In high school, people called me a wimp. I couldn’t run a lap around the football field without nearly passing out. I couldn’t lift more than 30 or 40 pounds without having to go to the doctor. My physical pain tolerance is very low, even to this day.
But my mental pain tolerance is another story entirely.
I can sit in a chair for hours on end to make up a story, even though there’s always a real chance that no one will want to read it, that the story won’t do anything for my career, won’t make me money. I need to tell any of you how mentally demanding a novel is. And when a story doesn’t do well, I sit down and do it all over again even though the end result may not be the same. Some folks may call that the definition of insanity—I don’t.
I’ve been doing it for almost the past decade. Over and over again. I got no problem with the fact that my career isn’t what a lot of people would call “success.” I’ve always been an underdog in every other area of my life. Not a big deal. I focus on myself and what I can control, keep improving, and keep showing up.
What’s your pain tolerance for writing? Mine is a 20 out of 10. I can’t tell you how many people I started with in 2012 who are no longer around because they couldn’t endure the pain.
Maybe your pain level is a 1 or 2, and that’s fine. But you may not be around for much longer. But if your level is an 8 or higher, you’ll be able stay in this for the long haul.
And, unlike physical pain, which is hard to improve your tolerance for, you can improve your mental pain tolerance by working on yourself and ingrained perceptions you have about yourself, art, and money. Therapy helps, too.
Anyway, that’s just a thought that has been on my mind over the past day or two. I need a break from Amazon Ads…LOL
But just when I got out…they pulled me back in…
LESSON LEARNED
Made more progress in Bryan Cohen’s ad course. There is a LOT of content.
LESSON EXECUTED
So, I had to take some action on my ads. We’re looking at a fourth straight day of losses again. *wipes egg off face and continues typing
My strategy worked and it didn’t.
What I said: waiting is key to understanding how your ads are actually performing, even if you lose money.
Was I right? Yes.
I pulled my customer search term report, which is about 24 hours behind. It told me a very interesting story about what terms and books were attracting clicks.
For my short story collection, I put it in the literary fiction genre, a choice that I knew at the time could hurt me. Well, turns out that my category ads were targeting LOTs of titles that were not relevant to the book at all. In fact, one book in particular was attracting a lot of clicks—a hot title that has nothing to do with my book. It’s called Anxious People by Frederik Backman.
My short story collection is called Reconciled People. I think people are clicking on it because the names are so similar and then finding out “Nah. This isn’t highbrow enough for me. I’ll pass.” Several days later, I’m letting holding the bill.
Amazon allows you do what’s called “negative targeting.” You can enter terms and ASINs of books you DON’T want your ads to serve on. So I went through all the terms that were getting clicks for my short story collection, weeded out offenders that didn’t fit, and then updated all of my ads accordingly.
The result? I cut my ad spend in half without touching the ad itself. So far I’m still not profitable for the story collection, but sheeeeeet…I’d rather be unprofitable by spending less money, if you know what I mean. The daily ad spend is much more manageable, and I can stomach losses at this amount for a while in service of the data.
So I actually consider that a huge success. If I hadn’t waited, I would have shut the ad off without knowing what the real problem was.
It turns out that Amazon was targeting some interesting books that were similar to mine that I didn’t even know existed. So while my research got me some “negative terms,” it also uncovered some comparable books that I spun into the basis of a few more ads. So that was another win.
Will my short story collection ultimately be worth running ads on? I’m not sure yet. The answer may be no.
But I still have a lot of levers I can pull. In many respects, my ads can’t perform worse than they are already. The only direction to go is up.
And I’ve spent an insane amount of time talking about a short story collection, which is a moonshot initiative for me, though not the best use of my time and resources. Now that the spend is more manageable, I can leave it alone for a while.
I’m running new ads on a LOT of my other titles, too. No action yet. But those are only getting a couple clicks a day, so it’s a much slower burn. Plus, many have titles in audio as well so it’s hard to know how they’re truly doing just yet.
