So I made about the best pop-art ad in my history; it was a classic and at least one friend pointed that out. It led to a page advertising all ten of my short stories. This was a short-story campaign. I put it on Facebook, Twitter, my blog promotion site, and on various Facebook sites. On Facebook I had found about twenty sites that accepted book promos and even welcomed them, and I put it on each one. A great ad, a great launch page, and even a kindle promo (99 cents on the newest and best of the stories) to throw into the deal.

In short, it was a wash. I only got nine views of the launching site altogether, no sales. Whether anyone clicked from the launching site into my various Amazon book sites, I don't know; if those nine even become more familiar with my work I can at least say there was a benefit. Some of my Facebook friends are already familiar with my work but may have gone in there just out of idle curiosity. Most people didn't click the link. They liked the pop art; they put a "like" on the posts, if they saw them, but they didn't buy anything.

Should I just accept this as the price of doing business? I knew that idea of blanketing the Facebook kindle sites was kind of hot air, a bunch of noise on a pile of noise. I am not sure anyone is really using those sites to buy or read books and I know that the authors who dump stuff on there, myself included, are too busy to check out anything anyone else dumps on there.

On Twitter you have a few people who systematically retweet anything an author puts out. They seem to be grateful that I have ten books of stories with one on sale and they are glad to tell all their audience, no matter how wide, about it. I myself have a thousand followers, of whom maybe a hundred will see it, depending on when they get on there I assume, but to most of them it's random noise too. I don't often get readers from Twitter, though I've gotten a few.

My next campaign is haiku, and it will go on the haiku and poetry sites as well as the big three (my FB, Twitter, and blog promo), and the twenty or so abovementioned Facebook sites. I am not going to get on Tik Tok or Instagram (maybe I should?) but rather just feel like the short story audience is somewhere else, still eluding my fine pop art and collection of ten sets of short stories, all reasonably good in my opinion.

It's something to think about.