Giving Away Books to Sell Books - Part 2 of 2

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 6^th among the top 100 free books on Kindle. It held that position all day and well into evening. It also ranked 2^nd in the Romantic Suspense category and 3^rd 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 13^th, 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 19^th in paid Romantic Suspense and 37^th 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)

https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/christianfictiongathering/

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.

Giving Away Books to Sell More Books - Part 1 of t

For today's post I'm handing my blog over to a guest blogger and prolific author who will be telling you all about how he is promoting his books to get results. I  hope this topic will give you insight to improving your book sales.. Today's guest blogger, E. G. Lewis is a former newspaper editor and publisher. His articles have appeared in regional and national magazines and he has also authored of nine books. His latest, Martyr, Book Four in his Seeds of Christianity™ Series, was released in February of this year. He lives on the Southern Oregon Coast with his wife, Gail, also a writer. Now here's his tips.

If you’re an author with one or more books in the Kindle Store, you’ve undoubtedly heard of KDP Select. And, if you’re like me, you had more questions than answers about the program. Today’s post is dedicated to sharing what I’ve learned about KDP Select and the promotional opportunities built into it. In a subsequent post, we’ll examine the results of my recent eBook promotion via Amazon’s KDP Select Free Days.

AMAZON SELECT AND KDP SELECT

Amazon Prime members get free shipping for an annual fee. KDP Select moves an eBook into a Digital Lending Library where Prime members can borrow eBooks at no cost, thus making membership in Amazon’s Prime program more attractive.

In order to enroll a book in KDP Select, the author/publisher must give Amazon exclusive digital distribution rights for a series of self-renewing 90-day periods. This exclusivity, by the way, applies only to the digital edition. Print copies of your books will still be available everywhere.

To get this catalog of borrowable books, Amazon pays a royalty each time an eBook is borrowed. The payment is volume-driven (Your Borrows/Total Borrows X $600,000). Monthly payments have ranged from $1.60 to $2.18. They further sweetened the pot by providing up to five promotional free days each 90-day period. About now you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, I thought my goal was to sell books, not give them away.” It is, but tests prove that giving away free eBooks generates word of mouth, resulting in sales and borrows.

DECIDING TO ENROLL BOOKS IN KDP SELECT

At first I shied away from the program, viewing it as a thinly disguised attempt by Amazon to reassert its monopoly on eBooks. Their first attempt was the Kindle, which worked well until Sony, Apple, B&N and others introduced reading devices. I also resisted because I didn’t want to forego sales on these other platforms. An in-depth analysis of my sales reports changed my mind. I write in three genres, Contemporary Fiction, Christian Fiction and Christian Nonfiction.  For reasons I don’t claim to understand, my Christian books sell equally well across all platforms, but Amazon is far and away the best market for my two contemporary novels, Promises and Lost. Armed with this insight, I moved them both into KDP Select. After all, what’d I have to lose?

GETTING READY TO JOIN THE CLUB

When you enroll one or more Ebooks in KDP Select, the first thing you have to do is unpublish them everywhere else. I used this as an opportunity to re-edited Promises. It’d been on the market going on three years and I wanted to tighten and tone the content. Next, we re-formatted both digital manuscripts. I wanted the books to be as error-free as possible. And, since Claudia Monet, the MC in Promises, appears in ten chapters of Lost, we inserted a book promo and sample chapter of the other book in both of them. I hoped that by stimulating interest in Promises, I’d encourage the reader to buy Lost…and vice-versa. We also include a link to all of my Kindle books in every eBook…if you haven’t done this, you should.

Maybe you can’t tell a book by its cover, but a good cover sells books. Since you’ll be uploading new files anyway, this is the time to critically examine your cover art. Don’t make a change in the eBook without also changing the print edition; the covers should match. You may also want to revisit your pricing strategy. The eBook market follows the high volume-low margin model. Prices are trending lower and, according to a recent study, 40% of Kindle eBooks list for $4.99 or less.

While redoing things, visit your genre classifications too and fine-tune your choices. It’s important to choose categories which accurately reflect the content of your book. This is, after all, the search criteria most people will use to find you. Clearly, you can’t help yourself by lying. Tagging a cozy mystery a crime thriller, or a sweet romance erotica may generate additional uploads, but it won’t satisfy readers.

PREPARING FOR YOUR FREE DAYS

When doing research on how others utilized their Free Days, I found out that a successful promotion yielded what marketers call a tail. In other words, the buzz generated by putting all these free copies into circulation creates ongoing word of mouth that (hopefully) moves your book into an extended string of sales. Keep in mind that the numbers from earlier campaigns may be skewed. An enormous number of people received a Kindle for Christmas. Along with them Amazon offered a 30-day free trial in Amazon Prime. So, if you happened to be lucky enough to schedule your free days in the early part of the year, you no doubt got a boost in borrowing from the trial memberships and additional downloads from people wanting to load up their new Kindle.

DIPPING YOUR TOE IN THE WATER

Now it’s time to lock in some days. The first piece of advice I got was promote early in the week because Friday and the Weekend are prime selling days. I did a two-day promo on Wednesday and Thursday. Had I done three days, I would’ve added Tuesday not Friday. Another suggested you book your days individually rather than as a block. That way, if the promo opens on a Tuesday and belly flops, you can easily cancel the other days. This also allows you to instantly make a two-day campaign a three-day campaign if things are going good.

Booking individual days is a good idea, but when we study my graph you’ll notice Promises started slow and gradually built momentum. Why? Did a competing book hold it back at first? Does it take time for readers to become aware of your title? Was it influenced by the timing of tweets and posts? The moral here is don’t be too quick to pull the plug. My experience seems to say that once you earn a high ranking, the momentum is somewhat self-sustaining. You’re king of the hill and it’s up to someone else to knock you off, or wait until your campaign ends.

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

As the time for your free days rolls around, you want to try to gin up as much publicity as possible. Make posts on your Facebook page, utilize Twitter, Linked-In, etc. There are also websites specifically dedicated to free Kindle Books. (I’ll include a link list with the second post.)

You can, and should, ask your friends to help spread the word. Remember, success is seldom a solitary effort. Friends, good friends, whom you may have never met and probably never will meet face-to-face, can provide immeasurable assistance by taking time to share your Face Book posts and spreading the word via their blogs, tweets, etc. As tiny ants in a world of publishing giants, it behooves us all to extend a helping hand whenever we can.

Next time, we’ll examine the results of all this work.

Next time, we’ll examine the results of all this work.

If you would like to know more about E.G. Lewis and his work, here are some helpful links..

Sowing the Seeds blog

Buy his books

Come back on Thursday for his results!

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