Want 200 downloads in one day?

Not to diminish your efforts but I achieved almost seven thousand free downloads in the first week by tweeting a few times.

Just curious, Alitrona, what sorts of benefits you saw from it? Did it drive more sales of your books from pay-to-read sites, generate more reviews that then increased sales. My writing partner is indie pubbed and I've been watching and waiting before dipping my toe in, so these sorts of experiences are very helpful.

pengwinz said:

Just curious, Alitrona, what sorts of benefits you saw from it? Did it drive more sales of your books from pay-to-read sites, generate more reviews that then increased sales. My writing partner is indie pubbed and I've been watching and waiting before dipping my toe in, so these sorts of experiences are very helpful.

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It wasn't about benefits for me or driving sales. So I haven't been paying a lot of attention to if that happened. I imagine if it had a big influence I would have noticed. It's not something that is anyway connected to my other books by the story.

I will never say never but I didn't set out to self-publish, it's not something I planned for my career path. I'm published through a small publisher for my novels and I'm happy with them at the moment. I feel I have learned a lot about writing and publishing over the years but I know there is still a lot more to learn. Hopefully it will be onward and upward for me in the future. My goal has always been trade publishing.

Basically I wrote a short story as a contribution for a fundraiser collection shared through email and when the fundraiser was over I had this story I wasn't comfortable selling. At the same time I didn't want to do nothing with it after spending a week writing it and then another month with editing and bringing it up to scratch. I've read so much about self-publishing so I thought this was a good opportunity to learn by experience.

I put it free on smashwords first and it passed through to the premium catalogue first time. I uploaded to amazon at 99 cent, thinking if it did happen to get enough sales before it went free I could draw down a payment and pass it on to the charity originally benefiting. However I tweeted the free version in the meantime and put a free link on my website. It went free fairly quickly on US amazon and only sold a few copies.

It's YA. Obviously I didn't make that clear in the beginning and I think the initial feedback was poor, it wasn't what readers expected. Not that it's the best writing in the world anyway. lol. But later reaction was better. I didn't see any spike in sales because of it, perhaps because it's not connected to my other available writing so it's not a feeder to other books. A couple of people have asked if it will be extended. As it happens one of the characters is from a partially finished manuscript but is an adult secondary character, where in the short he is still a teen. Maybe if that story ever gets to print the short might serve as a teaser of what's to come but at the moment it's just something I wanted to share with readers.

Between smashwords and amazon there were over 1,500 downloads at the end of the first free day and is up to just under 9,000 downloads between SW and A. I can't see the number of downloads from other sites yet. The promotion I've done is a link on my site, tweets when it first came out and a blog post. I imagine only a small percentage of the people who download it will ever get around to reading it.

I think if I had set out to use it as a promotional tool I would have been disappointed.

Alitriona said:

Not to diminish your efforts but I achieved almost seven thousand free downloads in the first week by tweeting a few times.

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That's actually not at all uncommon for free books on Amazon. If it helps future sales and ups sales of other books, it's great. Otherwise, the number of free downloads, whether 200 or 20,000, doesn't mean much.

Shelley

shelleyo said:

That's actually not at all uncommon for free books on Amazon. If it helps future sales and ups sales of other books, it's great. Otherwise, the number of free downloads, whether 200 or 20,000, doesn't mean much.

Shelley

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Exactly, it's not uncommon, at least from what I've heard claimed. Like I said, the number of people who read a free download is probably significantly less again. It's downloaded because it's there, it's free and it's a click away.

Alitriona said:

Exactly, it's not uncommon, at least from what I've heard claimed. Like I said, the number of people who read a free download is probably significantly less again. It's downloaded because it's there, it's free and it's a click away.

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I have seen evidence in various places that if it's the first book in a series, it can really spike sales of the rest. As a promotional tool for sales of a series, it's certainly something to keep in mind. I'd be interested to see hard statistics, though, for how many people do this and how many get great results. It's all too common to only see the great results talked about--who wants to discuss something depressing?

Shelley

I agree, because mine isn't connected to another book it wouldn't provide those numbers. I would be interested to see how often it works for a series verses how often it doesn't with some numbers to back it it up.

thanks for the post. there seems to be a lot of different avenues opening up for self-pub / ebookers, and I'm curious to see where it goes. I've heard decent things about getfreeebooks.com but i never looked at it. I'll probably skim it over now, thanks again

Amazon and B&N offered a free download of the second book in my series a few weeks ago. I was surprised it was the second and not the first book in the series, but after seeing the end result it made a crazy kind of sense. Here's how it played out:

I'd noticed a sudden uptick in sales of both book #1 and #2 in July and August--a slow steady climb--mostly because of a buzz that had been generated on a Goodreads discussion board (at least I think that was the cause). Book #3 came out (as both a hardcover and an ebook) on 8/31 and then the free download of book #2 came on 9/1 & 9/2.

The book was only free for two days and it catapulted to #1 in the Kindle store for part of those two days--no big surprise (although NovelRank shows the highest any of them got was 34--so go figure). But the interesting and more surprising result was that the other two books also catapulted in rank/sales and all three were in the Kindle top 100 for two weeks after that. Sales of the paperbacks and hardcovers went up as well, higher than they've ever been.

I have no idea how many free downloads there were, but I do know a lot of folks on Goodreads who were on the fence about checking out the series after people started talking about it made the leap when the freebie was offered. My actual sales (at least the numbers I have access to) for the first two books quadrupled for those two weeks (the third is a bit harder to figure since it just came out, but initial sales for it appear to be 25% stronger than initial sales of the other two.

Sales are slowing now, but still better than they were before the free offer. More important than sales ranking though is the fact that all those free downloads generated a bunch of new readers, reviews, and more buzz on Goodreads, Amazon, etc. In the month of September I've seen hundreds of readers added to my books' "groups" on Goodreads and other sites, and dozens of new reviews have popped up this month, too (by and large very favorable reviews--phew!) So while all those free downloads don't count as sales for me, there is no doubt in my mind that they generated sales, and perhaps more importantly, it grew my readership, my fan base, and my "buzz."

In hindsight, I think offering #2 as the free book was a brilliant strategy. Though the books are a series, all of them work well enough alone and offer a satisfying story. But interest in the middle child got a lot of people wanting to meet the eldest and the youngest. I'm not sure a free download of the first one would have done that, but who knows?

Beth

Hmm, fascinating stuff, cfwgal. I guess it makes sense. Knowing the books are a series, a free d/l of beek 2 will prompt a more immediate "nned" to purchase book 1 more than if it was the other way around.

I hate to admit I wouldn't have thought of that. Yes, an almost fiendishly diabolical strategy.