Holiday sale

There's no way for me to say in advance. I did a free promo over Thanksgiving weekend and decided that was probably not the best choice in the future, but it wasn't awful.

The run up to Christmas seems like it'd mostly be people buying books for gifts. I don't know anyone who buys ebooks for gifts, although I'm sure that some do. If you're looking for people buying for themselves, I'd think the week between Christmas and New Year's would be better.

But I haven't tested it, so I could be wrong. *picture the little shrugging emoji here*

Goodreads tends to be pretty dead around the holidays. I'm not sure ebooks are super-popular as gift ideas. A lot of people like gifts they can wrap.

I haven't done a promotion then, but watching my affiliate earnings, it drops off before Christmas and then goes back up after Christmas. Very close to Christmas, most people already have their gifts. Just after Christmas, they're buying things with gift cards and the like. Ebooks will tend to be bought with gift cards rather than directly as gifts.

efreysson said:

So people aren't big on buying books to read during vacation?

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Not right before Christmas. Think through what's happening and you can see why it happens this way. People know that they might get books (usually physical) for a gift or get given gift cards/money to get ebooks. So they're not going to splash out on a bunch of books a few days before Christmas. Once the day happens and gifts are given, they know what books they don't need (because they got them as gifts) and have money to spend on new books. This is when people start buying for themselves.

Also, most of the holiday for the season tends to be on and after Christmas Day. Factory jobs tend to run up to Christmas Eve then close afterwards until the new year. Retail jobs often only get Christmas Day as a guaranteed holiday. There's not a week of holiday leading up to Christmas Day. This may not be true in all countries, but it does tend to be how it goes in the biggest English-speaking markets.

Also often people are just extra busy around the holidays. If you have kids, they're out of school. Many either travel to see family or have family come stay with them. There are presents to shop for and wrap, extra cooking to shop for and prepare, and a host of other things to do.

I'm doing a Christmas sale on two of my Christmas romances for the entire month of December and it's going very well. I'm wide so I don't use countdown deals, etc. I just discount and advertise. In romance, holiday-theme books do very, very well from Thanksgiving to as long as February. Those readers eat up Christmas books. I write in several genres so I refrain from releasing anything new during this time and either I will write a Christmas romance or do what I did this year and just do a sale for existing books. It could depend on genre, etc. Not sure how book sales do overall in other genres this time of year but they do extremely well for romances if the book is about Christmas. Romance readers LOVE the Christmas books. They eat them up.

For me, it's safer not to release anything that's not holiday-themed this time of year and just wait till next year to release the other stuff.

A lot of authors do box sets during this time of year though. I'd suggest doing a discount set of a series and you might sell well during this time.

Yes--they're sold together on Amazon, one ASIN or ISBN.