cgockel:PROMOS THIS MONTHIt’s been a while since I’ve released...
PROMOS THIS MONTH
It’s been a while since I’ve released (Ragnarok is on the way; I’m getting the second half of edits back today!) so I’ve really been relying on promos to get me through the past few months. This month, because I wasn’t sure I was going to release I held back on running promotions (typically I try to spend $250/month on promotional activities). I did this to 1) save money for promos as soon as Ragnarok is finished. 2) I’ve hit most of the promo circuit before, now when people see my permafree promoted they look for the last book in my series … since there is nothing there for them to buy, they are not as effective.
But I did try a couple of new things this month:
1) I tried Buck Books to advertise my permafree.Buck Books is one of those places that doesn’t charge for your promotion, but they do ask that you promote them (*waves hands at Steve at Buck Books—see I did it!*). As you can see, they were by far the best mover of my permafree this month. You can also tell from the little blip in the red line below the green line that they are effective at not just giving away freebies, they also have people who are genuinely READERS who are going to snag your book 2 right away.
Buck Books sends out a very barebones email. No pictures of books, just a short blurb. This probably worked in my favor as my book’s cover, though pretty, isn’t particularly well suited to it’s genre. (I’m working on that!)
2) I tried advertising Part One at FREE and Part Two at 99 Cents in the same email with BKnights and BestEbookReaderLovers
For the Bknights ad it was $10 more than it could have been because I asked for next day service. There is some indication that getting the “next day” gets you higher on their email. I was very high on their email. I still didn’t get that many downloads and the sales were meh. I probably won’t be doing that again (though I may book a FB post with both books together if possible.) Also, Bknights relies heavily on your cover to do the heavy lifting—I think that brought me down.
BestEbookReaderLover's ad paid for itself the same day with sales of Part 2 (106 sales—about 86 more than typical). But check out the piddling downloads of Part 1 … that was because the link to my first free in series was BROKEN in their email post. I'm going to see if I can get them to run me again free, just in their email … but not until Ragnarok comes out.
3) Pretty pictures on Tumblr. This isn’t really new. I can’t put a price tag since I did the illustration, but they tend to get me between 50-100 extra downloads across *ALL* platforms (Apple users in particular like them). Every 16 reblogs seem to equal about 100 downloads … so thanks everyone who has been reblogging my cover experiments!)
Conclusions: Bknights probably isn’t the best service for me until my covers are redone. Bestebookreaderlovers is DAH bomb for 99 cent sales, but damn, you have to check in on them! Buck Books is completely worth your time. I’ve added them to my FREE book listing sites.
Good luck — happy promoting. Just a reminder, the first ebook in my Loki series I Bring the Fire is still free at Amazon, iBooks, B&N, Kobo, and GooglePlay.
