OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
If you want to sell books, you need to find readers. Although there are a lot of ebook vendors out there, Amazon is currently the dominant player and there are a lot of readers who own Amazon Kindles/Fires and who shop on the Amazon store. I am one of them.
There are a few things you can do to market direct to these people, and you don't need an existing platform to do it. You don't need a blog or a twitter presence and you can still get thousands of sales or downloads of your book.
Direct Advertising
You need to use some of this budget for professional editing and cover design, and some of it can be used for promotional activity. There are a number of sites that specialize in promoting books to avid Kindle readers. These sites have lists with tens of thousands of readers on them so they can be a powerful way to boost sales and get your book moving on the Amazon charts.
In 2010, I used Kindle Nation Daily to promote Pentecost and it shot me up the charts. Pentecost reached #1 on Movers & Shakers, #4 in Religious Fiction and #93 in Thrillers. This year I decided to use PixelofInk.com as KND had increased in price and also had little availability for the time period I wanted.
The promo is a 1 day event with lots of other books also promoted that day. I paid US$250 for the promo of Pentecost, again counting on the first in the series dragging Prophecy up with it.
Copies of Prophecy sold: 57 @$2 = US$114
Total income: US$394.
Given the cost was US$250, financially, this was worth the promotion.
But the impact on the Rankings was also fantastic. Pentecost reached #5 in the Action Adventure charts and Prophecy reached #88, so both books were ranking together, and Prophecy debuted in the charts above Lee Child. Awesome! Pentecost also reached #82 in the entire Amazon.com Kindle store. We still don't know how the Amazon algorithm works but rankings, sales and reviews definitely play a part.
Will I do it again? Absolutely. (But remember, every book is different so don't assume that what works for me will also work for your book. It's all experimentation!)
My tips for getting the most out of the experience:
- Have a great cover and back blurb
- Have 10+ reviews of 4 stars or more on the sales page already – this social proof will help people to buy
- Use great pricing. 99c will get you into the bargain area which will elicit more sales, although clearly higher pricing will result in more revenue for less sales.
- You can find out more in the Author's Corner on PixelofInk
KDP Select
Free is basically a marketing activity. The aim is to get eyeballs on your book and to pick up data from the Amazon algorithm that may help your book when it goes back to paid. Most authors have experimented with some form of free but it works best when you have multiple books. Here's NY Times bestselling author CJ Lyons on how free worked for her, and this was before KDP Select.
In order to be in the program, you have to put your book exclusively with Amazon for that 3 month period. You can then choose to renew or opt out again.
There have been some prominent indies in both the For and Against camps for KDP Select but I wanted to try it for myself in order to give a more informed opinion. Obviously the results will be different for every book so this is hardly the last word on the subject, but it is my experience.
How I used KDP Select
I initially set the promo for 3 days but increased it to 5 once I got to the top of the Action Adventure charts in order to maximize the impact and downloads. I shared the fact it was free on Twitter and Facebook but that was about it. I know there are a number of sites that promote books as being free and also people who watch the lists, so no extra promo was really needed.
I did have to remove Pentecost from Smashwords in order to do this which meant the book wasn't available on the other ebook stores.
Results from KDP Select
Total downloads of Pentecost over the 5 days: 10,836
Total sales of Prophecy over the 5 days: 294
Was it worth it?
For me, I don't think so. The uptick in Prophecy sales was quite small and I think a lot of people who get free books just get a lot of free books. They don't necessarily need to buy books anymore as so many are free. How many of those 10,000 new readers will convert to fans of my fiction? It will certainly be a small percentage but perhaps the same number who would have bought the book over that period anyway, as I have quite consistent sales every month.
On the lending aspect, only 20 copies of my books have been lent in the last month. That's not significant data at all but it does show that lending doesn't work for all books as an income or promotional activity.
I also had to remove my books from the other platforms. I now have to republish them so I may have missed out on sales during that period as well. As much as I personally love Amazon as a reader and an author, I actually don't like being exclusive to their store. Even though I buy there exclusively, it doesn't mean other people do and I want to be available everywhere.
Will I do it again? Probably not, for fiction anyway. I might experiment with non-fiction. That doesn't mean it's not good for your book/s, but it's my own experience. I have a guest post coming soon from an author who totally loves KDP Select, so we all have different experiences.
Have you tried direct advertising or KDP Select? How has it worked for you?
Want more tips on how to sell more fiction?
I share my findings in this recent webinar recording: How to promote your novel: 21 ways to sell more books online. It's just US$21 and has some rave reviews. Click here to read more about it.
View Comments (45)
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1 2 3 4 Next »I'm interested to hear your experiences, Joanna. Mine mirror yours although my numbers are much smaller. I am running another 5 day promo at present to double check and await the results with interest.
It's always good to double check the numbers Grant. Of course, I'm married to a statistician and he would say that all of this is anecdotal! The numbers we discuss are not statistically significant. Amazon has this data but we just can't get big enough samples.
Hi Joanna - great post as usual - thanks for being so transparent with your numbers. I'm planning on doing a KDP Select experiment of my own in the future, though with only one novel for sale at the moment, I should probably wait. Did you experience any problems unpublishing via Smashwords? It's simple enough to click the appropriate link in the dashboard, but 3 weeks later, I'm still waiting for the book to be removed from the Kobo/WHSmith's catalogue. Feels like things are moving at trad publishing speed!
Good luck with your continuing experiments - I'll be tuning in.
Removing books is indeed a nightmare. It takes ages for things to disappear. I am struggling with my name change as well which still hasn't come through on my Kindle book. So yes, trad pub speeds for the removal at least. So make sure it's worth it for you! Take screen-prints of numbers and rankings and track the data.
Eva,
I had to contact Kobo and Diesel individually and ask them to remove my titles. This was after having unpub'ed from Smashwords over a month earlier. They were courtesy and timely to the requests.
I also "opted out" in the Channel Manager on Smashwords, just to be sure.
Scott
Thanks Joanna and Scott
I've been in touch with Kobo and their support team are 'looking into it'. Might have to give them another poke if nothing happens soon.
Thank you for sharing.
I'm about to write a blog post on it, too, because I had similar experiences. Total downloads in 3 days free promotion on kindle: about 4k (two books). Sales increased to 30 in the US, 281 in the UK. I had about 160 sales in the UK anyway for the shorts. Now they almost dried up again.
I would have expected to have the book continuously back in the top 20 humour charts like it was in the beginning, when I first published it.
The books which were in the top 20 when free will be replaced by the next free books and rapidly fall off their high position. That's what happend to a few books I've watched. They'll peak a few days after the promotion and then sink again. I will use my remaining days and will not continue with the programme.
An interesting insight Joanna
I'm still not sold on the KDP Select programme. It certainly has it's positives, and the exposure generated is great. But is it worth the exclusivity, and will it create longevity? I'm not convinced at all. I must say i'm surprised you didn't see an uptake in sales of Prophecy though. Knowing how Pentecost ends, buying the next in the series is a must.
Maybe this will increase over time, as those stock piling the free book actually get around to reading it?
Matt (Turndog Millionaire)
Thanks Matt - I'm glad you enjoyed Pentecost! I think there will be a trickle over time but how can I differentiate it from sales that would have happened anyway? or sales I am missing out on by not being on other platforms?
I think the longevity issue is definitely something to think about. It keeps coming back to more books, over time = more sales :) The rest is perhaps just a flicker along the way...
Fascinating stuff and hugely valuable for other writers looking to do the same thing.
10,000 downloads is a huge amount, even if they are just in the business of 'buying' free books for the sake of it. Apologies for the ignorance, but do you have any way of knowing how many of those people went on to read or even start your book?
I hope you don't mind me answering, Iain.
You don't know who is reading, starting, or deleting your book unless they leave a review or get in touch with you. I had someone one Twitter telling me she enjoyed No Wings Attached and her review on Goodreads said she'll start reading Candlelight Sinner soon. (Had NWA free for one day on Smashworsds.)
I think, though, that those who downloaded the free version of Candlelight Sinner in the US are now buying the shorts. Still I only noticed an increase in sales of the short stories, not the novels. 6 sales in total compared to about 1500 downloads. But those novels were very slow from the start and I wrote them off already. I doubt they'll suddenly take off.
Don't mind at all! Thanks for the info.
Hi Iain, no, we don't know that. Kobo apparently has very good analytics to this level but Amazon doesn't right now. However, it must be said that Amazon have daily sales & lending info as well as income reporting. The vast majority of traditional publishers don't even have this and wouldn't be able to do an article like this on the effect of a marketing campaign. So I am grateful for the transparency we have in terms of sales figures.
Sorry for the delay.
Yep, definitely many traditional publishers won't have access to those kinds of analytics. I guess I was pondering on whether that might be the next step in the technology. A way for authors (traditional/indepenedent/whatevs) to know, when people download their book, if they went on to read it all, stopped at page 67 or never bothered starting.
We have that kind of information for websites, so why not ebooks? Would be very handy.
Hi Joanna,
This seems to be the prevailing wisdom regarding KDP Select - a lot of downloads only tells you people like free books. They don't go on to review or make further purchases. I think this is a shame, because I downloaded a free book and loved it, then made a further purchase, but that was from an author I already knew I enjoyed. I'd probably have bought the next book ANYWAY...
I think you've proved that making a book a success still relies on a: A good book(!) and b:Legwork by the author. The free book offer will have 'em flying off the shelves, but doesn't put anything in your bank account.
Great article Jo! Hopefully a lot of that group of 10,000 will become return customers.
Quick question- how many books were you selling and how much money were you bringing in per day prior to the Pixel of Ink promotion? You need to subtract that out in order to measure the increase Pixel of Ink brought you. Presumably, you'd have made your average number of sales that day regardless of the advertising.
hmm, I didn't think of that ... but I sell around 200-300 per week, average 30-40 per day I guess. That still makes it just about financially worth it, but the rankings were very important to me, so breaking even or even costing a little is fine for a promo period.
I love these lists of advertising opportunities. I used Kindle Nation Daily with a previous novel and had great results. Unfortunately, the wait for ad space there is now close to a year down the road. And Pixel of Ink isn't accepting advertising requests at all. Pretty good indication of how many authors are going that route to spread the word about their books.
Pixel of Ink have a newsletter for authors that you can sign up to be notified when they open new spots. As soon as I got the email, I paid for a spot. I booked 3 months in advance basically which isn't too bad. But yes, you can see how many people are doing this now - which means there's room for someone else in this market :) OR/ they will put their prices up, which is what KND have done. I think I balked at $500 for a one-spot promotion.
This post is a fantastic resource, Joanna. Thank you so much for honestly sharing your numbers and experiences.
I have similar thoughts on KDP Select. I haven't found it to be a as great of an advertisement boost as some others have said. Personally I feel as if you're limiting your audience by being exclusive to Amazon. I can control much better free promotions through Smashwords--as well as reaching users of different eReaders. I'm even able to make some works free indefinitely if I choose.
I'm not sure why KDP Select limits you to 5 days over a 90 day period. Seems arbitrary.