About a month ago I posted a piece on trying out the various book sale promotion sites that are available, and promised to report back on progress. Here are some preliminary findings, as well as an example of one I have running today at Free Kindle Books and Tips so that you can get an idea of what one looks like (perhaps you might want to invest $0.99 while you’re at it).
The early report back is that using one of these services can definitely produce results. Indeed, this is the only approach I’ve explored over a five-year period that actually, reliably works – assuming you’re using the right service (more on this below), and that you’re willing to pay the fees. So one question one might ask is why, given the terabytes of marketing advice you find on the Internet about book promotion, this approach isn’t mentioned more often, and placed at the top of the list?
That’s a pretty good question, and I’m not sure I know the answer. One guess is that so much of the book advice you find is simply an echo chamber rehash of all of the other stuff that’s out there, most of which had its origins in the first years of post-Kindle book promotion. The other is that any of the promotions that actually work cost money – anywhere from $20 – $150 a pop (and in the case of BookBub, the king of the mountain, much more).
So if you give your book away through a promotion, its expensive, and if you use the wrong service, it’s not only expensive, but you’ll get very poor results. Another element is that it takes time and effort to use these services. Any service that will give you a slot the next day will almost assuredly sell few, and more likely no, books. I suspect they won’t result in that many downloads of free books, either, judging by how few Kindle Unlimited downloads I got.
One reason many promotion sites have such dismal results is that they will accept anything, and therefore have very low credibility with potential readers. Another is that some services have far more subscribers than others. Not surprisingly, the more exclusive the service, the harder it is to get them to accept your book, and the longer you will have to wait to get a spot on their daily list. But because they actually screen the books and accept only those with great covers and reviews, they have higher credibility with their subscribers. They usually list fewer books each day, too, and may also allow subscribers to sign up to only see books in their preferred genre(s).
The result is that it when I did my research to select the services I wanted to try and filled out the on-line applications, the earliest dates I was able to get were spread out over a six-week period, and I wasn’t able to score a spot on the two top services (ENews Reader Today and BookBub) at all. Hopefully that will change when I get more reviews for my second book.
You can see easily see the credibility/waiting period effect in the chart below, which shows sales during the period that my first four promotions ran run. The first two ran on 8/25, and 8/26-27, and likely resulted in at most one or two book sales a piece. The third and fourth (which I had to wait for) resulted in sales of about 42 copies and 21, respectively. The upturn on the far right is showing the first results of the promotion that I’m running today.
So what about costs? The bad news is that if you use bad sites, you’ll be throwing money down a hole. On the other hand, if you use the right ones, have an appealing book, and discount your book rather than give it away, you may break even or make a little on the sale days. Authors using the best services usually report follow on sales for a few days afterwards, when their books are back to full price. Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the good sites also limit how often you can run a book, which means that you can only run another promotion at each site after a number of months have passed.
I have three more promotions to go: one more with my book at a discount, and three when I’ll be offering it for free. I’ll report back in greater detail when my first cycle of promotions has run, and also give the names and costs of the various services I used. To see how the current one is doing, you can keep an eye on the Amazon sales rank of The Lafayette Campaign, which you can find here. The Free Kindle newsletter will go out later today, and it usually takes about six hours for actual sales to percolate through the Amazon system (and longer, I believe, for non-US). Based on past experience, that means that sales peak on the day of the sale, but continue meaningfully into the next day.
Have you joined The Lafayette Campaign?
Hi Andy. On behalf of all those who may read, partially read, or pretend to read this excellent piece of research – thank you.
You’ve gone to considerable lengths to produce these results and you’ve reported your findings in a simple-to-understand way, which works for me. I’ve only paid Facebook twice, but I couldn’t follow what I was getting for my money, and I have no intention of going back that way. I have also twice tried the Fiverr type sites, but that was a waste of Internet time … and money.
I’ve been tempted, but never got involved with payment for any promotional service since, and I’m happy enough now to see sales and pages read on a daily basis.
I have cut back on how often I post about my books on Facebook and suchlike, and less seems to be more. I see regular sales and pages, so somebody is buying them. I stand by what I said in our FB group some weeks ago – that the best publicity is to produce more work.
In the back pages of my eBooks, I have included the title and blurb of all my other books, so if a reader is keen, they’ve got a good idea about what else I produce.
Thanks again for going to all the bother of such a well presented article on this topic.
My pleasure, Tom, and thanks for the kind words. I certainly agree with you about multiple books being the best way to build sales – I just wish it wasn’t so much work getting there! Not being retired, I’ve still got a lot of demands on my time, and besides note being a particularly fast writer, I find it necessary to go through multiple drafts before I’m finally happy with a book. I did the same with my second book, adding links and several chapters from my first book, and it’s clear that this has been boosting sales on that one.
I think, though, that with several books under you name, using the right services (I’m talking about the type I’m writing about in this post – the ones that send out a daily email) would be even more cost-effective, since you’ll get a compound return on your investment. The sweet spot, I think, is in the $25 – $50 range, with a one-day discount to $0.99. If you have two or more books to sell and pick the right services, you should steadily build your base and do better than break even at the same time.
I think it would be great if we could build up a database of the different services, and results, that authors have used. That way we’d all be able to focus our efforts and resources on the most effective services, rather than all playing blind man’s buff and wasting money in the process. Like every other aspect of self-publishing, I think that the biggest lack is up to date, accurate data. Heaven knows there’s enough unreliable advice.
First up, excellent post, Andrew. Hard data is difficult to come by and it’s much appreciated. That said, I have to agree with Tom. I almost never post my books on FB and will only tweet about them less than once a week. I was doing a lot of FB promotion in various groups but – just like me – those groups were a bunch of authors posting about their books day in and day out and not looking anyone else’s posts. Since the groups were really just for authors, no readers really stumbled across those posts.
Thank you, Andy, for all of your research!
My pleasure, Peg. We’re all doing research, just by conducting our own explorations of the possibilities, and sharing it as well. What I’d really like to do would be to put a site together that would collect and consolidate all that experience.
Reblogged this on Eric Lahti and commented:
Looking for book promotion places? Some will do you good, others not so much.
Thank, Eric. Give me another month, and I’ll consolidate all of the data, together with the site names and the prices they charge.
I’m with you on time constraints on my writing; I still work, and have a severely disabled husband who cannot help me on the home front. And like you, I’m not a fast writer. I’m trying to content myself by keeping up a blog presence, writing when I can, and wishing my life away, wanting retirement to hurry up and get here. Hopefully, then, I can devote a good deal more time to writing.
I agree with Tom that to increase sales, we need more work out there. If only there was a way to make more time in a day…
Thank you, Andrew, for sharing what you’ve learned about marketing one’s work. I think we writers as a whole are a generous bunch, helping each other when we can.
You’re very welcome, and I agree, writers are a very generous bunch. Getting to know and share with other self-published authors has been one of the major rewards of going down that road myself. Sadly, I think, as most Indie authors eventually conclude, that writing and the self-publishing journey rather than some illusory destinatiodefined by success, is what it’s all about.
And yet…I can’t help feeling that there’s something to be said for continuing to try to build a reader base. Perhaps unlike most self-pub authors, I’ve actually had to focus deeply on marketing during my day job, and had some success figuring out how to be successful at it.
28 years ago, I left the law firm I was working for and started my own firm with two partners. When I did, I had no clients, no money, a mortgage and a non-working spouse.
Happily, I found out that I had an until then undiscovered talent for marketing. We grew steadily, and 14 years later, we had 36 attorneys. In 2003, I started a web site that I wrote furiously for, and a blog, a journal and more, and by 2006 I had 1,000,000 visitors a month. While all of these efforts were a lot of work, the results fell neatly into place.
And then I tried writing fiction, and I found an area where simply having good marketing instincts wasn’t enough. I learned enough along the way to know why that was. The biggest problems are that it’s exceptionally hard for an author to differentiate his or herself from the competition, and it’s even harder to get noticed. For authors, those are virtually insurmountable issues, absent good luck.
The good news, of a sort, is that the reason it’s so hard is because, unlike almost every other pursuit in the world, self-publishing is a truly level playing field. That means that everyone has an equal chance. But it also means that almost everyone will be equally unsuccessful, because we all have an equal opportunity to cast up our tiny voices to the reading public.
That’s why I’ve been searching for data justifying successful marketing approaches whenever possible, to figure out what are the very few methods that can actually work. It’s a bit pathetic, given that the chart that accompanies this piece shows how unsuccessful I’ve been marketing my newest book (none to one sales a day most of the time), as well as the fact that selling 20 copies for $0.99 a copy and netting a 30% profit can be identified as meaningful. If I were trying to make a living by writing, this would be the most damning evidence of failure imaginable.
Perhaps some day there will be better promotional tools available for us. But for now, it appears that the best that most authors can do is to learn what marketing efforts are wastes of time (the vast majority of approaches), try and discover the limited number of effective tools there are, utilize them diligently, and hope that with patience, talent and hard work they will eventually succeed in building up an audience that will at some point ignite, build spontaneously, and lead to growth in readership that in some measure becomes self-sustaining.
Here’s hoping, and best of luck in your own journey.
I’m about to try a little experiment of my own. In the next week or so, I’m going to publish an eBook novelette via Smashwords and see what kind of luck I have there, as opposed to what I have published on Amazon. In case you don’t already know, Smashwords distributes eBooks through multiple vendors as well as on their own website. I’ve never tried any outlet other than Amazon, and am curious as to what the results might be.
Silas, thanks very much for dropping by, and also for re-blogging. That’s good of you.
I’ve generally been convinced by those that have suggested that give aways, as compared to discounts, are a better idea. That said, I’m looking forward to trying the giveaway route two weeks from now in order to test that assumption, and I’ll be very interested to see what follows.
I’ve also realized that going the free route has a hidden cost, because it means that an author pretty much must commit to go with Kindle Select. If they don’t, and want to use other eBook distributors, they can only with great difficulty get their book down to free with Amazon, which will dramatically limit their reach. At the same time, they may lose access to the best promotional services (like BookBub) which (rightly) appear to give preference to books that are also available at B&N, Apple, Google, Kobo, and so on.
Due to that reality, and the fact that free giveaways seem to no longer result in good trailing sales, my current working plan is to let my Kindle Select commitment expire in a few weeks, introduce my second book into all of the other distribution channels, work on getting my third book out, and maintain an ongoing set of promotional days using the services that demonstrate that they are most effective in the course of my initial trials.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether I’m on to something. But after five years of experimentation, research and observation, newsletter promotions appear to be the one sure way to move the needle, and that’s where I see the possibilities for greatest success.
As always, I’ll report on whether I turn out to be right or wrong.
Hi Andy,
It is very refreshing to see people who put themselves out there and share what’s worked and hasn’t with real data. I appreciate what you are doing. My last promo I gave away 4000 free copies and saw very few reviews, and from what I recall, about 20-30 purchases (or equivalent in pages read) in the following month. Sales were dead before that and are again now. I’m not sure if it was worth it. My conclusions were to do giveaways 1 or 2 days at a time, as the Amazon rankings dropped daily after that, on a five day giveaway. I would also try the $0.99 promo as you suggest. I have also come to the conclusion that I’ve put a lot of time in watching sales, page reads, rankings and promoting books, to little benefit. I am now focussing my time and effort on publishing more quality books and spending minimal time, effort and money on marketing until I have more out there. Thanks again for sharing. Silas.
Reblogged this on Silas Payton.
Thanks as always, Andrew. That’s really helpful, and shared with such typical generosity.
My pleasure, Marcus, and more to come.