This week I’m looking at the performance of the short videos I’d made to promote my latest release. I talked last week about how to create these. It’s been a pleasant surprise!

The above are my stats for short videos posted to Youtube. You’ll note the nice peaks there at the end. Each of the little icons at the bottom is where I’ve posted something. Almost daily, the last week and a few days. Not all of those are book videos – I’m interspersing the book videos with my little pollinator identification videos, and one really impressive Wheel Bug, which took off in views.

The first short video got 212 views, which is nice, and then to my surprise the next one got 1481 as of the time I took the screenshot! Keep in mind that short videos don’t go only to your subscribers, in fact they don’t notify your subscribers at all when you post one. These are being fed by the algorithm, to viewers who are looking at stuff like your video, to keep those viewers watching. The third video didn’t take off as well, but I’m still pleased with 751 views at less than 24 hours after posting.

With the second video, you’ll see that for some reason it just… stops. I don’t know if this is an internal throttle on Youtube’s end, or what. However, this is the reason they tell you to post videos fairly frequently, as about the time one stops getting views, you’ve got another going.

The vast majority of the views are coming from the shorts feed, not my own subscribers (which I knew, because I’m a very small channel right now). Also, this means more fresh eyes on the book cover…

Finally, is this making an impact on the book sales and reads? Well… maybe. This book is doing very well indeed. I do believe the videos are helping, because the genre readers I’m aiming for, with cozy mystery, do find books like this. Over on Amazon, the numbers went far better than I anticipated in ranking for this book, given it was the first book I’d aimed at the category, and I knew I would have to make marketing adjustments to really hit my goals.

I held over in the top fifty of all of Cozy Mysteries for more than two days. And I can really see the impact of that, as mystery readers are voracious users of Kindle Unlimited. I’m seeing reads all the way through the Groundskeeper series already.

The book released on 30 October, was announced on 31 October. My loyal fans were buying it, bless them, but here you can see the big spike of readers hitting on 02 November, when it was ranking in Cozy Mystery and in Ghost Mysteries. This tells me that the marketing campaign is working somewhere. I’m also doing cute graphics, another thing the readers of this genre like. You can do these with Canva, I’m told, fairly easily. I do them in my graphic design programs. Either way, I recommend setting up a template so you can easily swap out elements without having to rebuild the whole thing from scratch every time. I do this for my stuff, and for Raconteur Press, which is exponentially more volume.

I’ve put a short link on the graphic, but as I said last week, these are more about branding than direct leads to ‘buy!’ for the social media denizens. Never post one of these with a link in the post or description, it will be throttled down to nothing.

Little square images are really easy to share on social media, so they are another valuable tool in your marketing toolbox. Make them fun, bright, not too much text, and yes, I would embed a link on them, to your website if nothing else. Oh, and they don’t have to be for that book, either! If you want to encourage readers to explore your backlist, come up with links between this book/series and your other work.

Does this look like a lot of work? Yes. Is it necessary to sell books? Heck yes. You must market if you are going to be a successful author. I’m devoting a fair amount of time every day to marketing, once I’ve done my morning writing. It’s a constantly moving target, finding your audience, figuring out what they want that will attract them to your books, and getting their attention. You may try and fail, more than once. Persistence pays off, though.