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Marie Silk: the value of permafree?
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Marie Silk
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Apr 20, 2017 07:06AM
Thank you, William :)
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Okay, I had to go peek at your paid rank today and all I have to say is damn, girl. :O
Christina, I have to admit I've been smiling about that one for awhile! Alex, thank you very much!
Here are my "day after" stats for anyone interested:
Total free downloads from 1-day feature with Bookbub (and a few others sites): 43K
Sales from yesterday of sequels on 99 cent countdown (with additional paid promotion): 1460
New pre-orders: 50
Kindle Unlimited pages are going up today. The most I've had in the past is 7K pages read in one day. Although page reads were not significantly different yesterday during the feature, this morning the KENP are over 14K.
Author rank made it as high as #133 overall yesterday but is now at #172. My book that was featured for free yesterday has now returned to regular price (2.99) and is ranked at #188 in the Paid Kindle Store. I expect this number will not last long but it's still pretty neat to see :). Book #2 (which was featured on Early Bird Books yesterday) is also ranking nicely. So my series look like this in the Paid Kindle Store right now:
Book 1: #188
Book 2: #403
Book 3: #1108
Book 4: #1291
Book 5: #1356
Book 6: #1383
Pre-order: #7435
Today I have no paid advertising scheduled, so just watching and waiting. "Free99 book" featured my 4th book in their newsletter today and I scheduled a few tweets to continue spreading the word about my countdown.
It looks like I probably won't reach my goal of 300 pre-orders since that book releases tomorrow and I've still got a ways to go. My other goal of 2K book sales for this month is just about there. Overall I am very happy that I recouped my cost on not only on the Bookbub feature but all of my additional advertising efforts for this campaign + the launch of my new book. I have been extremely nervous over how much I would be in the hole with my new book launch lol. Since it's priced at 99 cents with 35% royalties, I didn't figure it would exactly make me rich anytime soon. I'm hoping that whatever momentum is built from this campaign will carry over as long as possible while I take my break from writing/marketing. But first things first. I still need to get through my book launch that starts tomorrow!
Mod
Oh, make no mistake. I am TOTES jealous! ;-p
Forgive me, Marie, if you've already said this but which genre did it go under. Historical? Historical Romance?Many, many congratulations.
Anna - Oooh. oooh...I can answer that last one. It's Historical Fiction and I think it's also Historical Fiction for Young Adults. :) Marie - Spectacular job! Equally incredibly impressed/jealous!
I would love to be a fly sitting on your marketing journal, LOL. I have to imagine you are incredibly organized through and through. What an awesome addition that Bookbub gave you the added Facebook exposure. :)
You are all awesome, thank you for the kind words ♥ Anna, I applied for a feature in "Historical Mysteries", but when BB approved my book, they said they would feature it in "Historical Fiction" instead.
OMG, Marie! You are a goddess and Bookbub knows it!
Amie wrote: "Anna - Oooh. oooh...I can answer that last one. It's Historical Fiction and I think it's also Historical Fiction for Young Adults. :) Thank you, Amie. Not Historical Romance then? If it is purely Historical, I think Marie's response is stonkingly amazing because that is a smaller market.
Anna Faversham wrote: "Amie wrote: "Anna - Oooh. oooh...I can answer that last one. It's Historical Fiction and I think it's also Historical Fiction for Young Adults. :) Thank you, Amie. Not Historical Romance then? ..."
A small amount of romance is in the first book for sure, but I get the sense that it was going to be more established in the sequel. I am hoping to get through all of the books by late summer. But the first one was packed with murder suspense and family dynamics. It's one of those "who can you even trust around you?" page turners. :)
Thank you, Lyra!! :)Thank you, Amie. I love your description of my book :)
I've been careful to steer clear of having my series categorized as romance because any romance weaved into the story is very much psychological as opposed to physical. I definitely don't want to disappoint readers looking for a bodice ripper. There are a few kisses in the whole series and that's as far as it goes. I think nowadays you need a lot more than that to satisfy the romance genre. No pun intended :D.
Marie Silk wrote: "I think nowadays you need a lot more than that to satisfy the romance genre. No pun intended :D"A shrewd business woman who can make me chuckle? If I were a dude, Miss Marie, there might be a proposal...
^_~
Seriously, though, soooo boss!!! x
Marie Silk wrote: "Thank you, Lyra!! :)Thank you, Amie. I love your description of my book :)
I've been careful to steer clear of having my series categorized as romance because any romance weaved into the story i..."
Thanks Marie. I have Davenport House in the queue and I like what you say. Historical is a much more difficult genre to get the numbers in, so you have really done well. As I said stonkingly so!
Thank you, Annie!! :D Thank you, Anna! I had to google stonkingly, haha!
Amie wrote: "I would love to be a fly sitting on your marketing journal, LOL. ."Well alright. Here is a page from my journal just 'cause I love you guys so much :D. It's my
crazy! thanks for letting us take a peek and best of luck with the rest of your month. How exciting :)
Ha ha, we're in, LOL. We're in!I, for one, am glad to see it's in journal format because I use the old school handwritten journal too!
I mean, don't get me wrong, I routinely check my stats from my website, Twitter posts, FB, Amazon Author Central charts, etc, but I like to do all my planning in a leather journal. It makes me feel all Austen-like, especially the quill pen.
(Just kidding. That part is a cheap ball pen usually lifted from my bank or church. But I insist on the leather journal!!!)
Yes Amie!!! Hooray for old school! I pretty much always have these around: notebook, planner/calendar, journal, and super duper cute flash drive that is a mini library card catalog :D 
Jennifer wrote: "crazy! thanks for letting us take a peek and best of luck with the rest of your month. How exciting :)"Thank you, Jennifer! The idea is to have sales trickle in day after day after day rather than spiking one day and falling the next. In my experience, the algorithm tends to rank books better with steady daily sales than if the same amount of sales had happened in only one or two days.
That seems to be the case...at least for now :). I live in a perpetual state of paranoia that Amazon will change the algorithm and we'll have to figure it out all over again lol.
Day 1 of Xpresso Book TourMy book tour with Xpresso just started and I'm already impressed! The rafflecopter giveaway was set up beautifully and already has a couple hundred entries. Since this is my first time, I really wasn't sure how this tour or giveaway would work, but it's really set up to bring a lot of exposure to my book. Entries happen by adding my book on Goodreads, sharing the giveaway on twitter, liking my FB page, liking the post about my release, etc. The likes and shares on Facebook from just this morning are enough to be encouraging. For the rafflecopter giveaway, I am doing a $25 Amazon gift card. Based on what I have seen so far, I think this expense plus the book tour cost have been well worth it.
Enter the giveaway HERE
M.L. Roberts wrote: "Oooo, that looks nice! Great work! :)"Thank you, M.L. :) the images are made up by Giselle who has organized the tour. Thank goodness, because I have no clue how to make images like this.
Marie Silk wrote: "Jennifer wrote: "crazy! thanks for letting us take a peek and best of luck with the rest of your month. How exciting :)"Thank you, Jennifer! The idea is to have sales trickle in day after day aft..."
Again, wonderful information. Thanks Marie for being so generous with your extensive marketing knowledge!! It is extremely helpful. And good to know about the sales; I would not have guessed that trickling in is better than a few great sales days.
So glad to hear the tour is going well! I got my list back with 90 blogs. Excited to see how well it will do:) Congrats on a great week of promos!!!
Thanks for sharing and SWEET... you're doing great. I'm excited to read all you post about your launch/event, etc.
Thank you Alex and Jennifer!!Thank you Amanda, and well done on the blog response. Hope you see lots of activity during your tour!
Thank you, Nat! I appreciate the words of encouragement!
Xpresso Blitz/Tour update
After the first two days on Rafflecopter, the giveaway has 1200+ entries with 9 days to go. The Xpresso Facebook post about my book has 115 likes, 26 shares, and 15 comments. It's impossible for me to say how many sales are from this book tour since it is only one part of my launch campaign, but I appreciate this powerhouse of publicity to a targeted YA audience. I think that my book being priced at 99 cents and the $25 gift card for the Rafflecopter will ensure best results from this tour.
Audible Update
Still no word from Audible, so I guess their "10-14 days" is legit. Boo. As I was typing this update, I went to the ACX site to see if there was any kind of update on where my book was in the review process. I was shocked to see that it said "this title is already in audio and available on Amazon, Audible, and itunes". I had received no notification about this, so I checked Amazon and looked for the Audible. It wasn't there. I dug around ACX some more and it showed me this:
I still find the ACX site to be inconsistent and tricky to navigate. So I guess my audiobook will be listed eventually lol.
I'm still not sure if it will be listed separately from my Amazon product page and I'll have to talk to Author Central to combine it, or if it will happen automatically ??? Book 2 is well on its way in production (first 15 minutes approved) so looking forward to that as well :).
Prequel launch update
The prequel launch is going well. My dashboard shows sales coming in from 6 different countries for this book. Exciting!
A few things I am having trouble with though...I've talked to Amazon over the phone but they won't put my prequel into the series listing. I worry it will be harder to find this way. Goodreads is also doing something funny with the series and title. They categorized my book as a "non essential part of the series" or something like that, whatever that means. It doesn't show as one of the books in the series even after I requested it. Also, instead of showing the title of "Davenport House Prequel", as I entered it in Goodreads and Amazon, they changed it to "Debutante (Davenport House #0)". I ran a giveaway on this book but had way less response than usual, and I think that is because the title only said "Debutante", which not only sounds foreign, but showed no indication in the title that it was part of this series. I might try talking to librarians about this again but I'm a bit frustrated. I'm OCD about having all my ducks in a row on this!
Bookbub update
Things are going well almost a week after the Bookbub promo. Ranks are steady and I even still have the special author rank thingy:
Many times on the day after a free promotion, I will see a lot of sales of the book that was just free. To be honest, I have not had very many sales of Book 1 since the BB promo compared to my usual ratio from past promos. I was surprised at this. However, my Kindle Unlimited page reads have been crazy high. The best KENP day that I had prior to this promo was 7K. Yesterday my KENP went above 46K for the day. Kindle Unlimited royalties alone from the past two days can cover my Bookbub ad cost. Good to know.
My "freebie" has 9 new Amazon reviews since the BB day. Fortunately they are mostly positive. I never know what sort of reviews will roll in after a massive free promo so this is a relief!
Kindle Countdown update
In order to get the most out of this promotion, I stacked more guaranteed features on advertising sites beyond Bookbub for my sequels on Kindle Countdown. My books were also picked up by a few sites like ebook daily, free99book, ebooklister, and reading deals, which were most welcome. I did not pay to guarantee a spot for these sites. I just check the daily newsletters to see if my books made it. If anyone is interested, I can post the sequence of advertising I lined up for this countdown campaign. Maybe everyone is tired of reading about my promos by now, though :D.
Marie, I like your updates and would really like to see your sequence of advertising. I plan on doing a campaign soon and I'm learning a lot from your posts.
Hope things work out with ACX and audible. Let us know!
Thanks for all of that, Marie! I knew about the prequel thing. Somehow, I was able to get my prequel listed as Book 0 on Amazon, but GG could not. Neither, however, will show up as part of the series page. I believe your best bet is to have "A Prequel to.." as your subtitle and a clickable buy link at the end of the book.Interesting though about the fact that sales after your BB didn't net as high as with other promos. It certainly ranked well, but that definitely could have been the KU borrows. Congrats on those! That's pretty exciting right there!
Congrats Marie! Fantastic results. I also have the same problem with my series. I have 2 novellas, but neither are listed as part of the series on Goodreads or Amazon. This is because they aren't labelled with full numbers. (One is #0.5, the other #3.5). It sucks, because those are essential reading for the series, but I suppose they don't see it that way. Nothing I can really do about it, though, except not bother to write novellas next time.
Mod
Christina is right. I contacted Amazon about my prequel. I wanted to have it on the series' page. They told me that they didn't consider prequels as part of a series. What I don't get is that they told me it had to be relevant to the story. What the heck do they think a prequel is? Anyway, I lost my 'battle' with them. The prequel does not show at all on the other books' pages. I added that it was a prequel to 'insert name of the series' in the subtitle. I think it look very stupid but at least it links it somewhere.
And true. I had put book 0 when I asked them first. They told me they didn't accept 0 for book number and it was why it didn't show. I changed it to 3 and they told me the reason I gave you about prequels not being part of the series. I received a similar answer from Goodreads however, I had changed it to 3 to match Amazon and the librarian actually changed it to book 0 so go figure.
G.G. - Wow, I think they should add a giant hoop of fire and the mouth of a tiger to the equation. It clearly doesn't sound challenging enough;)Marie- Those are excellent stats coming in!
Everyone keep sharing your little secrets of gold. Even though I can't do all the cool countdown stuff at the moment I still love to hear a well-orchestrated plan. And it's nice to know we can revisit these posts should we need to mimic them for ourselves.
*gasp* Look what showed up on my product page today! Yay!
I submitted the book for review 8 days ago so it really wasn't that long for the approval process...just felt uber long since I was waiting lol. I didn't have to combine editions or anything, it popped up just like this. Still no email about it from ACX so I guess you just need to keep on top of it.
Yay, audio!!! So pretty. I'm excited for you.
Congratulations on all of that amazingness! I imagine it's got to be a pretty nice feeling to see all your hard work bearing fruit. And you've definitely convinced me to do a blog tour for my next big book, so thank you for that!
Awesome! So happy it's up now and your heart and phone can take a breather, ha ha. I'm sure you were checking to see if it was listed like every half hour. (or half minute).At least that's how this OCD author works ;)
Marie Silk wrote: "Yes Amie!!! Hooray for old school! I pretty much always have these around: notebook, planner/calendar, journal, and super duper cute flash drive that is a mini library card catalog :D " />"
If I could actually upload a pic from my house you would see the same scenario, only my leather journal is gray and I have nearly the same black leather planner with a little snap closer.
Oh and today's stolen pen is from the Swiss Hotel :)
Mod
Look what showed up on my product page today! Yay!
Congrats Marie!!
Alex wrote: "guess if you have a big publisher behind you they'll do it but sod doing anything useful for the little people they claim to champion. ."
It is no secrets that traditional published authors don't follow the same rules. :/
Congrats on the audible book, Marie! I hope you get even more sales and exposure!
Thank you so much for your replies, everyone :). I have the results of my promotion and I hope it helps someone to read about it. The trouble is, many times when I post details like this, I get a sudden batch of terrible ratings on Goodreads. What bums me out so much is that they're from authors going through and 1-starring all of my books. (No one in this thread, thank goodness.) But it is a risk to post stats unfortunately. I always debate whether I should or shouldn't but honestly the only way I've come this far is because other authors on goodreads have shared their results and I've been able to customize campaigns for my books based on that information. If no one talks about their results, it could mean a lot of us wasting money or reinventing the wheel every time we write a book. I'm grateful to everyone who takes the time to share their marketing results and publishing advice.
The day of the Bookbub promotion had the most significant spike in sales. In the days that followed, the sales were still plentiful, but I think I should point out that I had similar numbers without Bookbub with the promotion I ran in January (Book 1 free for 2 of the days, sequels on countdown for 99 cents). However, as soon as the countdown ended that time, my sales basically tanked. This time has been much better once my books returned to regular price.
Another thing worth noting is that a certain book in the same subcategory as mine was listed on Bookbub the day before mine was featured. That book was featured at 1.99 and quickly became #1. However, within days, 6 books from my series all replaced that book pretty quickly and have been leading in the top 6 spots ever since. Since there is the controversy over free vs. paid promotion, I thought this was worth mentioning. I did not sell very many of Book 1 during this time. So I'm thinking that unless you have other books published (especially in a series), you might not have the greatest results after a BB promo with a free book.
I've had 16 new Amazon reviews on Book 1 since the promo. Thankfully almost all of them are 4 and 5 star. This tells me that I reached my target audience (historical fiction readers) with the Bookbub promo! Success! I think this is what it's really all about. Reaching that target audience seems impossible sometimes on an indie budget. The people that I wrote my book for are reading it and liking it and that just means the world to me <3.
In addition to the advertising sites below, I scheduled Ask David tweets and posted about the promotion to Facebook and Goodreads status throughout the campaign. I was pretty relentless in my advertising efforts this time around. I think this is crucial to maintain the improved ranks from promotion--make it count as much as possible, make the biggest splash possible so visibility remains as high as possible while you have the chance. I also ran a launch campaign for my prequel that coincided with this promotion.
Day 1: First book free, sequels begin countdown at 99cents
Ebooklister (Book 1), Bargain Booksy (Book 2)
46 free downloads, 31 sales, KENP normal
Day 2: First book free, sequels 99 cents
Bookbub (Book 1), Book Adrenaline Book of Day (Book 1), Early Bird Books (Book 2), Fussy Librarian (Book 1), Bargain Booksy (Book 6)
43K free downloads, 1450 sales, KENP 6K (normal)
Day 3: First book returned to regular price, sequels still 99 cents
No paid promotion, Free99book (Book 4)
449 sales, KENP 27K
Day 4: Sequels on 99 cent countdown, released new book for .99
Bargain Booksy (Book 3)
335 sales, KENP 33K
Day 5: Sequels on 99 cent countdown
Bargain Booksy (Book 4), Free99book (Book 6)
351 sales, KENP 42K
Day 6: Sequels on 99 cent countdown
Bargain Booksy (Book 5), Reading Deals (Book 3)
314 sales, KENP 46K
Day 7: Last day of 99 cent countdown on sequles
Reading Deals (Book 4), Ebook Daily (Book 2)
289 sales, KENP 47K
Day 8: (Books at regular price. No promotions running)
104 sales, KENP 44K
Day 9: (Books at regular price. No promotions running)
107 sales, KENP 49K
Marie Silk wrote: "The trouble is, many times when I post details like this, I get a sudden batch of terrible ratings on Goodreads. What bums me out so much is that they're from authors going through and 1-starring all of my books. (No one in this thread, thank goodness.)"Seriously??? Wow. Jealousy is one thing, but that is downright petty and abusive.
And for real, those are some fab numbers. Gives me reason to keep poking at the Book Bub beast on the off chance Hell freezes over. ;-p
Thanks so much for your stats, Marie! Great numbers.
Thank you, Nathan!Thank you, Christina! And yes, sadly it's happened a few times. I understand that not everyone will like my book and that's totally okay, but when the sequels are rated low, I look to see if maybe the reader liked the previous books but just not that one. I don't want to lose readers midway through the series. So I try to gauge general response to the sequels. But yeah it really bums me out to see it's an author who rated multiple books of mine low and it coincides with my post about promotions :/.
Thank you, Aislinn!
Well phew, I'm a bit worn out mentally now and looking forward to taking a break from the writing game. Planning and monitoring the promo and launch and audible have taken up so much mindspace lol. I will probably post again about my book launch results (campaign goes a couple more days) and then disappear for awhile :).
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