Part 2: Here's How Many Books I Sold After I Spent $11,000 Marketing My Debut Novel (003)

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

Thanks to everyone who read Part 1 of I Spent $11,000 Marketing My Debut Novel and for all the great questions in the comments. I haven’t been able to answer all of the book marketing Qs yet, but I intend to do that in a future email for paid subscribers. Make sure you’re subscribed to get answers in my premium email next month, such as “How do you feel about paid influencer campaigns while working with a tight budget?” and “Do agents want to know my marketing plans in the querying stage?”

Missed Part 1? Check it out here for the breakdown of what I spent my marketing dollars on for my debut novel, What We Sacrifice for Magic.

Part 2: I Spent $11,000 on Marketing My Debut Novel

Okay, folks, the results are in. Here’s what I actually got in exchange for my $11,000 investment in my debut novel.

Events

We often tell our authors that bookstore events are a bit of an ego play. They make the author feel good. It feels like you’re doing something. But are they the most effective way to sell a bunch of books at once? No, not really.

Did I want to do them anyway? Yes! I wanted to celebrate with my community in the few cities where I have friends and family, and I wanted to support the indie bookstores that I’ve worked with for years from the other side. I had a great time doing these events and finished my tour on a complete high. I would 100% do it again.

Did I sell a ton of books? Well…

• Nashville: 18 books sold

• Brooklyn: 38 books sold (sold out!)

• DC: 24 books sold

• Minneapolis: 27 books sold

BookClubs.com Reach

I alluded to this before, but BookClubs.com is my favorite paid promo for women’s fiction, historical fiction, memoir, or just about any of the genres that we know book clubs love! Why? Because they give us fabulous reporting and we know that their promos are actually reaching book club decision makers.

That said, book club outreach can be super long-tail because book clubs sometimes plan their monthly picks up to a year in advance, so sometimes they will save something for later and it can take a while to come to fruition. I still wanted to seed the waters for any extra potential book club love and reserved a Book of the Month spot EARLY on BookClubs.com.

For an extra 1.1M impressions in front of book club readers and 1,954 clicks on the book and 69 book clubs adding it to their shelves, I’m very happy with this promo.

I have done 3 book club conversations in person, and I hope to keep getting asked to do more book club conversations. (Want me to join your book club meeting? Email me at hello@ajdewerd.com!).

Goodreads “Want-to-Reads”

This is one of the stats that matters most for debut fiction and memoir. While not everyone is on Goodreads, the number of people on the site that have marked a book “want to read” is a great measure of visibility and awareness overall. At pub, we want debut fiction to have 5-10K WTRs.

To help get to that number, I ran a premium giveaway for What We Sacrifice for Magic. For $599, the Goodreads premium giveaways are really worth it, in my opinion. While they don’t specify how much more visibility you get exactly from a premium vs. standard giveaway, anecdotally, the premium giveaways are getting 3-4x more visibility, entries, and WTRs as a result.

At pub, I had about 8K WTRs. Here are the stats now:

• Want to read: 16,447

• Added to shelves: 17,228

(Hint: click “Book Statistics” on any Goodreads book page to see the book details over time.)

Reviews

Besides securing trade reviews from Booklist, LibraryJournal, and PW, at 6 months post-pub the book now has:

• 167 Goodreads reviews

• 484 Goodreads ratings

• 3.5 star average on Goodreads

• 56 Amazon reviews

• 4.0 star average on Amazon

• 4 reviews on Barnes & Noble

• 4.3 star average on B&N

• 127 ratings on Storygraph

• 3.4 star average on Storygraph (I admit, this one hurt my feelings a bit!)

I’ll add that I am in no way recommending that an author obsess over or even read the specific consumer reviews! I look at the star rating every few months, mostly by accident when I’m visiting the page to grab some other bit of information.

There is so, so much fiction that just slides into the 3.5 star average on Goodreads and Amazon that from the publishing side, we really consider anything above 3.5 stars to be good. I’m hovering right on that line, but I am very happy with the 4.0 stars on Amazon. That makes me proud. 4 stars is hard to achieve!

Total Book Sales and Income

My advance was $6,000. That’s $5,100 for me after my agent’s 15%, paid out half in 2023 upon signing of the contract and half in 2024 upon acceptance of the final manuscript.

In 6 months:

• 2,117 paperbacks sold (5,146 shipped — which means there’s another ~3,000 out in the world available for sale in stores or distribution centers)

• 312 ebooks sold

• 254 audiobooks sold

= 2,683 total book sales, as of the sales report I received in April

With my initial sales and some royalties from subrights*, I essentially broke even. I spent my entire advance and expected first royalty check on book marketing ($11,000).

*Note: This post was edited to remove confidential deal information that was inadvertently shared in a previous iteration.

Conclusion

My 8-year-old nephew asked what my goal was for the book, how many I wanted to sell. I told him I was hoping for about 1,000 copies in the first 2 weeks (I did that!). He said I should try for 5,000.

I would be thrilled to get to 5,000 total copies sold. After many years working in publishing, I can tell you that that is not a benchmark that every book sees. I worked on several books published by the Big 5 that sold maybe a few hundred or 1,000 copies max in their first few months.

It can also be a slow build. I’m still hearing from people that have discovered the book and are reading it now. Those people tell more people, a book club adopts it, etc. Word of mouth can take a long time to build momentum. I may do additional promotions for the book here and there, but mostly I’m focused on writing the next one, Christmas Cookie Miracle, and growing the book marketing agency.

One of the things that can really help an author’s first book sell is to publish the next book. As people discover an author’s second, third, or fourth book, readers will go back and read the first one. That’s what I’m hoping for. For now, it’s an honor just to know that people I’ve never met in the world are reading my very Minnesotan, made-up story about a family of complicated witches and getting a little glimpse inside my world.

What I’m Reading

Gentle by Courtney Carver. I’m 50% through the audiobook, and I can already tell this is going to be a new entry into books that I quote from and talk about all the time (see also: Do Less by Kate Northrup). I ordered a physical copy from McNally Jackson because I know I’m going to want to re-read this one.

I loved Courtney’s Soulful Simplicity, and I was excited to read her new one, billed as a collection of 30 practices to overcome chronic overwhelm, cultivate self-compassion, and find permission to do less.

Something about the way Courtney proposes slowing down and reprioritizing deeply resonates with me. Here are a few ideas from Gentle that I have bookmarked already for myself:

• Put rest at the top of your to do list. Don’t wait for the weekend or vacation to rest.

• Weekends are not for catching up.

• Rest when you are tired!

As an author and agency founder with chronic illness, this is a message that I need to hear all the time. When I left HarperCollins in 2022, I was deep in the throes of what my doctor had called “medical grade burnout,” and it’s been a three year journey to walk that back. Like so many type-A, recovering perfectionist, eldest daughters who measure our worth by our productivity, I struggle to prioritize rest, even when my body is screaming for it, putting me right back on that track to burnout.

I tell myself now that if I’m not healthy, then nothing can get done, i.e. my writing, my company, literally everything depends on my health—and that needs to come first. Gentle is already helping me reframe some of those old productivity, hustle culture thoughts.

Coming Up…

In my next public missile, we’ll review how Breaking up with Bezos is going. I’ll compare my total Amazon spending from 2024 vs. the first 6 months of 2025—no matter how embarrassing it all is. And I’ll start to answer your book marketing questions in a monthly email just for paid subscribers.