Launching My First Book: Month One Spending Review

My first novel comes out this August, so I’m learning the ins and outs of launching a book, and putting my knowledge to work.

To help others in a similar position, and improve my results through self-reflection, I’ve decided to “build in public,” as the tech bros like to say. This means I’ll be sharing my journey — strategies, tactics, insights, wins, losses, meltdowns — along with how much I’m spending each month.

Jared, my doppelganger

For context, I started with zero marketing experience and a minimal online presence. I’m a veterinarian turned freelance medical writer who once had a funny piece in McSweeney’s and gave an “epic” speech at my vet school graduation. I barely touched Instagram, never had a Twitter, deleted my Facebook years ago, and left a TikTok profile decaying in the cloud somewhere.

When I started, the good citizens of the Internet had never heard of me or my book, and I had no idea how to do this. I needed to 1) figure out how to tell them, and 2) start telling them.

Here’s how I began.

Book launch: month one spending summary

Here’s how much I spent on all book launch activities in January 2023.

Advertising course	$849
Wix (2 years)	$312
OneUp social media scheduler (1 year)	$72
Online ads	$21
Domain (1 year)	$12
TOTAL	$1,266

Below I’ll explain why I spent what I did, and how I would have spent it differently if I could do it all over again.

$849 on Mark Dawson’s Ads for Authors

In my day job as a medical writer I’m often asked to create a type of deliverable that is new to me. Whenever this happens, I always ask the client for a solid example, or find one myself. I decided to take the same approach with book marketing.

To this end, I found a perfect example in Mark Dawson, of the Self-Publishing Formula.

The man, the myth, the Mark Dawson

Unlike many other Internet gurus out there, Mark first made a lot of money doing exactly what he teaches (selling books), not from the business of teaching others. All of Mark’s content — including his podcast, reviews on Amazon, and newsletters — showed me that he is the real deal: a successful author who knows how to market a book.

His Ads for Authors course offers both strategic (big-picture) and tactical (nitty-gritty) approaches for connecting with potential readers and selling them your book.

I’m still working through the course, but I’ve already implemented some of Mark’s lessons with online ads, yielding my first newsletter subscribers.

Worth it? Absolutely.

$21 on Facebook and Twitter ads

Mark Dawson and many other book marketing experts agree that the first step for any new author is to build your email list, since it gives you a direct line to potential buyers. Mark recommends Facebook lead generator ads to find these first readers, and I can now say from experience that this approach works well. I was able to gather potential reader emails at about 33 cents per email.

My first Facebook ad

(Whether or not they really are potential readers is a post for another day. [Also, this book is better than Hunger Games on steroids. I just thought that would be catchy copy.])

I've heard from multiple sources that Facebook ads are more effective and economical than Twitter ads for finding readers, especially if you want to collect email addresses. Mark avoids paid Twitter ads altogether.

Still, Mark’s readers are older than mine, so I wanted to test Twitter advertising for myself. I launched a book giveaway advertising campaign that indeed increased my follower count. Unfortunately these followers cost about $1 each, which felt very pricey after my Facebook ads experience.

Not only is $0.33 per email much cheaper than $1 per follower. I can reach out to all of my new email contacts directly but I can’t do the same with my Twitter followers.

So, are Facebook ads worth it? Yes.

How about Twitter ads? No.

$324 on Wix and a domain name

Arguably this comes out to about $14 for the month since the Wix subscription lasts for two years, but I’m no accountant, so let’s just tally this now.

Before I paid for Wix, I tried Weebly for free, but it was too buggy.

Wix isn’t necessarily cheap, but the functionality is fantastic, and it’s super user friendly.

The biggest problem I’ve faced with Wix is knowing when to stop, since there are endless ways to pretty-up and optimize your site. I can get obsessive with that kind of thing, so I keep reminding myself of the 80/20 principle. I (try to) stop somewhere around 20% effort, knowing this will achieve 80% of my desired results.

Is Wix worth the price? Definitely. I mean just look at this beautiful site ;)

How about the domain? No choice, so yes.

$72 on OneUp social media scheduler

Social media can waste hours that are probably better spent writing books, creating ads, and learning more about marketing. Because of this, I wanted a social media scheduler to handle my posts to Facebook and Twitter.

For Facebook posts and single Tweets, OneUp performed fine. Twitter threads were another story. While shorter threads were posted without issue, longer threads kept getting scrambled on my Twitter page. OneUp also failed to recycle my posts (post them again later), which is a primary reason I wanted it.

OneUp failed to post this again on Twitter a month later

Is OneUp worth it? Nope. (And they don’t give refunds.)

If I could do it again, I would go with Buffer. It’s been around longer and I’ve since heard more of my friends recommend it.

Starting costs feel steep, but worth it

I have so much more I want to say about my first month of book marketing, but I’ll try to do that in dedicated posts. For now, I’ll summarize by saying that my biggest ticket items — Mark Dawson’s course and Wix — were well worth it. I strongly recommend these options to any author starting their own book launch.

Some people may feel intimidated by spending $1,000+ when they're just starting out, but I think this reaction deserves a different perspective. Imagine you are setting out on a journey through a dense jungle. Would you start without a map (the advertising course) and suitable equipment (the website)?

The jungle ahead

Perhaps this is a platitude, but you have to spend money to make money, and this is no different when selling a book, or in any other type of e-commerce.

Let's hope that one day I can earn some of it back.