An Unexpected Gift and Mysterious Advertising Decisions

 Now that Just To Be Fair has been for sale on Amazon for a month and some people have read it, I gotta mention two interesting things stemming from it.

First, a friend named Mike, who is my age, gifted me with his old Remington Model 66 .22 caliber rifle—the same rifle that is instrumental in the plot of Just To Be Fair. The same model I owned as a teenager and accidentally left at a friend’s country place back in the’70’s and never recovered. Mike said he bought his Model 66 for his son who is grown now and he doesn’t want it. After gushing my thanks for such an unexpected offer, I sent him a paperback copy of JTBF in a very lopsided swap. The gifted Model 66 is in my closet now, and has brought back some nice memories of my excursions into the Sabine River bottoms with it back in my tender teenage years. Hopefully, I’ll take it to the rifle range with sons and grandkids someday.

The other odd deal about Just To Be Fair and Amazon is that they four times rejected my Kindle advertising campaign for the book, even though the original book cover is on Amazon in full color and the plot well described.

When you open your Kindle to read, there is always an image of a book with a very short blurb about it. If you click on the cover image you can buy the book or read more about it. The advertising author pays Amazon ‘per click’ whether the clicker-reader buys the book or not.

The serial rejections stirred my streak of stubbornness and curiosity as I kept amending the copy and the cover image until the Amazon Kindle advertising gods accepted it.  First, I changed the brief text from referring to a shooting.  Nope. Then dropped the term ‘high school,’ thinking schools are off-limits. Another nope. Next I deleted the phrase ‘Redneck Romeo and Juliet’ romance. Yet another nope. Then I asked my cover designer to delete the rifle slung on the teenage boy’s shoulder on the cover, suspecting it was too threatening. You can see that version of the cover here. 

Anyway, that was a fourth nope. Finally, I completely rewrote the blurb again, and on the fifth try received an approval.  It’s still a mystery exactly why the rejections kept coming until the fifth effort.

 So far, the cover of JTBF has appeared on someone’s just-opened Kindle nearly 3,000 times. Sounds impressive, huh? Well, maybe not so much. I’ve paid for 17 clicks at about a dollar per click, and have had no purchases resulting from the clicks. I’m starting to feel like an email spammer or telephone robo-caller. If the campaign doesn’t beget some sales soon, I’ll zap it later this month and put the rifle back on the Kindle cover, knowing I at least tried a new marketing gambit.

Meanwhile, I’m receiving some nice feedback about the Just To Be Fair story and the characters. I hope you’ll invest a few bucks in a Kindle or paperback and give it a read. I’m betting it won’t disappoint, even if there’s no Civil War or giant flying horny toad in the plot.

And just for fun, here’s two of the grandkids at the San Antonio Zoo last weekend.