Today we'll be continuing with the second part of E.G. Lewis's detailing of his experiences with KDP select. Please read on...
In
our previous post we discussed the KDP Select program, its promotional
opportunities, and the preparations I made for my Free Days Campaign. With
everything in place, there was nothing to do bet sit back and watch things
unfold.
GIVING AWAY PROMISES
I’ve
created two graphs. The first details the cumulative total of free eBooks
downloaded over the two-day promotional period by hour. The downloads totaled
21,200. With the exception of a couple of spikes, the hour-by-hour downloads
generally showed a steady increase. I can’t explain why we had those two
outliers around the middle of the second day. It may have something to do with
the timing of tweets, Face Book posts and simply time differences.
Rather
than throw numbers at you, let’s first try to bring them into focus by
comparing them to what other books were doing during the same period. On the
second day, Promises reached its
highest ranking, placing 6th among the top 100 free books on Kindle.
It held that position all day and well into evening. It also ranked 2nd
in the Romantic Suspense category and 3rd in Contemporary Fiction.
RIDING THE WAVE — FOLLOW-UP SALES
Okay,
so you’ve worked hard, done everything right, and promoted like crazy. Now
comes the reward. My second graph tracks the after effects of the promotion,
the resulting sales and borrows. In the first post I mentioned our attempt to
cross-promote Promises and Lost. I tracked the number sold and
borrowed for both books to see if it worked.
I
had someone else’s stats and they reported follow-up sales of 2.37% of the free
copies downloaded and borrows of 0.46%. I adopted those percentages and my goal
became 503 copies of Promises sold
and 98 copies borrowed. My free campaign ran 4/11-4/12/12, making Day One on
the sales graph Friday the 13th, 2012. Fortunately, I’m not
superstitious. During the next 16 days we sold 550 copies of Promises, or 2.59% and it was borrowed
134 times, or 0.63%. At its peak, Promises
ranked 19th in paid Romantic Suspense and 37th in
Contemporary Fiction. We exceeded both goals.
The
brightest spot in the picture was the surge in sales of Lost. This was, after all, a book that wasn’t directly promoted.
During that same 16 day period, Kindle users bought 138 copies of Lost and borrowed it four times, giving
us a grand total of 826 paid transactions. Looking at it another way, without Lost we would have exceeded our combined
goal by 13.8%. With Lost, we exceeded
it by 37.4%.
I
also wanted to know if this campaign boosted sales of my Seeds of Christianity
Series and/or my Nonfiction titles. [We automatically include a link list in
each eBook to all other eBooks. If you aren’t doing this, you should.] The
Nonfiction titles couldn’t be evaluated since two of the three are seasonal.
However, April sales of the Seeds Series were three times an average month,
which makes one assume this is due to the Promises/Lost
promotion.
FINAL THOUGHTS
The
returns from a KDP Select campaign came very quickly. The three vertical red
lines on the graph record the cumulative percentage of total sales of Promises after 3, 5 and 9 days. I
believe the reason for the rapid falloff in sales can be traced back to
Amazon’s ranking system. Many people peruse the top 100 lists, etc. Being in
them makes the sales more or less self-sustaining, and dropping out of them
leads to further declines. This is the same phenomena I mentioned in regards to
free downloads.
It’s
also interesting that on two occasions sales of Lost equaled those of Promises
and on two other days Lost outsold
it. The one unanswered question is why 138 people were willing to purchase Lost, but only four borrowed it when
borrowing is free.
What
all this means for the future is hard to say. But I do know one thing; most
companies advertise their products continuously. If you have free days, don’t
let them go to waste.
Sites Advertising Free Kindle Promotions in
No Particular Order)
All Things Kindle (FaceBook) http://www.facebook.com/allthingskindle?sk=wall
Pixel of Ink
http://www.pixelofink.com
Kindle Boards (under Book Bazaar) http://www.kindleboards.com
Digital Book Today http://www.digitalbooktoday.com
World Literary Café http://www.worldliterarycafe.com
Free Ebook Deal (FaceBook) http://www.facebook.com/freeebookdeal?sk=wall
Free Kindle Books & Tips (FaceBook) http://www.facebook.com/fkbooksandtips?sk=wall
Christian Specific Sites:
Inspired Reads http://www.inspiredreads.com
Family Fiction – Christian Books http://www.facebook.com/FamilyFiction
Christian Books by Indie Authors http://www.facebook.com/pages/Christian-Books-By-Indie-Authors/188636394517963
Christian Fiction
Gathering (FaceBook)
Christian Fiction (FaceBook) https://www.facebook.com/#!/ChristianFiction
A
detailed search will surely turn up additional sites willing to plug your
promotion. Also be sure to create an event on GoodReads, do FaceBook posts, and
mention it on your Blog, Twitter, etc.
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