call out in the AMS video course (now renamed Easy AMS Ads), but maybe not as strongly in the book, so I thought it was worth addressing here.
Which is that: as a self-published author looking to make money off of your writing (lots of assumptions in that sentence, but that’s who I’m talking to here), you need to keep producing new material.
Yes, you should market what you’ve already done. (And I am arguably not as good at that as I should be which is why I thank my lucky stars for AMS because I can run them full-time and with maybe fifteen minutes a day spent on them.)
But more importantly, you need to feed your readers. You need to give them new material. Otherwise you’re spending all this money to acquire customers (readers) and then you’re losing them because you have nothing more to offer them.
The most effective use of advertising is when you can bring people in the door and then keep them there and buying more from you. (See Amanda M. Lee for a good example.) Now, not everyone can write that fast, but if you’re spending all your time advertising what you’ve already written to the detriment of producing new material that is not a successful long-term strategy.
And what’s even more important about this is that AMS are an Amazon ad product. Meaning they favor new and shiny and already successful.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m running ads on books I published in 2013, 2014, 2015. But my most successful ad the last six months was on a book published September 2017. My second most successful, same thing. There’s a reason for that. Amazon is the reason.
So writing one or two books and then running AMS on them to the expense of everything else will perhaps do really well for you the first six months or year or maybe even two years you run the ads. But after that you need something new. You need new material to throw at the ads.
(And you need new material for your fans, too. Don’t forget them.)
Never ever lose sight of the fact that new material is what will keep the lights on. The JK Rowlings of the world who have a series selling well a decade after release without new material are the rarities. (And even she has had new stuff come out related to the original HP books. The movies. A play. A book of the play. The website that tells you your house and your patronus.)
Always be sure that whatever strategy you take to promoting your books doesn’t keep you from producing new material.
Speaking of. I have a book that’s waiting on final edits.
M.L. Humphrey 