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The value of advertising.

In the last couple of weeks, I've dipped my toe in to two new areas of advertising. I've popped #TheVanishingOffice into #TheIndieBookStore https://www.theindiebook.store/ for a year (to begin with) and I've noodled about making some ads on canva.com https://www.canva.com/q/pro/?v=2&utm_source=google_sem&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=REV_UK_EN_CanvaPro_Branded_Tier1_Core_EM&utm_term=REV_UK_EN_Can

As I've told you before, I'm on an extremely tight budget, pretty much no pounds and no pence and so any spondoolies that I invest, have to be great value for money.

When you're a newbie indie author and don't have a massive following you can feel, and often are invisible. As I've blogged about before, during a freebie promo you can do very well,


but the rest of the time you can end up having rather sporadic sales because nobody knows about your books and who the heck you are. You may as well be the invisible man or woman.


Promo sheets have done very well for me before, but I've usually only stuck a book on there when it's been on a freebie promo. There's a little bit about that in this previous post,

but I hadn't taken the leap of placing any of my books with active promoters. I thought that #TheIndieBookStore looked great and good value @$29 and at just over 20 of our British Pounds for a year, I thought I'd give it a whirl. The Indie Book Store actively promote your book on a number of different platforms including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.


#TheVanishingOffice has only been on there for about a month, but I am seeing a difference, especially in KU pages read. The only thing that I've done differently is to place my book in The Indie Book Store and make my little ads. Which brings me onto making DIY ads on canva.com.

Originally, I wanted to have go at making a banner to pop on my writer's page on face book or just tweet out sporadically. A wee change from links. I wanted to alternate my spamming methods, if you like.



I originally had the idea to create a book banner after reading the fabbo Lee Hall's blog post about different ways to advertise your book without dropping links. See post here:

There are so many good ideas here, that I recommend you have a gander. Or indeed at any of Lee's posts, especially if you're an indie writer.

A quick disclaimer before I show you a couple of my ads, I'm neither Leonardo or one of The Mad Men.



But nevertheless, once I went down that rabbit hole, it was hard to come back up again. Oh lordy, it's so much fun and easy to do. So firstly, drum roll please.....here's one I made earlier...

I felt like a director. I love noodling around with book covers as it is and so adding animation to it was even more fun. I spent a couple of hours making an ad for each book in the series, as well as one for all three. Eh, voila!


So how easy is it? Well, If I can do it, you can do it. Go on to Canva and sign up. I have a free account but there's also a premium one, if that floats your boat. For all my ads, I just typed in, banner in the search bar and loads of different templates popped up. I chose landscape banners. Then for the Nemo & Co. series ad, I picked black and white modern vintage as a starting point. I clicked on all of the text boxes that were featured in the example and removed them, and then uploaded my book covers and placed two text boxes of my own at the top and bottom of the banner. Then joy of joys, I noticed the little animate button in the top left hand corner and turned it to on, and that my friends was that. There are a few options that you can use to animate your ads and I chose the "Breathe" option in the end.

So those are my latest forays into the indie marketing world and so far, so fun. I'll let you know how they get on. Tatty b!

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