This month, I launched my debut ebook, Princess Vengel Tein – The Blood Heron.

• No mailing list.
• No social media fanbase.
• No pre-launch hype machine.
• Not even a fully polished website.

Just me, my book, and Kobo’s New to Kobo and Editor’s Pick promotions — which meant the book was free for its first week.

• I’ve nuked my old Facebook and Instagram. No Meta data-mining my readers.
• I didn’t rally a street team or beg for promo help (though a few kind friends shouted me out).
• I broke every “rule” the traditional publishing playbook swears by.

I self-sabotaged, if you will.

My book still found readers.

The Setup

One week in Kobo’s curated promotions gave me prime placement in:
New to Kobo — “Hey, here’s something shiny and new”

Editor’s Pick — “Hey, this shiny new thing is also worth your time”

The cost? $40.00.

But Kobo doesn’t offer data past the number of downloads and buys in their dashboard, so I’ll update the dataset later (they have promised to send me a report, and I am assuming that report includes some numbers we can analyze together).

What I do have is the Total number of copies from that week + next three days:
129 free
3 paid

Which tells me my cover and blurb are getting some attention, and which landed within my realistic estimate of 150 (I also did a “anywhere between 0-1000” estimate before going in).

Analyzing the Ads from the first few days

When I launched I ran Comicad campaigns to reach webcomic readers, because from my knowledge that is the kind of audience who are likely to want what I write.

In a day and a half, I spent $0.86 for 207,210 ad views. That’s a CPM of $0.02 — that is cheap!

And yes, I only had one ad ready. Not because I don’t believe in A/B testing (I do), but because I didn’t have time to make more and something is always better than nothing. Waiting for perfection is worse than starting badly — you can’t optimize what you haven’t launched.

Here’s what I learned:
My direct placement on a site I love (and that vibes with my book) hit a 0.31% CTR – way higher than most slots.

Some campaign slots were dirt-cheap but low relevance. Still; I’ll keep them running for “ad familiarity” — people often need 5–10 sightings before they click. Once I know what works and where, I’ll consider pausing or ending them.

A few placements nailed high CTR + low cost — those are my future ad darlings.

Keep in mind I don’t have Kobo stats yet, but if half of Day 3’s download bump came from ads, we’re talking 15% conversion from click to download. That is decent.

By the Numbers — Launch Costs & Results (Day 1.5)

• Kobo promo: $40.00
• Comicad spend: $0.86
• Total launch cost: $40.86
• Comicads Impressions: 207,210
• Comicads Average CPM: $0.02
• Estimated clicks: ~60+
• Best CTR: 0.31% (direct placement)
• Conversion to download (guessing): 6–15%
• Number of ad creatives: 1 (no A/B testing yet)

Revisiting my Ads strategy when the book went from free to “paid”

While the book was free, I sent traffic directly to the Kobo page, opting to avoid any extra steps between curiosity and download. That means all the estimates above are my best guess – and I’ll update once I have anything more substantial. 

But as soon as the book turned to Paid, I adjusted my sales strategy. Now the ads take you to a sample page with the first three chapters – and from there to Kobo.

And that gives me the following hard numbers:

From my second comicads campaign:

• Spend: $9,30
• Views: 214K
• Clicks: 129

From my Google statistics (Homepage):

• 69 unique visitors (one from organic search – that is also a cue to update my SEO game!) 
• 20 Clicks
• 94,2% of traffic was referral (eg from my ads) 
• 9 returning visitors (still reading through the sample chapters)

Honorable mention:

1 lovely person tipped me on Buy Me a Coffee : Much Love! ☕☕❤️ (take this as a reminder to always provide your readers with a chance to support you if you create content) 

The “Launch Secrets” VS “Fuck this shit, I’ll just try selling my stuff”

There’s an entire industry built on selling indie authors “launch secrets” and “exclusive help” — promising you that this is the magic formula to bestseller status.
As far as I can tell, they mostly boil down to paying to send cold traffic to your book through Meta or Google or gathering 10 000 followers on social media.

That’s fine if you have the budget, or you just don’t want to deal with marketing and sales. But it’s not automatically better than learning your audience and testing your own channels — especially when you can get hundreds of thousands of targeted impressions for a handful of dollars.

I’m not here to become an influencer. I’m here to write books.

And I fully believe that is a viable option.
For me, I’d rather spend $40 on a Kobo promo and $5/day on ads my audience will actually see, than dump hundreds into Big Tech’s black hole — or spend months dancing for algorithms.
Sales isn’t some magical fey creature, it is work.

Key Takeaways for the Rebels

• Kobo promos work — $40 got me prime placement + downloads.
• Small pushes matter — a couple social mentions = ~10% of my results.
• Niche ads beat Big Tech — Comicads gave me 214K views for under $10.
• Don’t wait for perfect — one ad, one promo, one shot = data to build on.
• Track everything — because numbers > myths.

TLDR; I am strengthened in my hypothesis that you can’t “fail” a launch. (It will just take a different strategy)