When Ads Stop Working (and Trying Something New)

I’ve dabbled in Facebook ads before, but they’re just not for me. Instagram ads? Same story since my following there isn’t large enough to make a noticeable dent in sales.

Amazon ads, on the other hand, have historically been worth the investment. With the tracking tools Amazon provides, I could see they were bringing in results. But earlier this year, Amazon made some changes that threw a wrench into my progress.

In January, proposed tariffs put a halt to shipping print books from the U.S. (where mine are printed) to other countries. This completely shut down the small but steady stream of sales I had in Mexico. The trickle went dry. Worse still, I can’t even order author copies to Mexico, where I live, which is an issue I’ll have to find a workaround for.

Then in June, Amazon raised print prices and changed its royalty structure so that only books priced above $9.99 qualified for the 70% royalty rate. That meant I had to raise my print book prices. But knowing this would push some readers out of the market, I made nearly all of my titles available as Kindle ebooks for KU reads.

The results? Immediate, but not encouraging. KU page reads shot up, but print sales plummeted. I had my worst sales month ever.

Because of this, I’ve decided to reduce my overall ad budget. I’m keeping my Amazon ads for now, but they’re not pulling their weight. And given that Amazon reported a 41% drop in sales during July’s Prime Day compared to last year, it’s clear I’m not the only one seeing a slowdown.

So, I decided to try something different.

In July, Ultimate Bundles was running their Ultimate Healthy Living Bundle, and I just managed to get my submission in before the deadline. I offered my book The Mexican Apothecary: Traditional Cold and Flu Herbal Remedies as an ebook, which is one of my books that isn’t available in ebook form on Amazon.

I didn’t expect to sell many bundles (and I didn’t), but that wasn’t my main goal. My real aim was to introduce my work to a new audience, people interested in healthy living and herbs, who might not otherwise have discovered me. My hope is that some of them will enjoy the book enough to check out my main series, Exploring Traditional Herbal Remedies in Mexico.

The writing life is full of experiments, and this was one of them. Here’s hoping August brings more traction.

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