Last month I decided to try Goodreads’ self-serve advertising system, and set up test ads for both Faerie Blood and Valor of the Healer. The ad wizard they set up is pretty simple–as long as you have a book in Goodreads’ database, you can build an ad around that and deploy it to be viewed by whatever set of users you’d like. You throw it whatever amount of money you want to spend, and every time your ad gets clicked on, the cost of that is deducted from your budget.

It’s pretty slick, I gotta say. And now people are seeing the ads for both books and I’m starting to see people add both of the books to their shelves on the Goodreads site. What’s even cooler is that I can use both of these campaigns when I’m ready to deploy ads for Vengeance of the Hunter and Bone Walker, too, and they’ll use the same pools of credit.

So I’d recommend checking the ad wizard out if you have an author account on Goodreads. You can use it for your self-pubbed work, and non-self-pubbed work too–hence, me setting one up for Valor. Pretty easy way to do some promo on a site whose entire point is to talk about books. Thus, one of the few ways I’m absolutely comfortable with advertising.

Advertising! Enjoy some now!