I
was releasing the second Relic Worlds book at Wondercon in March, so the plan
was to have book 1 available for free on the same three days of the convention. This way I could promote the free book at the
convention while also having it promoted online. I was hoping people getting this for free
would go on to buy book 2.
To
prepare for the KDP free promotion, I purchased advertisements on a bunch of
sights. I have learned that, when it
comes to promoting your free days, you get what you pay for. Every time I’ve tried free sites, or just
tried to post to places to get attention, I get nothing. But when I pay for some sort of promotion on
some sight, I get a lot of downloads. I
spent approximately $200 on these promotions, and I promoted in a lot of
Facebook groups, as well as my own Facebook and Twitter. I also gave away a ton of flyers at the
convention which gave the site where someone could download book 1 for
free. The final tally was 3,277. 1,859 were on Friday, 1,042 were on Saturday,
and 376 were on Sunday. Like my time at
Wondercon, this was pretty much what I had expected, but not what I had hoped
for. I had hoped for between 5 and 10
thousand. I expected somewhere around
3,000. Unfortunately, VERY few of those
led to sales of book 2, at least during that weekend. The hope is that, after a bit of time, when
some of those 3,000 have read book 1, they’ll go on to read book 2.
I
also scheduled advertising to take place directly after the free book sale
ended. So from Monday to Friday I had
ads running on Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, (where I had the book
trailer running as an ad.) Something
very interesting happened here. I got
very few sales, so it would appear this was a failure. However, I got a TON more followers on both
Facebook and Twitter. On Facebook I went
from about 40 followers to 250. On
Twitter I gained a couple dozen, but a lot more people started retweeting my
things and talking about Relic Worlds.
So it was successful in that more people learned about it. This goes along with what happened at
Wondercon, building my following, though in the short term I didn’t sell that
much. I’m hoping that turns into sales
later on. I met someone at Wondercon who
makes her living just writing, and she told me this is the way it usually
works, so hopefully I’m on the right track.
My
plan for the next step is to use my last two free days of day 1 at the same
time I do a countdown deal of book 2. I’ll
talk about how that goes later. In the
meantime, here’s a list of the places I promoted the KDP sale:
More
Than 2 Weeks Before the Sale
2
Weeks Before the Sale
One
thing to consider is that I got turned down by Bookbub and Ereader News
Today. Both of those are the most
important lists to get on, but they’re the hardest. I seem to have had my best luck with
Freebooksy, but it’s hard to know for certain.
All
in all, what I’ve learned is what I began to suspect when I started down this
journey, that it’s best to do series, because short term results in independent
publishing are typically slim. Even the
3,000 downloads I got are relatively small.
If that was the only book I was releasing, I would think it’s really
said, because only about 1% of those will probably turn into real sales of
other people down the road. But since
this is a series, it’s only the first step in a much longer road.
http://www.amazon.com/Relic-Worlds-Lancaster-Secret-Padrone-ebook/dp/B01BHPM4SW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1461127428&sr=8-2&keywords=Relic+Worlds
http://www.amazon.com/Relic-Worlds-Lancaster-Secret-Padrone-ebook/dp/B01BHPM4SW/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1461127428&sr=8-2&keywords=Relic+Worlds
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