Two Weeks Into My Book Launch: Ads, Aesthetics, and the Allure of Analytics

My debut romance novel officially launched two weeks ago. The first order came in during the pre-order period, which gave me that early dopamine hit, but what followed has been a flurry of tweaks, fixes, and firsts. I redid the ebook cover, hunted down typos, reworked my book description, and pushed through to get the paperback version live.

I'm hoping that as I learn all the things that I'll become less reactionary.

Adventures in Ads: Amazon vs. Instagram

I dipped my toes into the world of Amazon ads and quickly found myself in over my head. After spending too much too fast, I hit pause, regrouped, and did some much-needed research. This week, I’m essentially starting fresh with a new strategy.

Meanwhile, I experimented with Instagram ads — and to my surprise, they’ve yielded far better traction than Amazon so far. Orders and page reads are coming in more reliably through IG, even though I’m still very new to the platform.

Platform Immersion: Bookstagram Culture

I chose Instagram as my first social media channel to study and engage with. Hours went into simply observing: the way romance readers present their books, the aesthetic conventions (like color-coordinated shelves — who knew?), and the meme-fueled microculture that makes playful jabs at "normies" while celebrating readerly identity.

This kind of immersive observation felt familiar for me, but this time, I have very specific community goals for growth, which is something I've never cared much about before.

The Lure of the Metrics

Every platform offers up a buffet of data — impressions, click-through rates, sales, reads. For someone who loves patterns, it’s intoxicating. I don’t necessarily care about big numbers (yet), but I do care about how patterns emerge. It’s fascinating to see page reads spike on weekends, or watch which ad creatives spark more interaction. But it’s also easy to lose hours refreshing dashboards instead of building the next thing (which I really need to do because I'm trying to get these books out!)

You can see the difference in sales rankings before and after I started posting and running very low budget ads on Instagram (we're talking $2 per day to start). We'll see if this trend continues or if it was a temporary boost.

*I'll probably have a post in the future breaking down some of the ad spend and revenue generated by type when I've a) figured out what I'm doing and b) got some stable numbers to show you.

Snapshot in Time (as of June 26)

• Instagram followers: 5
• Newsletter Subscribers: 0
• Book orders: 9
• Page reads: 12,217
• Estimated royalties: $83.57

Reflection

These two weeks have been less about selling books and more about learning ecosystems: Amazon's opaque algorithm, Instagram's aesthetic codes, and my own reactions to feedback loops. I’m playing the long game, and right now the work is foundational — observing, experimenting, and documenting everything along the way.

Next week I'm trying out a book promotion through Red Feather Romance, so I'll back with a deep dive of how that went.