World, Writing, Wealth discussion
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Paid Promotions - A Case Study of Experience
Ok, a couple of events.Set my discount prices for ASA ($0.99) and ATW ($2.99) a couple of days ago, then I got my new cover for The Dragon's Den (TDD) and promoted it. Then I promoted my discount days here on goodreads, but not elsewhere.
Results.
2x ASA, and 3x ATW sales in the last 24 hours. My actual promo with BargainBooksy is yet to begin...
Better than I expected. Creating a ramp into the actual promo.
Ok, Campaign completed. 2x BargainBooksy fantasy promos conducted back to back on a Monday and Tuesday.15x ASA (includes 3x KU) sold, 7x ATW sold.
Assuming 15 new readers for a net cost of $60 USD. A little steep, however I made an error on the dates as I was aiming for the weekend.
I'm also going to run my next promos with BargainBooksy under thriller with a new 'advert blurb'
These results include the early ramp (new book cover, goodreads promo) pre-promo.
Just been accepted for an eReaderNewsToday fantasy promo for ASA on the 11th August.I'll pair a BargainBooksy with it as the lead in promo on the 10th.
I'll leave ATW at $5.99 and see if I can get any full price sales.
What was the genre on Bargain booksy? Good luck on the ENT :)
fantasy.I've been mining that for some time. Occasionally do a thriller.
Thanks, Marie,Got a good result (15 sales @ $30) the first time, and it's been 6 months since then.
ENT is very cost effective.
Setting up for the August promos is now complete.[1] (Cost $50) Bargainbooksy (Thriller) for ASA at $0.99 on Thursday 10th of August.
[2] (Cost $30) eReaderNewsToday (Fantasy) for ASA at $0.99 on Friday 11th of August.
Following the advice here to position a BB feature before an ENT feature to better fit a ramp model aligned with Amazon algorithms.
New sub 350 character thriller blurb for the Bargainbooksy advert.
Action-packed, fantasy thriller. Got a silver flechette grenade launcher? Got a meteoric iron katana? Got mad combat skills? Got a rogue vampire general on your six? Got a weapons master as a coach and his beautiful daughter as your instructor? Got a para-military force hunting you? Got Triad gangsters wanting you dead? Time to meet Anton Slayne.
That's pretty much the August budget. Let's see how it goes.
Getting some traction on Pronoun.I now have ATW on Kobo and Itunes.
https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/a-tr...
and
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/a-tr...
In terms of ebook publishing their system is simple enough to use, but I'm still working through the finer details associated with formatting for their requirements.
I think, I'll set both books (ASA & ATW) for release on the 10th of August. (ASA is out of KU on the 9th). and use the links within the current August promo.
Just added ASA to Pronoun and brought the ATW release date forward to the 10th of August (aligned with ASA and the upcoming promo).Now, ASA and ATW will be available on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble (aka Nook), and Google Play.
I'm also hitting the library paths with OverDrive and Bibliotheca. For the libraries, I set my price at my usual discount prices of $0.99 and $2.99 for ASA and ATW respectively.
Everything is now aligned with the August 10th. I will update my current promos with the new links as soon as they are fully available.
Pronoun provide an interesting interface for establishing search terms and genre categories. They show you how popular search terms are, and how robust the genres are.
Graeme wrote: "Pronoun provide an interesting interface for establishing search terms and genre categories. They show you how popular search terms are, and how robust the genres are."Great stuff Graeme!! Thanks :)
One obvious negative. They have 6 specific style formats, only 2 suit novels, and the shift in format is 99% of what I'm after. They don't handle Not disasters - just not optimal.
Graeme wrote: "One obvious negative. They have 6 specific style formats, only 2 suit novels, and the shift in format is 99% of what I'm after. They don't handle strikethrough and have some 'rules' that are applie..."Good to know...
It primarily impacts the formatting of my top of chapter epistolary texts. The body of the chapters are fine.
Graeme wrote: "It primarily impacts the formatting of my top of chapter epistolary texts. The body of the chapters are fine."Do they have a reason as to why they want a specific format?
Graeme wrote: "Pronoun provide an interesting interface for establishing search terms and genre categories. They show you how popular search terms are, and how robust the genres are."Immensely helpful! How "robust" is UF vs technothriller? Would you mind giving a few examples of the attributes of "robustness"?
My evaluation is only in comparison with Amazon, but the Pronoun information is in the following links.http://support.pronoun.com/knowledge_...
http://support.pronoun.com/knowledge_...
http://support.pronoun.com/knowledge_...
The upshot is that you get additional information about categories and search terms to inform your decisions on these topics.
Graeme wrote: "My evaluation is only in comparison with Amazon, but the Pronoun information is in the following links.http://support.pronoun.com/knowledge_......"
thanks for the links. that second one has key basic attributes with which to compare the competitiveness of (sub)genres. they're probably pulling amazon data in a similar fashion to authorearnings.com.
very, very instructive.
Great info on the keywords :) I learned that Amazon can be pretty strict with them. My book was recently rejected for Amazon pre-order because I wrote "Twilight Sleep" in the keyword field. They said I could not publish with the keyword "twilight", because it was "misleading". Twilight sleep referred to the way women in the early 1900s were drugged during labor, an important element of my book. I'm not great at picking out keywords lol. I usually just put some words in the fields and hope for the best. I was amused that Amazon would not let me use that phrase, even though it was unrelated to the vampire book.
ATW is now on B&N (Nook) and Google Play. It takes a couple of days to publish.
Could I please ask a favor.Could people please check to see if these links resolve to their own country currency on selection (no further clicks).
I want to see if they are generally useable.
Thanks
[Apple] https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/a-su...
[Nook] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-su...
[Google Play] https://play.google.com/store/books/d...
[Kobo] https://www.kobo.com/au/en/ebook/a-su...
Graeme wrote: "Could I please ask a favor.Could people please check to see if these links resolve to their own country currency on selection (no further clicks).
I want to see if they are generally useable.
T..."
[Apple] https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/a-su...
Had to open in the iBooks app to get the price but it's displayed ast $0.99.
[Nook] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-su...
it's displayed as $0.99.
[Google Play] https://play.google.com/store/books/d...
it's displayed as $0.99.
[Kobo] https://www.kobo.com/au/en/ebook/a-su...
it's displayed as $1.43.
So they all work correctly, except Kobo which is the Australian $dollar price.Thanks Alex,
Found the US Kobo site here. https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/a-su...
I've asked BargainBooksy and eReaderNewsToday to update the promotions on the 10th and 11th of August with the additional links so hopefully I'll see some traction on these other sites to make up for the lost Kindle Unlimited reads.I'm almost due to submit another BookBub feature. This time I will meet their "going wide" preference.
I will also be able to report back on the responsiveness of BargainBooksy and ENT to author requests for promotion changes.
Graeme wrote: "So they all work correctly, except Kobo which is the Australian $dollar price.Thanks Alex,
Found the US Kobo site here. https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/a-su..."
that's displayed at $0.99.
Excellent - aligned with the promo prices on the 10th and 11th of August.Those sites all go live on the 10th.
ASA comes of KU on the 9th.
[Apple] https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/a-su... Had to open iBooks, but ended up at $1.99[Nook] https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/a-su... $0.99
[Google Play] https://play.google.com/store/books/d... $1.41
[Kobo] https://www.kobo.com/au/en/ebook/a-su... $1.43
(Australia - but I'm sure you knew that!)
Hi Leonie,Thanks for that - the odd price there is with the apple book, should be approx $1.42 like the other sites.
Graeme wrote: "Hi Leonie,Thanks for that - the odd price there is with the apple book, should be approx $1.42 like the other sites."
That's weird...
Both BargainBooksy and ENT responded efficiently to my requests to add the new links to the August promos.
Pronoun interior file prep: I have epistolary text at the top of all my chapters, including things like quotes, emails, news reports, fragments of 'secret' documents, etc to provide additional flavour in support of the narrative.
I also stick in a place, data, time marker to help orientate the reader.
These were getting mashed together by Pronoun's ebook machine. The trick is to use a "**" double asterix to indicate an 'empty line.'
This has helped a lot, I now only have one formatting issues left. The indention of the first line of text on the first scene in each chapter is incorrect - it is indented.
Thank you for the updates on Pronoun. I did not realize they had their own ebook converter thing.
Graeme wrote: "Pronoun interior file prep: I have epistolary text at the top of all my chapters, including things like quotes, emails, news reports, fragments of 'secret' documents, etc to provide additional fl..."
Would not proper HTML coding prevent these mash ups?
@Eldon. I have line spaces between blocks of text that disappear unless marked with a '**,' so I added it in and it was much better.I asked Pronoun support the following questions.
[1] You have a feature "Our layouts feature a first-paragraph design: the paragraph is un-indented and the first four or five words are capitalized. We don’t apply this design if the first paragraph of the chapter is shorter than 15 words."
Is it possible to switch this off?
I would like all my text in the first paragraph handled exactly like other paragraphs.
[2] If I place an empty line using '**" I would like the next line to be un-indented as well.
Which would fix the indentation issue.
Their quick overnight response was
Thanks for the feedback! While there isn't a way to switch this feature off, we totally get the importance of consistency, and we're updating this design so new chapters are always styled the same way moving forward. We'll keep you posted on our progress
Looks like they are responsive.
Graeme wrote: "@Eldon. I have line spaces between blocks of text that disappear unless marked with a '**,' so I added it in and it was much better.I asked Pronoun support the following questions.
[1] You have ..."
Hi Graeme, my point was I guess that HTML coding could solve the spacing problem by specifing so much space after the return. Just an FYI
Their input is a .docx file, or epub.I'm using .docx with Pronoun. They haven't indicated that epub is treated differently.
Tim wrote: "I did a search in Word Doc for all return symbols and deleted them all. That solved the spacing between paragraphs issue, but I've still not solved the indentation on the first paragraph issue in H..."You tag first paragraphs as something different that references a no indent format in the CSS :)
CSS = cascading style sheets. it's HTML. i suppose one could tweak the intermediate HTML output from docx and then convert it to epub, but that seems more trouble than it's worth. (if that's what people are talking about).
I'm also wary of delving into the .docx formatting and then being caught when Pronoun change their engine.As stated above, their process is under development.
In any event, my books will go live as they are (minor, minor issues) on iBooks, Nook, Kobo, Google Plus on August the 10th.
Graeme wrote: "I'm also wary of delving into the .docx formatting and then being caught when Pronoun change their engine.As stated above, their process is under development.
In any event, my books will go live..."
Most of this discussion is over my head now haha. I'm curious whether you chose August 10, or is that a timeline given by Pronoun?
ASA exits KU on the 9th.ATW is already out.
Just gound this thread. Thank you everyone who's contributed. I'm releasing my first novel next year and am doing all my marketing brainstorming and this has helped a bunch!
Hi Aidan.Glad you're getting some value. I was half way through my second book when I poked my head up and said, "Marketing? Better do something about that."
Pronoun just came back overnight and said that compliant ePUBs can be loaded without modification.So just roll your own. I'll try it an see how I go.
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It's framed on a createspace 240pg template for the physical, trade paperback.