Year in Review

What I've been doing and whether it worked

We’re coming to the end of 2023, so, of course, it’s an excellent time to look back at the year - and the series - behind us. What I did, what worked and didn’t work, and what I can take from that into 2024 for better results. As an aside, I also wrote a piece on this theme for The Writing Cooperative, so you can read a bit more there (but here is where you’ll find concrete stats).

What I did

Let’s start with what I actually did behind the scenes to get to this point!

• Wrote, edited, formatted, designed covers for, and put on sale 5 books from Crowhill Cove (and 1 from Serial Investigations back at the start of the year)

• Ran ads with BookBub: New Releases For Less for Don’t Leave Town (7th November) and Don’t Check Out (12th December); submitted Don’t Move Out for a featured deal twice but was only accepted once; ran three month-long ad campaigns at $5 each for Don’t Move Out

• Ran ads with Amazon: two US campaigns for Don’t Move Out at $2.50 daily, spending just over $50 before I paused them.

• Launched ARC campaign with Hidden Gems on October 14th

• Daily TikTok posts, including 16 directly featuring Crowhill Cove books or Substack

• Other social posts: 2 Substack roundups (IG), 5 book reels, 1 Substack reel, 4 book posts (IG), 2 LinkedIn posts

• Looked for influencers to review the book on social media via SocialCat

• Overhauled my author website, revised my SEO, and started ranking higher in search results as a ghostwriter (not so much as a romance author, but eyeballs are eyeballs)

• Started this Substack with weekly posts since July

• Started a giveaway here on Substack and shared the link to it on GoodReads in a couple of giveaway groups

• Ran full-page ads in London Runway and included Don’t Move Out in the Christmas Gift Guide, just because I’m the Chief Editor and I might as well take full advantage of all the resources at my disposal

• In-person networking: I attended the London Book Fair but thoroughly failed to promote anything I was doing, mostly just panicked in the corner, and also attended lots of in-person and online networking groups.

• I was interviewed for the Fully Booked podcast but didn’t get much chance to talk about my own books. I also have a couple more recordings done that are going out soon, but again, didn’t get much airtime for my own writing.

Results

• New Releases for Less, Don’t Leave Town: Big impact! I think I can attribute at least £50.90 in direct sales (after conversion, the $50 feature cost me about £41) and it also triggered 3 preorders, with the potential for more preorders that I can’t definitively tie to this promotion (someone may have read the book before then preordering the next one a few days later). All of the books re-entered the top 100 charts in their categories and stayed there for about a week, with a significant amount of time for Don’t Leave Town in the top 3. Don’t Leave Town has actually earned more than the previous book in the series due to the promotion - this would normally be the opposite as you expect readers to go through the books in order.

• New Releases for Less, Don’t Check Out: So, part of the fun here is that I had my Featured Deal and this New Releases For Less go out on the same day. Great from a marketing standpoint as people who buy the featured deal can then immediately see wow, okay, there’s another book in the series that just came out and I can get them all. In terms of figuring out which ad pushed which sales, however, not so great :’) I’m just going to go ahead and wrap the price for both features as well as the results from both features into one analysis, below -

• BookBub Featured Deal, Don’t Move Out: The cost for both of these features was $261; in my currency, £209.32. Direct sales look to be around £301, with 647 ebooks total sold in the days during the promotion (600 of these were DMO itself). If we look at the stats from the day DMO went back to full price to today (4 days), I’m still getting about 18 book sales and 26,000 KU pages read ABOVE the baseline before the campaigns across the same time period. Don’t Move Out reached #1 in multiple categories in multiple territories, the other books all reached the top 50 at certain points. I got the coveted bestseller badge for Don’t Move Out in all four countries where the promotion ran! I shared some screenshots in the chat for this publication, if that’s your kind of thing. I’m continuing to see increased profit as a result of this campaign so I can’t even really say that it’s over. The full value will be hard to gauge, as readers who bought the first book may be slower to read it but could eventually move on to read the rest of the series.

• BookBub monthly ad campaigns, Don’t Move Out: paused two of them before spending full ad allocation because they weren’t getting enough impressions. Total spend was $9.09 for 38 clicks. Can’t be conclusively sure that any of them actually led to sales as figures seemed to remain consistent during this time. The ads weren’t performing well, so I need to test and find out why - I also saw a drop in results for previously successful ads for my other books at this time.

• Amazon ads: $38.79 in tracked sales and $4.31 in Kindle Unlimited royalties. I’m confident that some of those sales drove the readers to buy later books in the series or preorder them, so the campaign probably broke even. On top of that, we always have to remember that going higher up in the Amazon algorithm makes us get suggested to buyers more, which means we probably got more sales from that boost as well that wouldn’t be tracked. Not bad results. I also learned that they’re much more effective once your review score average is above 4.0. I’ve heard it’s even better above 4.2 but haven’t tried it myself.

• Hidden Gems ARC: it’s almost impossible to track how much impact this had, but I know it was big. Launching with good reviews coming in really quickly a) helped to push more sales and b) drowned out that one early bad review I got. I know they didn’t send a huge amount my way because they apologized about not being able to meet my minimum amount request, but it clearly still made a big difference.

• Social media outreach: I have definitely gained followers on TikTok, though I think most of them are for my writing craft content and not necessarily for Crowhill Cove or this Substack. I can see in my stats that I’ve had 2 views and 1 subscriber from TikTok, and 10 views but no subscribers from Instagram. This may be inaccurate as a lot of my traffic is listed as “direct” - people could be watching the video and then typing the URL into their browser, which would be untrackable. Either way, I don’t think social media has had a huge impact, and I know for sure that my Instagram posts are barely being seen by anyone because it hates me.

• SocialCat influencers: I found one! Then she only wanted print and wouldn’t accept an ebook version, so that didn’t pan out at all. Useless.

• Website: inconclusive. Probably didn’t help at all

• Substack: You can see my current subscriber count in the progress report! No paid subscribers as of yet.

• GoodReads groups: absolutely no effect

• London Runway features: again, hard to track. People could have searched on Amazon and directly bought copies and I wouldn’t know. Seems unlikely.

• Networking and interviews: once again, inconclusive. One person at one networking group (my local Chamber of Commerce) said they might introduce my books to their book club, which is pretty nebulous as far as results go. I also may have been put off the London Book Fair for life, honestly.

Was it a success?

This is a hard question to answer. Let’s go through the bullet points again, bearing in mind that the question of ‘how do you qualify success?’ has not been answered.

• Wrote the books: yeah, I think this was a success. It’s my best-selling book series to date, or will be, because Serial Investigations is out in front by virtue of the fact that it has YEARS of sales ahead of Crowhill Cove - but the gap is narrowing more and more every day. Like, one more good month of sales will do it kind of narrowing. I’ll update you on that when it happens in the Progress Report.

• Advertising: BookBub and Amazon ads were a success. BookBub hugely so. If I had any marketing method - absolutely any - that I could pour £200 into and get £300 back every time, I would be doing it every month! In fact, I would be pouring £2,000. And even then I would only do that until I could afford to put £20,000 in. Are you kidding me? This was SO good.

• Social media: that’s a nope! Might work better when I’ve grown my TikTok more as I started with, like, 20 followers or something this year. I’m already up to 200 so maybe I’ll get more traction as I grow.

• ARC campaign: definitely a success, will do it again next time

• Influencers: no

• Giveaway: no

• Networking: no

Did I hit my goals?

Let’s look back at the post I made towards the beginning of launching this Substack and the goals I set for myself. Did I achieve them?

• Enough paid subscribers to justify producing the content: No. We currently have 0 paid subscribers

• Enough free subscribers to see an impact on book sales: No. I would say it’s currently working the other way around (readers coming to Substack, not subscribers buying books)

• Enough book sales to justify writing the next series: … Yes? No? I didn’t define this clearly enough. Realistically, I always knew it was unlikely that I would make a lot of money from this. If you don’t include the costs of sales (ads etc), I still only made £6 an hour from all the work I’ve done on the books (I obsessively track my working hours for exactly the reason that I now have this data at my fingertips when it matters). Still, I’ve had more sales than ever before, and that does feel like a reason to keep going and see where we can go from here. After all, the first book has only been out for six months, and I’m trying to compare it to books that came out in 2017/2018 - the fact it’s already so high up in my personal charts means there will likely be more success to come. I do anticipate that at some point, the ‘top 6 all-time’ display on my Book Report will just be Crowhill Cove 1 to 5 and then my previous best-selling book (unless, of course, the new CC series next year gets there first).

• More sales than I get with Serial Investigations: Yes!

• 100 Crowhill Cove book sales by the end of 2024: Yes! We’re already at 6x that!

• Average sales of £200 per month - I did not set this on Substack but actually in my own personal goals; and no - but we did hit £100 per month even though I had absolutely stagnated down to almost 0 in the summer before launching Don’t Move Out. I haven’t got there quite yet, but with 8 days to go in the year and sales still good, we are actually still on track to possibly reach an average of £150 (currently standing around £138).

What are my new goals?

When I come to sum up 2024, here’s what I want to look back on (I’m making my goals SMARTer this time - more trackable):

• At least 15 paid subscribers (currently 0)

• Over 200 free subscribers (currently 24)

• Average sales of at least £200 per month (currently £138)

• More than 1000 Crowhill Cove book sales total (currently at 759 so this feels very achievable)

• More than 10 preorders for the first book in the new series

• New books to hit the top 10 in their categories after launch

• 50 ratings for series 2 book 1 on Amazon after launch

Some of these feel really achievable (average sales per month if I get the launch process right, preorders for the same); some of them will be a challenge (subscriber counts), but I wanted a mixture of things that would be easier to hit and things that wouldn’t. All of these goals would represent progress on what we’ve achieved this year. For example, Don’t Move Out had 9 preorders.

Now, I want to make some Big Dream goals, things that I think of if I close my eyes and dream for the very best for this venture:

• Over 50 paid subscribers

• Over 1000 free subscribers

• Average sales of £2,000 per month (this would pay for our mortgage! Then I’d only need our household bills, tax, food, my personal bills, and “fun” money to be covered by my other work! It’s also a huge stretch but at the same time, really not at all unusual compared to what I know some authors in this niche make!)

• Both the AU and the first book in the new series become bestsellers

• More preorders than all the other books combined to date for book 1 of series 2 (37 to beat!)

• Viral BookTok campaign

• Average reviews above 4.5 on Amazon, above 4.0 on GoodReads (it’s a much tougher crowd!)

• More than 100 reviews each for Don’t Move Out (currently 77) and series 2 book 1 on Amazon

• BookBub Featured Deal accepted for series 2 book 1 (I know this sounds like an action rather than a goal, but given how exclusive the Featured Deals are, I’m setting it as a goal; it’s actually an indicator that the book is doing really well to even be accepted).

• More than 3000 Crowhill Cove book sales (including the new series, even though it will be called Crowhill Cove Kitchen or Crowhill Cove Club; going forward, if I say Crowhill Cove, I’m referring to the whole universe and not just books 1 to 5)

What should I do next time?

• Definitely sticking to this style of gay romance book as you all have shown me that it is a better path forward than what I was doing before with Serial Investigations. Plus, we’re committed here now!

• Advertising: I’ll do BookBub New Releases For Less every time, and I will try Amazon ads again for the first book in the next series as well as trying it on any book that gets over a 4.2 score average (if you were going to give me 5 stars but haven’t gotten around to it yet, please use the links in the Progress Report section to do so!)

• I’ll keep submitting the books for Featured Deals (I’d actually really like to get the first Serial Investigations book featured, although that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about here; but seeing how powerful the buy-through for a series of 5 books can be REALLY makes me want to see what it would be like for a series of 12)

• ARC campaign with Hidden Gems for the first book in the series would be a definite. I don’t know if I’ll need to do it when I release the AU book because I’ll have some reviews from here, presumably, but we’ll see.

• Weekly Substack posts will definitely continue as before. We don’t have enough data yet to say whether it’s worth it or not, but I’m hanging onto the power of belief.

• I’ll keep doing book posts on TikTok. I might not have gained any subscribers or definite sales, but I’ve had a tiny bit of positive feedback there and I feel like I could grow that further, so I’ll keep going. The more followers I have in the first place, the more people will see them, I guess, so success should build.

• That’s all I definitely want to repeat!

What do I want to try?

I’m not sure how many of these I will or won’t do, but they’re on my list of ideas to try for sure:

• I’d like to get more beta reads. I had one or two for the books in this series but I would like 3 per book. If you’d be interested in beta reading, let me know. Otherwise, I’ll be looking around for where I can find them.

• I want to get better at running Amazon ads. Breaking even isn’t enough. I want to make profit from what I run there.

• I’d like to try more book promotion sites and tours. I’ve done one a few times where you just get a small number of reviews but mostly people are just sharing a giveaway, and I don’t want to do it like that anymore. I want reviews and, more so, sales. I have some tools down on my list to try: Freebooksy, Book Kitty, Books Go Social, Book Butterfly, Book Lemur, ENT, Just Kindle Books, KBook Promotions, and a few more. I’ve put these into my marketing schedule for next year, but it also depends on availability and how much spending money I have when I want to do them, so we’ll see

• I’d like to drive traffic here to my Substack with ads, maybe Facebook or Google

• I’ll obviously be trying out sharing the AU novel here weekly and seeing how serialization works

• I need to make sure I don’t forget about my older books. Serial Investigations is on hiatus right now, but it’s a 12-book series with 2 bonus novellas, so selling 1 copy of Bloodless has the potential to turn into 14 sales while selling 1 copy of Don’t Move Out only has the potential to turn into 5 sales. Amazon and BookBub marketing have been hit and miss for this series for me, so I need to figure out something new. Maybe Facebook ads. One of my longer-term aims, probably for 2025, is to write another book in that series (or at least 3, to round up the latest arc and try to finish the series off at book 15 with some kind of satisfying conclusion). I need more sales before I can justify taking time from this series to go back to that. But readers who’ve been with me since before CC, never fear: Ram and Will still hold a very special place in my heart and I’m not going to abandon my boys for good. The only way their story isn’t getting finished is if I die in a freak accident before I can get the last books written. If you’re not familiar with them or haven’t read my earlier, more general newsletter reports, I do have between 20 and 25 books planned (depending on whether I want to do the last arc I’d thought of) so there is a lot of untapped potential there still.

• I need to get into BookTok more! I’m there, but I’m only on the edges. The algorithm basically refuses to serve me book content, which is so annoying. I’m hoping to train it more going into 2024.

• If I can find any that are reasonably priced, I would like to go to some kind of expo/in-person book event. I hear US-based authors talking about these all the time and I think they’re much less common here in the UK, but it seems that being able to sit and talk to people as they walk by really, really works for some people. That’s cool! I’d like to try it. I did recently hear (from

  The Author Stack
  , here) that it’s harder if you’re disabled because people want you to stand up and talk to them, and honestly, this does make sense because I’ve done craft stalls in the past where I sat down the whole time and made 0 sales. But maybe I can try standing in shifts with my cane and see if that works, and a book fair is very different to a general craft fair where people don’t necessarily want YOUR type of crafts. All of this is really getting ahead of myself since I don’t even know of any in-person events I could try yet!

What do you think I should try?

Over to you! Do you have anything you’d like to see me try? Not just from a marketing standpoint: content you’d like to see, short stories you’d like me to write, anything about the AU novel or next year’s series, something you’d like me to do on social media - anything that comes to mind. Let me know in the comments! Recommendations for services or individual professionals who may be able to help me are encouraged, also.

I think we’ve had a pretty good year. I’m going to leave this summary there, but I’m determined to make 2024 better than this. Better than ever. I’ve seen what we achieved - my best book launch of all time - and I want more.

I was going to have a break for Christmas, but instead, I have one more two more short stories to share with you this year, both coming out on the same day. It’s something very different from the usual - I’m taking part in the Same Walk Different Shoes challenge run by

Ben Wakeman

. I hope you enjoy these upcoming bonus posts!

Progress Report

• Don’t Move Out sales total: ebook - 673, paperback - 4, KU pages read - 158,133 (DMO = 238 pages, so the equivalent of 664 full-book reads); 2 in highest Amazon category (-1 on last week) - Over 1200 equivalent buys is incredible to me!! Far and away my most-read book of all time now!

• Don’t Go Outside sales total: ebook - 36, paperback - 2, KU pages read - 39,645 (DGO = 222 pages, so the equivalent of 178 full-book reads); 21 in highest Amazon category (-15 on last week)

• Don’t Fly Home sales total: ebook - 23, paperback - 1, KU pages read - 21,326 (DFH = 224 pages, so the equivalent of 95 full-book reads); 79 in highest Amazon category (-41 on last week)

• Don’t Leave Town sales total: ebook - 32, paperback - 2, KU pages read - 13,308 (DLT = 299 pages, so the equivalent of 44 full-book reads); 49 in highest Amazon category (-7 on last week)

• Don’t Check Out sales total: ebook - 22, paperback - 1, KU pages read - 3,744 (DCO = 192 pages, so the equivalent of 19 full-book reads); 113 in highest Amazon category (-99 on last week)

• AU novel 1 - scheduled in for next year, no prep done yet, voting up now! (CEO/secretary is winning so far!)

• (Books 6+): 10 covers, themes, and titles done, voting up now! (Kitchen is winning so far!)

• Subscribers: free - 24, paid - 0 (hi new friend!)

By the way, please like this post if you enjoyed it and would like to see more! This helps me decide what to do for future content.

Although who am I kidding, I love this kind of post! I’ll definitely want to do this and check in on my goals next year.

XO Rhiannon