Ad results March 2025

It’s April, so let’s see how my ads did for the last month.

I changed things up a fair bit for ads in March 2025.

Because the economy is so bad and not likely to improve for several years (I saw someone arguing that all the policy decisions from COVID will have a 15 year economic hangover, which I think might be on point), I though it might be prudent to move some older series into Kindle Unlimited, so I did that with the DEMONSOULED books and with CLOAK GAMES (though not with CLOAK MAGE, which will remain wide as new books come out). I might do it with SILENT ORDER as well, but I haven’t decided. My thinking is that as people are looking to economize, subscription services will probably offer better value that direct ebook sales.

So, let’s see how we did!

For Facebook ads, I did CLOAK GAMES/MAGE and THE GHOSTS.

CLOAK GAMES/MAGE: $4.14 back for every $1 spent, with 10% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

THE GHOSTS: $8.73 for every $1 spent, with 6% of the profit coming from the audiobooks.

Obviously, that might be inflated because of GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY, which did well. (Thanks, everyone!) Without GHOST IN THE ASSEMBLY, the GHOSTS would have done $3.68 for every $1 spent, with 15% of the profit coming from audiobooks. So still pretty good.

For Amazon ads, I mostly focused on HALF-ELVEN THIEF. Remember that for an Amazon ad to be successful, it needs to get a sale or a complete KU read for every 6-8 clicks.

HALF-ELVEN THIEF: $3.41 for every $1 spent, with a sale or complete KU read for every 0.84 clicks.

That’s a really good result.

I gave up on advertising STEALTH & SPELLS ONLINE: CREATION. I’ve realized I fundamentally misunderstood what readers in the LitRPG genre actually want. I’m still going to finish the series this summer with the final book (I’m 75,000 words into the final book), but I don’t think I’m going to advertise the series any more.

For DEMONSOULED, I did a combined Facebook/Amazon Ads campaign. For a combined campaign like that, it’s best to just track the return.

DEMONSOULED: $2.53 for every $1 spent.

So pretty close to February.

I also did some Bookbub ad campaigns for THE GHOSTS and SEVENFOLD SWORD on Apple.

THE GHOSTS: $9.24 back for every $1.

SEVENFOLD SWORD: $6.76 back for every $1.

So some very good results there!

Finally, I’ve begun experimenting with Bookbub ads for Google Play. I tried out SEVENFOLD SWORD first:

SEVENFOLD SWORD: $3.86 back for every $1.

So a promising beginning there. I might try more experiments Bookbub ads and Google Play in future months.

A good month all in all. Thanks for reading, everyone! Hopefully I will have some more new books soon.

-JM