I found myself musing last week about how the advertising landscape—really, the landscape in general—has shifted for creatives over the last 15-20 years or so. For context, started releasing my first serial, Awakenings, in 2011 and probably in that first year and certainly by the second, I was doing some light paid advertising to get it in front of more eyeballs.
That was the heyday of things like serialized fiction (typically on self-hosted sites rather than aggregated spaces like Wattpad or AO3) and tilted more toward original work than fan fiction (not that I didn’t cut my teeth there for a very, very long time). It was also the era of the self-hosted webcomic (I read so many of those in college and grad school). In a lot of ways, the teenage and young adult years of the broadly accessible internet are something I’m sure I’m not the only millennial feels a bit of nostalgia for. Back in those days, there were different kinds of advertising options beyond the ubiquitous shameless self-promotion (which seems increasingly more what we’re expected to do beyond Facebook ads) and I tripped over one called Project Wonderful, which at the time fueled ads on several of the webcomics that I was following.
Now, I haven’t dug too deeply to see if it still exists, but back then, you basically load your advertising budget into a pool, load your different ads (images of different size, static or not) and then could do one of two things: let Project Wonderful pick what would be best for you based on information you put in, including what categories your ad fit into, what kinds of sites you thought your ads would do well on, and how much you wanted to spend per number of impressions, or bid directly on different spots (ie, on sites that you visited yourself). You could also do a combination of both, which is what I usually did.
And I’ll be damned if it didn’t work. At its height, I was getting thousands of hits a day on Awakenings and my other serial after I started advertising them. I wonder now, if I’d decided to advertise my books using Project Wonderful, if I’d have a bigger following now.
It is the only paid advertising I ever did and I can’t say that it didn’t work. This said, I don’t know that it would work the same these days, in our worlds where the algorithms rule our browsing experiences and ad blockers are very much more the norm. Part of what was attractive about Project Wonderful was that you as a site host actually got to pick where you put the advertising boxes, too, which meant you got to figure out how to make it work for your site design. It feels less and less like that these days when you look at so many sites out there that are ad-supported. This said, I don’t know for sure – the last time I hosted any kind of ads, they were from Project Wonderful, and I had some control there.
It’s strange to think sometimes of how much the landscape has changed. Someday I may need to do those Facebook ads (I’m not sold on BookBub) or something similar. It’s going to be a lot of research before that day comes, though, and probably won’t happen until we hit release day for Lost and Found or a similar project.
But we’ll see.
