THE GREAT 99 CENT SECOND IN SERIES EXPERIMENT
I’ve noticed...
THE GREAT 99 CENT SECOND IN SERIES EXPERIMENT
I’ve noticed some fantasy writers like Terah Edun pricing their second in series at 99 cents and getting great results. So I decided to try it too and decreased the price of my second in series, Monsters.
Amazon gives you 35% royalties on books from 99 cents to 2.98, and 70% royalties on books between 2.99 and 9.98. So to make up for the lost revenue I’d need to sell seven times as many books at 99 cents OR sell a lot more of the second, third, fourth, and the novella in the series.
Did it work? The first day, without any advertising, I did very well (see first chart above). Then I went ahead and hit up every single low cost or free advertiser for 99 cent books I could. I didn’t recoup the cost of the advertising on the sales, but I did make significantly more sales on advertising days than I did on the same ebook before the 99 cent promotions.
Did I loose money? I made about $30 less in overall revenues for the period I was at 99 cents versus the same period the week before.
Was it a disaster? No. I didn’t spend a lot on this promo. I moved a lot of Monsters, my second in series. For a while I was #1 in my niche genre, which increased my visibility a lot. Decreasing the cost of Monsters gave me another book to promote at places I’ve probably already saturated with my FREE first in series. I did get a small spike in sales of the other books—and most importantly—In the Balance, the novella for the series, didn’t drop in the rankings. (I was concerned that decreasing the price of Monsters would devalue In the Balance which is normally priced at $2.99 while all the rest are priced at $3.99).
Selling more of Monsters means that I will now appear more frequently in Amazon’s “Also bought" section—a fantastic source of free advertising.
During the sale, I also got another review on Google Play, and increased my sell-thru rate to 10% at that vendor. I’m not yet established on Google Play, and my sell-thru rate there has been a dismal 1%. (Though thankfully, my sell-thrus from Monsters to Chaos, part Iii is about 90%, from Chaos to Balance 100% and from Balance to Fates 100%).
Will I do it again? Absolutely! But with a few changes: I will only do it for, at most, 3 days — UNLESS — I get a BookBub promotion, then I will let the promo last two weeks. With an ENT promotion, I might let it run a few days as well.
Now I’ve been slowly slinking down the charts, and I’m planning on raising the price. Ranking doesn’t matter as much as overall revenue to me!
You can see sales for all of my ebooks during the time in question above.
