World, Writing, Wealth discussion
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Stats and Marketing Results
Marie wrote: "So, like many of you, I wondered if free promos were only really worth it if there is a series so there can be potential sales of the sequel. I am thinking it can be of value to standalones as well..."thx for the blow by blow! good data.
@Miss Marie: Dang, woman! You are on fire!! Keep the wickedly awesome stats coming!!! Proud hugs,
Ann
Marie wrote: "My June one-day promo brought in 40+ sales at full price the next day...almost all of them were for the book I had just given away! I wondered if it was a fluke, or if people thought it was still free and accidentally bought them. I am now realizing that these are largely intentional sales, due to increased visibility (and word of mouth?)"word of mouth" = evangelists = viral = 21 iterations@2x/iteration to reach 1,048,577.
do you have an email subscription list? maybe you should provide its URL at the end of a chapter at the 1/3-complete mark, 2/3 and the end?
(an aside: your books are for YA/teens; probably at that age, parents are relatively price-insensitive in the <$10 range for ebooks; i--the pushover dad--just bought a $10 sandbox online collaborative game, terraria (it's like minecraft) for my daughter b/c her friends at her slumber party were going to play it. i compared it to the $35 and $50 games that i was thinking about buying.)
Marie wrote: "It's been 21 hours since yesterday's promo started. I've had 80+ books sell at full price, and 75% of the sales today were for the book that was just on free promotion!"
i believe that you mentioned that you were using booklinker (?), correct?
if so, i'd be interested to know what your aggregate conversion rate was for the current promotion.
(as this is your proprietary data, you are, of course, under no obligation to share it.)
did you notice that some interesting sponsored ads have shown up in this thread:
I don't know what aggregate conversion rate means, haha. I originally placed the books in the YA category for several reasons, but I have since discovered that the range of readers who are showing a great response are everywhere from teenage-80yrs.
I don't actually have an email list. I have thought about it, but Facebook and Twitter are almost too much for me at this point. Getting together an email list and gaining followers might be biting off more than I can chew right now.
RE: the transgender romance in the sponsored post...please tell me that the 90's are not considered "historical" yet! :) I don't know where you are seeing these books. My adblocker must be preventing them from appearing, which is probably bad news for authors trying GR ads.
Sales have slowed down considerably today, but I am still seeing sales of book 1.
The booklinker shows about 500 total clicks on the link I gave to Annie and have been leaving around facebook and twitter.
Graeme wrote: "Hi Marie,Those are great results.
I did a 5 day free promotion on Kindle for my book
A Subtle Agency for a total of 133 downloads.Hopefully some of those d..."
Hi Graeme :) is your book the first in a series? I hope you get reviews, too!
My first attempt at a free promo day brought in 40 downloads, my next brought in only 12 downloads. Ever since I have been posting my books to the marketing sites for my promotions, the increase has been staggering. Many of the sites are free, too!
@Mr Graeme: May I ask what type of promo you did for the 5 days? And when does book two come out? That's super exciting!!@Miss Marie: re "I don't know what aggregate conversion rate means, haha."
ROFLMAO!! That's just our Awesome Alex being to school for cool again (no typo) ^_~
Methinks he'd like to know your total (aggregate) number of clicks (conversion) with booklinker, which you already answered.
@Mr Alex: Correct me if I'm totally off-base in my translation here...?
Hugs,
Ann
Annie wrote: "Methinks he'd like to know your total (aggregate) number of clicks (conversion) with booklinker, which you already answered."thx, Executive Officer (aka "XO"). you're almost there.
sorry, too much marketing jargon (i'm starting to get into it now).
basically, it would be nice to know how effective your promo was. so, to do that we calculate how many downloads/click to get the conversion rate, which is a proportion/percent. hmm... well, on second thought, that would be difficult to determine because we don't know how many downloads were through the booklinker URL vs. other sources--just browsing amazon.
nonetheless, if we say that 500 downloads were through booklinker, then out of 2436, you had 1936 downloads from other sources--browsing amazon; maybe GR. but that says a lot for those other sources--almost 4x!
too bad amazon doesn't say whether a URL that a purchase initially came from was external to amazon or whether that purchase was a user browsing.
oh, another thing i thought of is to provide different booklinker URLs for different promo sites b/c then you can see which ones had the most traffic.
Okay guys, I just tried a little experiment, so FWIW, here is what happened. I posted my book to 6 Kindle Unlimited groups on Facebook and had 10 clicks over about an hour.
I then posted my book to Twitter via AskDavid and had 30 clicks in 10 minutes. After this initial peak, the clicks stop coming unless there are retweets.
The 6 Facebook groups have a similar amount of followers as the AskDavid Twitter account.
I am guessing that the Facebook clicks are most likely to end in my book being actually read because I am able to give a lot more information in the post than I can in a tweet.
However, I am impressed with the number of clicks from Twitter in such a short time.
Thanks again Annie for telling me about booklinker :)
any downloads? Or does Amazon only update at the end of the day?
@Mr Alex: Hey! I'm still learning your lingo. Currently at a grade 2 level ^_~ And, nah, KDP numbers are live (or close to?)@Miss Marie: You're welcome, ma'am! Although I can't take the credit. I only learned about it during the SIA event.
Hugs,
Ann
Marie wrote: "Okay guys, I just tried a little experiment, so FWIW, here is what happened. I posted my book to 6 Kindle Unlimited groups on Facebook and had 10 clicks over about an hour.
I then posted my book..."
Cool experiment. It shows that twitter is 'immediate', whoever's online sees the tweet and clicks in and a short while the tweet drowns under thsousnads of others, so the RTs are important, while Face has a much more lasting effect and it doesn't have the need for immediacy.. You shall probably have more clicks from there in the coming hours too...
It's at 7 retweets now with 60 more clicks. Again, I don't know how many of these clicks end in actual sales or pages read on KU, because the word limit for Twitter is so short. A reader would have to click on the link just to be able to see what they are getting into. As far as Kindle Unlimited pages: these charts only update at certain times of the day, so I usually have to wait to see if my marketing was effective. At least I can tell by the charts that once a customer reads through book 1, they are highly likely to continue with the next books of the series.
Here are some more stats and interesting things I have found this week:I have been tweeting 2x a day via Ask David (once for my series, once for my new release) and it has resulted in roughly 1,000 more page reads a day than I was getting before. With facebook group marketing, I was averaging 2,000 page reads a day, so I am now up to 3,000/day. It did not seem like KU page reads were much affected by my promo on Sunday.
Rumor 1: Your book will not show up in "also bought" lists until it reaches a certain number of downloads or gets 50 reviews.
My response: Not true. My book 4 (which released last Wednesday) began showing up almost immediately in "also bought" lists alongside my other books, even when it had few downloads and no reviews.
Rumor 2: If you list your book for pre-order, you can show up in a high rank in "hot new releases" because pre-order sales make for a bigger launch day.
My response: I have wondered if I should try pre-orders, but it is hard for me to justify sitting on a completed book. So I have not tried it yet. However, my book 4 has been #1 in "hot new releases" of YA Historical Fiction U.S. almost every day since it published last Wednesday.
All 4 of my books have consistently stayed in the top 20 for YA Historical Fiction U.S. since the promo day. I've had lots of sales at full price for all 4 books, and over half of the sales this week have been for book 1.
Author rank today: 11K . I am not sure how long these effects will last, but if they are anything like my last promo aftermath, they will stay steady over the next 2 weeks and begin to drop. I have another promo scheduled for the end of August which I am complementing with a Freebooksy listing. This listing costs more than I have spent on any other promo site, so I am curious to see what the results will be. In September I will be trying a promo with Book Gorilla. I found that Book Gorilla must be booked far in advance as they are already full through the first week of September.
@Miss Marie: Thank you sooo much for sharing!! Methinks you are the promo queen!!!
Annie wrote: "@Miss Marie: Thank you sooo much for sharing!! Methinks you are the promo queen!!!"thank you so much, Marie!
i'll double-down on you. in a little while, you could write and sell a book titled: "FAQ: Secrets of a Promo Queen".
Thanks for the update and sharing future plans, Marie.Well done kicking ..s there!
Witnessing the scope of your promo activity on Face, I can only endorse that the success is well deserved -:)
Fiverr results:I was curious about Fiverr so I ordered a gig that did not look spammy or scammy. You can read about the gig here:
https://www.fiverr.com/samwrightwrite...
I chose the $15 pro option. My reach only goes so far so I was curious what a gig like this might do to expand it. I am not active on Instagram, Google+, or Twitter (with the exception of AskDavid promotion).
This lady made excellent communication with me and the fiverr message chat seems user friendly. Her # of followers is on the low end, but like I said, I am looking to expand my reach and I liked her audience.
The fiverr promotion went out today at 7am my time. I have not noticed immediate results/sales from it. There were 2 retweets and 3 likes on the Twitter post. The Instagram and Facebook posts do not show much activity. My book went up on two sites that may have promise, and is set to go out in newsletters with a lot more subscribers. I do not know if anything will come of it, but I do like knowing my book is out there in the Instagram and Google+ universes to an audience of readers, as well as to more subscribers. :)
Results: TBD
Communication: 5/5
Service as described: 5/5
Would I Recommend: If I had only $15 and had to choose between this and Ask David (same amount $), I would go with Ask David. However I am glad I gave fiverr a try.
Hi All--Just thought I'd share the results from the completely free promotion I just ran for "The Midnight Land: Part One," the first book in my epic fantasy series. So far I have two books out.I've run various free promos before, with varying degrees of success. This is the first time I've ever done one without spending any money on it. I did spend about 3-4 hours setting everything up beforehand and posting/Tweeting on the day of the promo.
Results: 57 free downloads, 1 paid copy (of book 2) sold day of, another copy (of book 1) sold next day, 38 KENP read day of.
Promo sites I used:
Readers in the Know (free because already joined--you can do a 60-day trial for free without joining)
BookTweeters (free because I had coupon)
Ereader Café--submitted but not accepted
Booklovers’ Heaven—confirmed
Best Ebooks Free--confirmed
Bookgenie.club—confirmed
Bookscream—submitted for free feature--featured
AskDavid—free trial promotion, although I didn't really understand how it worked and didn't use all my free tweets. I still have them, though, so I can use them on a later promotion.
Reading Deals—submitted for free promotion—Not accepted
Posted on KindleBoards and Goodreads day of; sent out multiple tweets day of.
Conclusion: Giving away my book using only free promos resulted in more action for less effort than anything else I could realistically do, and I didn't spend a dime. However, spending $50-100 on a promo seems to produce results that are better by an order of magnitude at least. I will see how long the spike in my sales and KENP lasts, although I suspect it will not be long.
Thanks for sharing, E.P. And well done.I can add from myself that trying a couple of free promos with similar sites layout I had pretty similar to yours results so far
It certainly did a lot more for me than doing nothing. However, using the paid sites resulted in 100s or even 1000+ downloads of the free book, and a substantial (by my standards) spike in sales and KENP read that lasted for weeks.
Woooo! Nice work, EP!! And thank you very much for sharing!!!I'm very interested to see how long your spike lasts this time. Hope it surprises you (in a good way!!) ^_^
Big hugs,
Ann
The question is whether paid promos return with more income than expenditure. If not - then free promo is not necessarily worse. Out of free downloads it's not clear how much is actually read in the end
Thanks for sharing, E.P.! Your list has some sites that I did not know about. I think that my free submission in Best ebooks Free brought in the best results for me. Would you mind saying which paid sites you have used in the past?
The biggest number of downloads I ever had was 1600+ the day I did a feature with Freebooksy. Which cost $100. It probably took me two months to make the money back. I also used Fire & Ice book promos for that promo, which was only $10 for a week of tweets. I don't know what it would be now, but they were very nice to work with.
Other paid sites: ENT (Ereader News Today--hit #2 in free epic fantasy the day I did that promo)
Free Kindle Books
Free Books Hub (I can't remember if that was paid or free)
Betty Book Freak (now Ebookbetty, I think)
The Choosy Bookworm
Bookzio
Bookscream (with a $5 feature, which I'd say is worth it. I myself have gotten several books featured in their $5 feature, but have never gotten one of the books from the free ads)
Digital Books Today
Free Ebooks Daily
Ebooks Habit
Reading Deals (they have guaranteed paid slots and free slots you can compete for)
Booktastic
Sweet Free Books
I subscribe to a lot of these newsletters as well and I can say that I most frequently get books from Freebooksy (there's also Bargainbooksy if you want to do a discount rather than a free promo), Bookscream, and Ebookbetty/Betty Book Freak. From newsletters that I haven't yet used but that I'm subscribed to, I most frequently get books from Book Barbarian (only fantasy and scifi) and BookBub. I'm currently on a book-buying moratorium until I finish reading everything I already have on my Kindle, but I have to say I get books from Freebooksy a LOT.
Thanks, Marie and E.P. and everyone - what a great thread on marketing. I'm learning so much from all of you and I'm so impressed with what you know and the ways you are getting your books discovered! I have a $.99 Kindle Countdown Promotion coming up starting August 19th and ending on August 23rd that I've spent lots of time researching and putting together. I will share the results. I applied to Bookbub (again) and got passed over so I decided to layer a bunch of smaller promotion sites (a strategy that seems to be working for you). Again, thanks so much.
Thank you for the list and info, E.P.! Ginger and Thomai, I am so glad you are enjoying the thread :) Good luck with your promo, Ginger!
Glad to share, and best of luck to everyone on their upcoming promos! I will probably do a promo using paid sites in another month or two and I'll be sure to share the results then.
It has now been 2.5 weeks since my free promo. Today my books have dropped out of the Top 20 in teen U.S. historical fiction (where they have been consistently since the promo). All 4 of the books are still in the top 30, which I am happy about. My 4th book which released July 20th has been either #1 or #2 in the Hot New Releases in its category. I think this is another reason for my books' steady performance.The first week post-promotion saw mostly sales of Book 1, the book that was free for the one-day promotion. The second week, I started getting less sales on Book 1 and more sales on the sequels. The third week I have only sold a few of Book 1 but the sequels are still selling. My author rank dropped to 28K today. This gives me a good idea of how to stagger my promotions in order to keep my ranks up.
I am definitely seeing the value of having 4 books out because their ranks have been alternating due to sales and pages read on KU. In other words, I think if I only had 1 or 2 books out, they could not have stayed in the Top 20 for this long. I am hoping my next promo with Freebooksy and Robin Reads is enough to give my books a good nudge to the top. It will be the first time that I try either of these sites. I am trying to get book 5 out about the same time that this promo happens, but it might have to wait til next month.
I have found another "case" for keeping my book price at 2.99. I realized that a lot of promo sites will charge more, not take you at all, or advise against your advertising with them, if your book's regular price is more than 2.99.
@Miss Marie: First things first, you are a legit superstar. I'm sooo extremely proud of you. Your work ethic earns my respect like no other. And, of course, thank you for sharing!!Regarding the $2.99 thing: Do you know why that is?
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Ann
Thanks, Annie :)I have seen a few sites say something with the gist of "our subscribers have indicated that they like bargain books, which are defined as 2.99 or less".
Oh I forgot to mention that I had over 20 ratings on Goodreads just over the last few days. This was most welcome! I think these can probably be credited to downloads as a result of my goodreads giveaway, which ended August 7th. I did sell a paperback the day after the giveaway ended and I don't usually sell these. So I guess I've had a few things in the works for maximum book exposure lately.Goodreads giveaway: I ran it for 3 weeks offering 2 copies to U.S. addresses only. Entries: 1200+
@Miss Marie: ❤ⒽⓤⒼ❤Whoa! 20 ratings?? Dang, woman!!
That. Is. Amazeballs.
I just submitted my book to a site (that I haven't yet tried for a promo) called Digital Books Today. They mention this on their email subscription confirmation which might be of interest to some here:"Our general guidelines are to list only books that have 4.0+ stars or higher and at least 18 customer reviews on Amazon. On a normal day there will be over 600+ new free titles added on Amazon. Usually only 20-40 titles will actually exceed these minimum guidelines."
Sales have nearly fizzled out now (just a handful over the last couple days), so today's ranks are mainly due to KU pages read. 3 weeks post-promo ranks in teen U.S. historical fiction:Book 1 #19
Book 2 #26
Book 3 #28
Book 4 #20
Always good to try something new. Good luck. Looking forward to hearing its impact on sales
@Miss Marie: Thank you so much for sharing!! I may have to join you in this who paid promo shindig. Your results are just too good to ignore...
*evil grin*
Marie wrote: "Sales have nearly fizzled out now (just a handful over the last couple days), so today's ranks are mainly due to KU pages read. 3 weeks post-promo ranks in teen U.S. historical fiction:Book 1 #19
Book 2 #26
Book 3 #28
Book 4 #20 ."
excellent!
I used the free option for Digital Books Today (the paid option is $30), but I am still shelling out a pretty penny for my upcoming promo on the 28th. The hope is that it will break my record of downloads and spur more sales. Full details to come, of course :).
Great stuff, Tim!! Thanks for sharing :).
Marie & Tim, You are both so inspiring. Thanks so much for sharing your promoting experiences. I'll be having my first Kindle Countdown starting this week on Friday and I've learned so much from other indie writers' experiences. Not all of them have had the same success you two are having. Kudos to both of you!
Tim wrote: "[wicked awesome results]"I just took a screenshot of your book at #1. Hmm. Is that beyond creepy?
*ponders*
Very well done, Tim and the night is still young. Onwards and upwards in the remaining two days and after
Nik wrote: "Very well done, Tim and the night is still young. Onwards and upwards in the remaining two days and after"totally take pictures especially if you're next to some top sellers in your genre. it's social proof (see Cialdini)
Hi Marie, what are the demographics of your twitter followers? Authors, readers, reviewers or other?
Tim wrote: "Thanks, Alex. Annie was good enough to send me a screen shot. Now I've found them myself on the free lists. Great to be #1 on free lists, now the challenge is to get to that position on the paid li..."you can look at the graph on price points in this presentation, which covers data on 6 million amazon titles gathered in May 2016. you can also download the raw data and run some stats for your book's genre in a spreadsheet.
http://authorearnings.com/2016-digita...
one should also look at the prices for similar ebooks in the top 100 bestsellers in the same genre. in some ways, if a book is priced similarly to the top 100, then it gives that book social proof (see Cialdini) that it's in the same league.
this is pretty much my stock answer; i'm never going give exact pricing advice. it's the writer's money. i don't want that guilt on my head.
just something totally random, whenever my pre-order book gets a pre-order, it jumps up the bestseller rank to around 30k overall in paid bookswhat I don't know is if come release day, there would be a cumulative effect or if it would just continue as normal.
I read somewhere that whilst other retailers do cumulative orders on day 1 Amazon doesn't.
anyone have any recent stats/info on this?
Segilola wrote: "Hi Marie, what are the demographics of your twitter followers? Authors, readers, reviewers or other?"Hi Segilola :) for Twitter I do not have my own account. I use tweets from the AskDavid account (52K followers) which are presumably to readers and other authors
Ginger wrote: "Marie & Tim, You are both so inspiring. Thanks so much for sharing your promoting experiences. I'll be having my first Kindle Countdown starting this week on Friday and I've learned so much from ot..."Hi Ginger :) good luck on your countdown! If you want to send me a PM when it starts and a link to your book, I will post it to my facebook page!
World, Writing, Wealth
Books mentioned in this topic
A Subtle Agency (other topics)A Subtle Agency (other topics)
Davenport House (other topics)
Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World (other topics)
Hood (other topics)
It's been 21 hours since yesterday's promo started. I've had 80+ books sell at full price, and 75% of the sales today were for the book that was just on free promotion! I always thought that I would do countdown deals instead of free promos when I publish a standalone because I did not understand the strategy of giving a book away for free without a series. Now I am rethinking this :). Today's stats for my first book, 9pm on day after free promo:
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,672 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#2 in Books > Teens > Historical Fiction > United States > 20th Century
#4 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Historical Fiction > United States
#284 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Historical Fiction
Interestingly, Kindle Unlimited pages on all books are the same as my daily average before the promo! I figured they would be higher, but nope :).