For book/ebook authors, publishers, & self-publishers

Now available - my first book "Carriage Returns" (a poetry collection)

Available immediately - a collection of poems from 20 years of writing. Love, friendship, loss, passion, and life's journeys and how they've all impacted me over time. This is the first in a series to be released periodically by the author.

About the author

Robert Ropars was born August 1970 in New Jersey, grew up in Ohio, and ended up in Illinois in 1986. After graduating from Benet Academy (Lisle, IL) in 1988, he went to and graduated from North Central College (Naperville, IL) with a BA in English-writing in 1992. He currently resides in Chicago’s far suburbs in Oswego.

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Comment by Robert Ropars on September 19, 2008 at 10:23pm: Trying targeted text ads on LinkedIn

Another idea I'm trying-I'll keep everyone posted. As a professional I have joined LinkedIn a sort of MySpace/Facebook for business folks. I never really used it but it's a great way to network with co-workers and others (including clients) and then you have connections beyond your close circle putting you potentially in touch with 1000s of people or more. I debated adding my book effort to my profile, but as it's used for business only thought that might be a gray area alerting clients and such. Well today I realized the answer-LinkedIn targeted keyword ads.

Main site:
http://www.linkedin.com/

Ads:
https://www.linkedin.com/directads/

You pick start date and 1-20 days to run and then how much you want to pay starting at $10 per 1000 impressions. LinkedIn boasts 12 million+ members so a big pool. You can segment/target by applying 2 different criteria (such as industry, gender, geographic location, etc). I picked gender (Female) and 8 industry types which I thought might be more interested than the average member and ended up with a pool of something like 200k people. Adding criteria increases the cost per 1000 by $3 each so I ended up at $16/1000 clicks. They have a sliding scale with $5 increments associated with a % of the big pool of matching records. I went with $40 for 2500 impressions over 20 days (whichever comes first, but they note that you will get the 2500 even if ends up being slightly more than the period you select.

They provide a dashboard to monitor results and data is updated at midnight each day (and day one starts at midnight EST).

Joining LinkedIn is free so I recommend everyone look at this site in addition to the Book Marketing Network. This should be a safe/inexpensive way to reach people with targeted relevance. My next step (assuming I see any decent results keeping expectations low) will be trying Google Ads.

Read more about my self-promotion ideas on my blog.