Indie authors don’t often show what’s behind the curtain, but we do like to give away a lot of free books. I figured to give everyone a look at my latest promotion. Hopefully this helps other indies decide whether to participate in this kind of thing.
Background
For context, I was part of two promotions. This is considered “promo stacking” where multiple promos run at the same time, to maximize reach and marketing.
- Indie Visible Halloween Hauntfest [Oct 25-28]
- Allowed for both free and discounted books, multiple listings accepted from the same author.
- Cost to enter: $20
- Witchy Bookworms [Oct 26]
- Only free books, must be “witchy”, only one book allowed.
- Cost to enter: Free
I offered My Boss is the Devil for free, and discounted the next two in the series to $0.99. My goal for the weekend was to promote by books, and see how much follow-through I would get on purchases of books 2-3 at a discount.
Additionally, I paid for a promotion by Book Barbarian, a service that provides an allegedly vast number of subscribers with information about free and discounted books. I’ll give my thoughts on this one later.
Give me the numbers!
Ok, final numbers for the weekend:
So roughly, for every ~40 free books I gave away, I got a sale on both books 2 and 3. This is rough math, I’m not being too exacting about it.
As for the markets, I had a number of readers from other countries pick up books. The US, UK, and Canada were the largest, but that’s no surprise.
My books are also enrolled in Kindle Unlimited so I received a number of page reads too.
I think I did get a bump in reads during the event, and hopefully I continue to see that after the promotion, from the rankings bumps.
How this affects Amazon Rankings
One reason to do this type of promotion is to bump your Amazon category rankings. I was super excited to see some great results there. During the free book promotion, My Boss is the Devil ended up #1 in all three of its free categories (Dark Comedy, General Humor, and Occult Suspense).
The other bonus was the additional sales make Dueling Shoulder Angels and Too Many Gods in the Kitchen shoot up in the paid categories. They went as high as #2 and #3, respectively.
There are also those little Amazon banners, and the sales on book 3 helped push it to a #1 New Release, so hopefully that also gets Amazon to promote the book more.
My Thoughts
I’m delighted with the results! This isn’t the first time I’ve participated in Witchy Bookworms, but it was the first Indie Visible event that I did. I would do both again. The fact that I sold over 200 eBooks on top of giving away as many as I did was amazing to see.
One challenge I encountered was that the Witchy Bookworms site was down for the morning (until about 1PM EST) so it’s hard to know how many more sales I would have made if the site had been up.
My only opinion about Book Barbarian was that I doubt it added anything to my numbers. I’ve done single source giveaways (i.e. just Witchy Bookworms) and had my numbers be higher than this for a single day, so I don’t think I’ll waste the money on Book Barbarian or similar services in the future.
Thanks to anyone who picked up my books this weekend, and I hope you enjoy them!
-Ben
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