Your book is mentioned in a letter, needs 4-5 star Amazon rating?

Zeddo

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Needle in a haystack time: somewhere I recall reading a comparison of the value of various types of publicity activities--virtual tours, ads, etc with a comparison of their costs.

I'm sure I recall one which got your book mentioned in a letter that went out to a very large audience. It required a high star rating from Amazon and the cost was only about $9.00.

Am I hallucinating, or does anyone else know more about this?
 

WriterBN

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Most of the good (i.e., ones that produce results) services require high star ratings. Some of them make an exception for new releases.

You may be thinking of The Fussy Librarian. His prices were around that mark a year ago but have gone up since then.
 

WriterBN

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Thank you, WriterBN, that's the one I was trying to recall. Do you know of any others that are cheap?

None that produce results, I'm afraid (and there are some more expensive that don't produce results, either). My best results by a long shot were with ENT, but that was a year ago and their prices were lower. I've also used Kindle Books & Tips, eBookSoda, and a couple of others that I don't recall.

KB&T generated some sales but, at a reduced book price of $0.99, the royalties didn't cover the cost of the ad. Keep in mind that my book was a collection of literary short stories, which is a very small market, so your results might be entirely different.
 

Lizzie7800

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I ran a week of ads in March, here were my costs and results:

15th: Great Books, Great Deals ($0), 12 sales
16th: ENT ($40), ebookstage ($0), Free Kindle Books and Tips ($25), 129 sales
17th: ereader cafe ($25), also a blogger picked it up and advertised the rest of the week for free, 29 sales
18th: Bookknights ($20), ebookarrow ($10), 21 sales, 6 borrows
19th: Booksends ($20), Faithful Reads ($25) 58 sales, 7 borrows
20th: Christian Book Finds ($5) 27 sales, 3 borrows

My sales and borrows stayed up the following week and then trickled back to normal. Which for me is a few print books a month ordered from Amazon, 15 or so ebooks a month and 30 borrows. So far each month since I've published (first book in Feb.) I've been able to find some sort of author event to participate so I'm able to sell some print copies myself. It's a slow process for a new author, but I'm hopeful it'll get better with each book that comes out.

Hope this is somewhat helpful. :)