What happened when I dropped the price

As a minor experiment, having seen others do it here, I decided to make the first book in my SP YA series free to see what would happen.

It became free early this morning and within an hour hit #1 on it's sub genre list.

By lunch time it had entered the top 50 of the Romance list,

And as of about 10 minutes ago it's very close to breaking into the top 100 of the free list.

In terms of numbers this has taken 995 free downloads over a period of 8 hours. All on amazon.com For some reason it's just not shifting at amazon.co.uk

In that time I've sold three copies of the second book in the series, but there's no way to tell yet if the free download will generate any real sales of the next book in the series, time will tell.

The first book peaked in sales about 6 weeks ago, and since then has sold about a copy a day, hardly awe inspiring numbers, but at least someone was reading it.

I've been refreshing obsessively all day, and I've noticed that as the book climbs higher in the chart, the rate of downloads (not just the total number, but the amount of downloads per hour) has been increasing.

I'm probably going to be watching this for the rest of the weekend, and I'll share the numbers etc with you all and the results of the price drop.

Elvirnith said:

Seems like that's the best route to go when you're releasing a new book.

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This isn't a new book. This book has been out for a long time and sold reasonably well.

From what I'm seeing of others who have done it, it seems to work best when they have a body of work already in place.



UPDATE: As of this morning I have 1526 free downloads of Book 1 and two downloads of Book 2 in the series.

The book is still number 1 in it';s sub category and hovering around #35 in Romance. It's 124 on the overall Free list atm.

UPDATE:

As of now, that's 26 hours after it went free, I'm not getting a list of 'customers who bought this also bought' that's quite vast.

Until this point there were only two book showing in that list, the second book in the series and another werewolf book.

There are around 30 books there now, and what I'm noticing is that most of them are SP urban fantasy and paranormal romances.

Update - my book has been free for 48 hours and in that time has had 2300 downloads. It's still sitting at around 120 in the overall free chart, although this has been fluctuating slightly between 120 and 135.

As a note, it's still showing on my dashboard at being the old price, which can be kinda confusing.


UPDATE : @12.43

First negative review is up. Well, I say 'negative' but it's actually just another author pushing their own book. So that's one very positive review and one spammy one so far out of 2300 total downloads.

Edit: @15.17

Had a look at the negative review, the writer has only one review (mine, which is a bit odd in itself) and some of the terminology used is alarmingly familiar....

I was a bit saddened by it (but didn't respond 'cause you peeps taught me better than that )until mu hubby reminded me that I'm still on the free bestseller list, so ner ner to the hater.

In other news, sales have slowed a lot today. Currently I am seeing 2402 sales over a 50 hour period, which is, percentage wise, down from yesterday. It seems that free SP books seem to peak quite quickly.

That said, I'm still seeing a good amount of downloads, although my UK downloads are just a handful. There has been some interest in the second book, although it's still only showing a couple of sales a day.

Currently the book is still #1 in it's sub genre, #39 in romance and has slipped back to 139 in the overall free list.

I'm still hoping to make the top 100, but we'll see. I'm just delighted that it's done as well as it has.

Jason E Thummel said:

It sounds like, at this early stage at least, it didn't increase sales of the next book much.

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No, it doesn't seem to have done much in that aspect, but I'm thinking that further down the line if and when people actually get around to reading the first book they downloaded then perhaps some will come back for the second one. I don't think it's going to be an instant thing.

But the exposure must still be beneficial. Did you make an announcement of the price reduction, or was the shift to free the only marketing done?

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I tweeted about it once and that was it, and it was on my personal account not my professional one. I was just interested to see what would happen. It's been free on Smashwords for a couple of weeks with only about 100 total downloads in that time compared to nearly 3000 in three days on amazon.

It still hasn't really picked up on Amazon.co.uk, with only a handful of downloads there.

merrihiatt said:

The "also boughts" will stay up for quite some time, so you will probably see more impulse buyers in the days ahead. It has been over a month since I listed a book free and the "also boughts" are still something like 30 pages. This works to your advantage without you having to do anything additional.

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It took quite a while for them to kick in and start to show, but it's been interesting to see what other books are coming up on it.

Interesting also that they seem to be primarily SP parnormal romance and urban fantasy, and aside from one or two freebies, they are all in and around the $1.99 -$3 mark.


As of this morning there have been 2800 downloads, which means there was only around 200 downloads overnight, so the rate is slowing down for sure.

J. Tanner said:

Hm. I wonder if genre affects free?


Not that the numbers are "bad" in any way, but marihiatt's download numbers seem more in line with the typical experience when I've seen others report for their pop fiction novels. 20K downloads or so.


Yours seems to be falling in line with more niche stuff like short fiction or oddball novels.

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My genre is YA urban fantasy,and at the minute has reached 3500 free downloads in four days.

I'll see how it works after a week or so and compare the numbers then

Also, something I only discovered yesterday, Amazon don't automatically discount your book across the board. My book has been free on Amazon.com but is still priced at Amazon.co.uk.

I manually told them about the lower price so we'll see how long that takes to change.

It would also explain why there were only a handful of downlods at co.uk (I feel a bit simple for not realising this sooner)

merrihiatt said:

Good point. I never checked the other three Amazon sites to see if my e-book was listed as free. I read somewhere else today (can't remember where) that you need to set up a separate author page on all the sites, as well. Just having one on the Amazon U.S. site does not mean it is automatically placed on the other sites.

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Yeah, I only noticed that yesterday too. You'd think we'd know these things by now. Lol.

Okay, update(thursady)

The downloads seem to have petered out at 3088, which is alright considering the niche genre.

In terms of sales - the second book in the series is getting better sales now ( 5/6 days on) but it will be interesting to see what happens over the next week,.

My UK sales have picked up, despite the book not yet being listed for free in the UK.

In terms of reviews, one thing I have noticed is that people will be mean before they are nice. The bad reviews will always come first. So far I have had two bad reviews, one was laughable (they wanted me to, and I shit you not, to write the whole thing in an 'authentic Irish accent') and the other was a personal attack that I just disregarded.

The third review was an inflated review, so I ignored the rating, but it was clearly from a younger person who spoke about the book and the characters with such passion that I felt really touched that they had liked it.