{"id":1699,"date":"2015-06-14T11:28:32","date_gmt":"2015-06-14T11:28:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/?p=1699"},"modified":"2015-06-14T13:35:02","modified_gmt":"2015-06-14T13:35:02","slug":"the-power-of-promotion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/2015\/06\/the-power-of-promotion\/","title":{"rendered":"The power of promotion"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s now a month since my third book, The Mages of Bennamore<\/em><\/strong>, was published, so this is a good time to look at the state of play.<\/p>\n

The previous book, The Fire Mages<\/em><\/strong>, was released in January with a long (13 day) promotion campaign, and it\u2019s been selling well for four months. I\u2019m signed up for Amazon\u2019s exclusive Select program, which means readers in the Kindle Unlimited subscription service can borrow the books for free, and that\u2019s kept things ticking over. However, sales + borrows had dropped to around 4 per day, and just 1 per day of my first book, The Plains of Kallanash<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Promotion plan<\/strong><\/p>\n

So I planned a similar, although shorter, promotion for the new release – just 7 days this time, including sites that have done well for me in the past, like BargainBooksy, EreaderCafe, OHFB and ENT. I set the price to $0.99 worldwide for the duration of the campaign. I also set up a $0.99 discount promotion (an Amazon Countdown) for The Plains of Kallanash<\/em><\/strong> to start a week after the launch campaign finished, again using some of my most reliable sites from previous promotions. And on impulse I set The Fire Mages<\/em><\/strong> free for the final day of the launch campaign. With only two days\u2019 notice, there was no time to set up any promotion for that, so I just blogged and tweeted and whatnot. But I had a piece of luck, and it was picked up by the semi-legendary Pixel of Ink. Result – an astonishing 4,000 downloads in one day, and a big bump in sales the next day. I booked two more free days, with some low-cost ads to coincide with the end of the countdown (and gave away another 1,000+ copies).<\/p>\n

Results<\/strong><\/p>\n

Week 0: 5 sales\/borrows per day over 2 books [pre-release of book 3]<\/p>\n

Week 1: 52 sales\/borrows per day, over all 3 books [launch promo week]<\/p>\n

Week 2: 50 sales\/borrows per day [but sales are down, borrows are up]<\/p>\n

Week 3: 79 sales\/borrows per day [countdown promo accounts for 34, so actually 45]<\/p>\n

Week 4: 53 sales\/borrows per day<\/p>\n

Costs<\/strong><\/p>\n

Launch promo: $245<\/p>\n

Free day: $0<\/p>\n

Countdown: $139<\/p>\n

2 more free days: $13<\/p>\n

Total: $397<\/p>\n

Conclusions<\/strong><\/p>\n

The results have far exceeded my expectations. I had my first ever day with more than 100 sales, which was truly exciting, and the \u2018tail\u2019 from the promotion (higher sales after it ends) is excellent. Even better, the sales were spread over all three books. This is partly because they\u2019ve all had their time in the promotion spotlight this past month, but also because they are connected stand-alones, independent stories but all set in the same world. That makes it easy for a reader who enjoys one book to hop over to the others. I\u2019ve had several reviews that said explicitly that they planned to do that.<\/p>\n

The royalties received during the promotions themselves didn\u2019t quite cover the cost of the advertising, since the books were discounted, but a few days of higher sales at full price ($3.99) has more than made up for that. I\u2019m still in the red for the cost of publishing the books (I paid for professional cover design and proofreading, amongst other things), but this last month has gone a long way towards paying off those costs.<\/p>\n

The free days have been interesting. It\u2019s the first time The Fire Mages<\/em><\/strong> has been free, and giving away 5,000+ books in a short time results in an influx of new readers, new mailing list signups and new reviews. And not all those new readers are a good fit for my writing. So, a few of those reviewing plain didn\u2019t like the book. And although that makes me sad, it\u2019s absolutely fine. People look for different things in a book, and you can\u2019t please everyone. Those reviews will be helpful for other readers trying to decide whether to buy or not.<\/p>\n

One interesting factor is that borrows have taken a lurch upwards. Almost as soon as the launch promotion ended, as sales dropped, I saw a matching uptick in borrows. I have absolutely no explanation for this, but it\u2019s been sustained for three weeks now. Borrows can outnumber sales by anything up to 9 to 1 (more typically 3-5 to 1). I guess it\u2019s price-related: high sales when the books are discounted, high borrows when they\u2019re at full price. Whatever, I\u2019m very happy to be in KU.<\/p>\n

The bottom line is that promotion pays. It probably isn\u2019t necessary to do quite as much as I did, and I got a bit dizzy keeping up with it all at times, but it\u2019s been fun as well as surprisingly successful. Well, it surprised me, anyway. There are signs that things are beginning to tail off now, and the books are beginning to drop in the rankings, but it was nice while it lasted.<\/p>\n

ETA: One point I should mention is that with each successive book, sales have ramped up quite dramatically. With just one book out, selling 50 in a week was cause for celebration. With 3 books, I’m selling 50 a day in the post-promotion flurry. So it really does help to have several books out.<\/p>\n

For anyone interested in the blow-by-blow results of the promotions, and sales numbers produced by each site, it\u2019s all in the first post of this thread <\/a>at the Kboards Writers\u2019 Cafe (no registration needed).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s now a month since my third book, The Mages of Bennamore, was published, so this is a good time to look at the state of play. The previous book, The Fire Mages, was released in January with a long (13 day) promotion campaign, and it\u2019s been selling well for four months. I\u2019m signed up for Amazon\u2019s exclusive Select program, which means readers in the Kindle Unlimited subscription service can borrow the books for free, and that\u2019s kept things ticking over. However, sales + borrows had dropped to around 4 per day, and just 1 per day of my first book, The Plains of Kallanash. Promotion plan So I planned a similar, although shorter, promotion for the new release – just 7 days this time, including sites that have done well for me in the past, like BargainBooksy, EreaderCafe, OHFB and ENT. I set the price to $0.99 worldwide for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1699"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1699"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1705,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1699\/revisions\/1705"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paulinemross.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}