I ran a free book promo on Amazon for my book The Great
Heist this weekend. I did something a
little different each day, and got varying results.
Day 1: Announced
on various sites. I go down a list I
found here: http://www.trainingauthors.com/47-places-to-submit-your-free-kdp-promotion-for-your-kindle-ebook/ I submit to each of the places that still
exist. Some have been replaced, some
just don’t exist anymore. Eventually I’ll
have to get a different list, but this one works pretty good right now. I got 658 downloads.
Day 2: I did all
of my social media outlets, including posting to groups I belong to on
Facebook. I also retweeted some things
and tweeted on my own handle. Basically,
I reached out to everyone I could get to throughout the day. I mostly posted the book trailer, and where
they could find the book on Amazon. The
result was 634 downloads.
Day 3: I did
nothing this day, counting primarily on what I had done on previous days. (Actually, the main thing that happened is I
got distracted with other things throughout the day.) The result was 176 downloads.
Day 4: I did two
paid ads, one in Freebooksy, at: http://freebooksy.com/editorial-submissions
and one at Bookgoodies: http://bookgoodies.com/ The result of these: 2,034 downloads.
Day 5: I’m just
reminding people that there’s one last day to download the book for free. It’s so far had about 600 downloads. Most of these are probably hold-overs from
day 4.
The moral of the story?
You get what you pay for. The
Freebooksy and Bookgoodies ads combined came to $100. Of course all the books are being given away
for free, so I get none of that back at the moment, but hopefully it will get
attention for the book. It was #1 in the
organized crime category the entire weekend.
It reached number one in nonfiction on Sunday, and is now number 16, and
it is currently number 93 in the free category.
(It was even higher on Sunday, but I’ve forgotten exactly where.)
The next few days will tell. But the point of this giveaway was mostly to
get people to know my writing, and to know one of the characters in it, who is
featured in the next book, Two Gun Hart, which comes out next month. To me, the decision to give a book away is to
get attention for something else. It
helps with sales of the book itself in that it shows up on people’s searches as
“People who bought this also bought…” and they’ll hopefully talk about it and
review it. But I don’t count on those
numbers. I do count on looking at this
book leading to looking at another.
If you would like to pick up The Great Heist while it is
still available for free today, or for a low price any other day, you can find
it at:
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