I wrote about how very pleased I was with the results for the Kindle free promo on my e-book Born of Water here. With over 723 downloads during the free promo, as a new author I was thrilled. I even met my hope of one review! So I met all my targets, but what happened the week after?
I really thought sales would stop. So on Tuesday March 13, the first day after the free promo ended, I was happy to have one sale in the UK. The next day I had 2 sales in the US. In fact, sales – small but sales! – continued the next week and a half before falling to zero. I’m not currently marketing, so all sales stemmed from the free promo or someone finding my e-novel through random luck. In total, I had 24 paid sales in the week and a half after the promo ended. Eight sales were from the UK and the remainder from the US market.
I already thought the free promo was worthwhile just to get my writing out to new people. The trickle of sales afterwards only increases my impression that a promoted free promo is beneficial to help distribute a new book. In fact, the next time I upload a book and opt to enroll in KDP to snag the ability to offer my new book under the promo, I’m going to do it differently.
The downloads from the promo were busiest on the first day and tapered off during the remaining five. So the next time I think I’ll break up the free promo days. Maybe start with one or two days as a “New Novel” sale and save the remainder. With my plans to put out Born of Water with a new cover, I really wish I had even one more day left of the free promo to offer a “New Cover Free Promo Sale!” It would be interesting to see if there are still some sales after just one day of free promotion and if so, how many? Spacing out the free promo days would allow the author to be able to increase market visibility when sales began to slump. A useful tool and one that I wished I’d thought of! 🙂
But Born of Water is my first and so my learning curve. I’m very happy to say that over 750 people have downloaded the book for free or paid. Hopefully I’m building a fan base, which is invaluable! The next step is to put up the new cover along with the second edition once a few edits are done. After that, I’ll start some promoting in a few venues. Without any free promo days left to use, I’ll know if I see an uptick in sales it is solely from marketing! And that will be a useful thing to know.
Related articles
- “And I woke up to…” Kindle Free Promo Update #4 (bruceblake.wordpress.com)
- Kindle Free Promo Update #5 – Final (bruceblake.wordpress.com)
- My Free Promotion Results on Amazon (theobjectserial.wordpress.com)
- Was it worth it? (keystrokesandwordcounts.wordpress.com)
- It’s all about exposure, baby! (lindacassidylewis.com)