(Also for those who don’t market because they don’t know how)
Promoting Your Free Book
(There are also a few places listed that will promote a book that you’re asking actual money for. Look for the orange font.)
There’s a certain underlying philosophy concerning free books that I want to touch on only briefly here. Some people (including me) believe that a good way to find new readers is to remove the bar to entry by making your book free. Others believe this devalues their work. Both sides of the argument have merit. (If you want more on this topic, I blogged about it here: https://cathleentownsend.com/2018/11/13/free-books-why-you-might-want-to-give-your-work-away/, but this post is already long enough.)
A more important consideration to me is that paid promotions cost money, and when you start, there’s a learning curve. (It seems like everything has a learning curve.) And with paid promotions, you’re spending money to learn, which gets expensive fast. Not only that, but with newsletter marketing (where a promoter includes your book in their emails to their audiences), even though you can re-use the same promoter again later, you’ll never get the same oomph you got from the first run. (It’s worth noting as an aside that BookBub is supposed to be an exception to this.) At any rate, if you muck up your paid promo like I did, this means that with a lot of the heavy hitters—Freebooksy, BookBarbarian, Ereader News Today—you’ve already diminished the usefulness of this resource for that book. I decided to learn how to do this for free before I spent money on it again.
Newsletter promotions don’t usually work for full-price books—that’s usually better addressed by Amazon, Facebook, and/or BookBub ads. The whole point of readers signing up to get yet more stuff in their inboxes is that they’ll also get free and cheap books.
As a result, paid newsletter promotions usually don’t “earn out” in terms of the particular book being advertised. That’s easy to see with a free book. If you pay a hundred dollars to promote a free book, the way you’ll make most of your money back is by sell-through to other titles. (There’s also a tail, a leftover from the promotion, that can result in some paid sales.) And if you advertise a $.99 book, it’s very difficult to break even just on the one book. Thirty-odd cents of profit per copy doesn’t add up very fast.
Well, earning out on sell-through is great for folks who have a whole series out there. With five strong books, you can afford to lose money on book one. But what about the poor author who only has one or two books published?
In the paid arena you have two choices, and neither of them are attractive. 1. Lose money, or 2. Do nothing until you have more books out and watch your offerings sink like a rock in the meantime.
Social media is an option, since that’s free. If you’ve built up a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and/or blogging, I certainly wouldn’t overlook that resource. But the results from this endeavor tend to be small and very time intensive. You have to go be a real person in all these places. Nobody likes a feed that’s nothing but commercials.
Newsletter promotions give you more results, especially if you’re looking for something short-term, like getting some copies out there before you fall off the 30-day cliff. People expect to be marketed to in a free or discounted book newsletter. They actually want to read about your story.
And there are lots of free newsletter options if your book is free. If you can stand dropping your price to nothing, at least intermittently, then you can practice free advertising on it. Get some copies out into the world, build your skills, and at least your only expense was time.
It’s worth noting that the process of lining up free newsletter promos is quite similar to that of paid. When I return to paid newsletter advertising, I don’t think the process will overwhelm me so much.
Success with these promos depends heavily on the size of their email list and how squarely your book fits with their reader preferences. But if an individual site doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal. You just don’t use that promoter again. Learning how to do this stuff for free is the main reason I took this route.
Also, it’s important to remember the YMMV thing, especially when it comes to advertising. I write noblebright fantasy, with a heavy emphasis on myths and folklore. I’d expect someone who writes contemporary romance to have somewhat different results.
In addition, it’s worth noting that I ran these promos in October, November, and December, which are all good months for sales. July and August tend to have lower volume, both for free and paid books.
And finally, I’m not in KU, but I have read posts about promos from other authors who are. In the past they’ve set free promotions, and some of their new audience ends up reading their books in KU instead of downloading a permanent copy. In that case you’ll get the page read income for your free book.
TL,DR note: The newsletter notes are mostly about stuff folks might need to know when they’re actually planning the promotion. If you like, you can skip down to the promo overviews afterward.
Newsletter sites
Ask David: https://askdavid.com/
David does some nice stuff, like giving you lots of free tweets, but the main thing is that if you sign up to his site, he’ll send you an email link to automatically promote you with up to a dozen more, which is a great timesaver. Other people may shrug this stuff off, but it takes me hours to fill out all their forms, and any shortcut is greatly appreciated.
On that note, you’ll save yourself a ton of time if you have the following tabs open: your blurb, your bio, your pages for Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple, etc.
You can schedule as soon as the next day, and it includes the following sites:
Armadillo eBooks: https://www.armadilloebooks.com/
BookBongo: bookbongo.com/
Choosy Bookworm: https://www.choosybookworm.com/
eBookasaurus: https://ebookasaurus.com/
eBookLister: http://www.ebooklister.net/submit.php
Some good fantasy picks at this site—I clicked on one.
eBooks Habit: https://ebookshabit.com/
Be sure to check your inbox—this site requires you to respond to their confirmation email.
Frugal Freebies: www.frugal-freebies.com/
It’s Write Now: https://itswritenow.com/
NFKB—New Free Kindle Books: newfreekindlebooks.com/
It could have also included the following sites, if I had qualified:
Digital Books Today: fiction books need to have 100+ pages, requires a 2-day notice.
eReaderGirl: ebook must be non-fiction or children’s ebook or Christian fiction.
The Kindle Book Review: requires a 14-day notice—This site I used only once for Dragon Hoard in April of 2018 and didn’t see any bump in giveaways. I’d only use it if you’re scheduling this far in advance anyway. I checked their website, and it looks like they’re charging now, though, so maybe they’re only free through David.
There’s no way to separate out results for all the individual promoters here, since the whole point is that you put them in all in one go. The ones who emailed me are It’sWriteNow and Choosy Bookworm, and both those days did well.
I used a five-day date range every time I scheduled with Ask David. I don’t know if having a longer date range gives me more choices for free promotions or not, since I’ve never tried free for only a few days (I don’t use KU).
I believe all these promos are kindle/Amazon only, so don’t expect any wide results from this group.
A lot of these places will send you an email stating that no free promos are guaranteed. To ensure a spot, you have to send them some money. I never have because the whole point of this is a free promo for free books.
Another nice thing about AskDavid is that the site saves your information, so you don’t have to re-input your bio, ASINs, etc. He also allows you to promote the same books with only a fifteen-day break. I’ve never pushed it that far—there’s no point in exhausting a newsletter audience—but I have used him a couple of times in the same year. That sort of thing is useful if you have a permafree book.
Also, if I were in KU I’d definitely use AskDavid for my free days every few months.
Regardless if you’re KU or wide, if I were to use only one promotion from this article, I’d choose AskDavid.
Golden Key: Oct. 8-12 (M-F) Good spike for the first two days—66 and 15, up from around one a day. This included ItsWriteNow on Oct. 8. Not much on days three and four, and then a very nice surge on day five: 133 downloads. Choosy Bookworm featured GK on Oct. 12, and I think that accounted for much of the volume that day.
GK total results from the AskDavid promo: 218 downloads.
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 21-25, part of my finale.
Nov. 21: 93 downloads, Nov. 22 (Thanksgiving): 20 downloads, Nov.23: 13, Nov. 24: 10, Nov. 25, 25 downloads. Total downloads: 161
Awesome Gang: https://awesomegang.com/submit-your-book/
This site offers to post a free author interview as well. I did that just on general principles, trying to shed the dreaded internet cloak of invisibility, but I don’t know if it netted me anything. : )
They email you a confirmation right after registering.
Golden Key: Oct. 13 (Sat) 20 downloads.
Dragon Hoard: scheduled for Nov. 24, not featured. Perhaps this site will promote your book only once.
Bookorium: http://bookorium.com/authorspublishers/book-a-promotion/
Wide promos. They send email confirmation.
Golden Key: Oct. 25 (Th), 25 downloads
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 11 (Sun), 32 downloads
Book Praiser: https://bookpraiser.com/promotion/
Choose the free plans tab from the top menu. No guarantee of being featured when free. Wide promo—multiple vendors, not just Amazon.
Saves your data so you don’t have to resubmit when you re-promote the same book.
If you tell them your book is permafree, you don’t get to set a date range.
They also have free promos for $.99 books.
Dragon Hoard requested Oct. 26-29 (F – M) 7, 1, 1, 45
Bookzio: https://www.bookzio.com/tall-book-promotion/
Allows promotion of same book with 90-day break. May request promotions of up to three books within a 24-hour period. No guarantee of booking unless you pay. Free is Amazon only. Must request a date at least 48 hours in advance. You have to subscribe to their email lists, which I think is technically a GDPR infraction, but I’m not going to kick up a fuss about it. Besides, their newsletter isn’t bad—I picked up a couple of free books from it.
DON’T USE CURLY QUOTES OR APOSTROPHES ON THIS SITE! Make sure all your blurbs are done in “straight quotes,” so they won’t come out as the letter a with a hat on top.
Golden Key: Oct. 17 (W) 26 downloads
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 25, part of my finale, 25 downloads
Digital Books Today: https://digitalbooktoday.com/join-o...t-your-free-book-to-be-included-on-this-list/
Your book must be…
If you tell them your book is permafree, they’ll schedule it four times over four months.
Amazon only.
This promoter is actually part of the AskDavid promo group, but I separated it out for Dragon Hoard because I wanted to fill what would have otherwise been a hole in my promo schedule. (Golden Key didn’t qualify due to length.)
Dragon Hoard requested Nov. 6-9 (Tues-F): 8, 11, 10, 12
Discount Book Man: https://discountbookman.com/book-promotion/
Enter title of book as Book Name by Author Name, or it might not be approved. Amazon only.
Other than that, the site is fairly straightforward. There was a two-day delay when I scheduled for 12T.
Somehow, this site got lost in the shuffle when I copied-and-pasted to alphabetize this list, so I don’t have any download numbers on DH or GK. I know I used Discount Book Man for both, however.
Ereader Café: https://theereadercafe.com/promote-your-books/
Requires a three-day notice, at least 100 pages, no erotica, and at least three reviews with a four-star average. Kindle only.
Dragon Hoard requested Nov. 3-4 (Sat-Sun) 6 and 7 respectively.
Free Kindle Books: http://www.freekindledeal.com/
Requires you to click a confirmation email. Can choose up to five free days. They send you an email the day the promotion begins. Free books go on a page like postage stamps—no blurbs or description, so you must have a good cover for this site.
Golden Key: Oct. 18-22 (Th-M) 8, 5, 8, 4, 3
Dragon Hoard: Nov 15-20, did not feature. Perhaps this site won’t re-promote books. (I used them earlier for DH in April.)
MyBookPlace.com: http://mybookplace.net/submit-your-book/
This site promotes wide books, not just Amazon, and they have a little social media support. They offer a very nice author interview which I filled out on general principles, but there’s no way to tell if it actually matters.
They email you on the day your promo goes live, and they’ve always given me the date I requested.
Golden Key: Oct. 16 (T) 4 downloads
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 1 (Th) 8 downloads
Pretty-Hot.com: https://pretty-hot.com/
With all the bright pink on the site and the name, you’d think this place would be geared to romance readers. But they have plenty of genres there, including fantasy and sci-fi.
Golden Key: Oct. 14 (Sun) 13 downloads
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 14 (W) 6 downloads
Reading Deals: https://readingdeals.com/submit-ebook/free
Requires a minimum of 5 reviews & 4.0 stars on Amazon.com. Wide promo. They send you an email on the day of the promo, which is nice.
They also have a service that will submit your free ebook to 25+ sites for $29, paid through Paypal: http://bookmarketingtools.com/submission-tool-features. They likewise have a service to connect you to reviewers: https://readingdeals.com/reviews, but it’s $79 for 10-15 reviews, and I think that’s a bit pricey. I prefer Hidden Gems and goodreads Reading Rounds, but YMMV.
Golden Key: 11-10 (Sat), 118 downloads.
Dragon Hoard submitted for Nov. 25, not promoted.
Newsletter also-rans
These are sites I’m including for the sake of completeness. I no longer submit to them (except for Freebooksy) because they don’t feature me. YMMV.
Book Angel: http://bookangel.co.uk/submit-a-book/
This is a UK site, so your book must be available at Amazon.co.uk, not just Amazon.com, although they also allow Kobo book links. I wasn’t able to choose a date for free promotions, so I don’t think this site will work well for free promos on KU.
Book Hippo: https://bookhippo.uk/
Another UK site, Amazon only. If you don’t provide your editor’s link, they are unlikely to feature the book. They email you on the day of the promotion if they feature you.
PeopleReads.com: http://www.peoplereads.com/list-your-ebook.html
Below are the requirements to be considered for a listing with PeopleReads:
1) 10 reviews on Amazon (US and/or UK) with an average rating of 3.9 stars or better (review requirement does not apply to New Release Listings. For books with 50+ reviews an average of 3.8 stars or better must be maintained and for books with 200+ reviews an average of 3.5 stars or better must be maintained.
2) The work must be reasonably free of typographical errors.
3) The work must have professional cover art.
Meeting the above requirements does not guarantee a listing.
Golden Key: requested Oct. 26-31 (Sat-W), not featured
Dragon Hoard: requested Nov. 22-26 (Th-M), not featured
Freebooksy: htpps://freebooksy.com/editorial-submissions/
This one is the best to snag in terms of results if you can get it. They haven’t featured me, but it would be really neat if they did. Freebooksy is frequently referred to as one of the best non-BookBub sites out there, so I keep trying. It’s quite expensive to pay them for a promo.
Website only: these sites will feature you on their homepage. Generally not as good as newsletters because readers have to take action (go to the web page), rather than just having the recommendations show up in their inboxes.
Contentmo: https://contentmo.com/submit-your-free-ebook-promo/
Wide promo, and the website’s free, but they’ll try to talk you into paying three dollars for three tweets. YMMV, but I don’t think promotional tweets are worth that much. Most people just ignore them, in my experience.
They email you when they feature you, but it’s a two-click system on their site. You have to first click on the blog for that day, and then see the books, rather than having the day’s covers showing on the home page.
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 24, 10 downloads
Ereaderlove.com: http://www.ereaderlove.com/contact-us-submit-a-book/
Free is website only. You can’t schedule ahead of time.
Golden Key: I requested to be added to site on Oct. 11. Could have contributed to the spike on Oct. 12.
Twelve Tales: submitted on Dec. 2
Free Books: http://www.freebooks.com/submit/
If you have a permafree book, you’re supposed to use the contact me feature. The short-term free promo is pretty easy, just ASIN and date range. Amazon only. After I submitted, they said they’d add it to their promotion page shortly. They do allow date ranges, though, so this site should allow scheduling in advance.
Golden Key: Signed up on Oct. 10, so it probably went in with the Ask David promo. Could have been part of the spike on Oct. 12.
ReadFreely: http://www.readfree.ly/newsletter-promotion/
Promoted on homepage for 2 days.
Promoted in our Promoted on social media platforms.
Guaranteed acceptance of all books submitted Books priced up to $1.99 accepted.
You can resubmit a book every 6 months.
Submit book at least 10 days before start of promotion.
Not guaranteed they’ll post your book if you don’t pay them anything.
Lots of romance titles.
Golden Key: submitted for Oct. 24 – Nov. 11
Note: This was a mistake. In the future, I’m using date ranges no longer than five days.
It’s too big a pain to keep checking back to see if they featured you.
Dragon Hoard: submitted for Nov. 1 – Nov. 5: 8, 7, 6, 7, 4.
And an also ran:
Book Brag: http://bookbrag.com/add-your-book/
A few guidelines
Free is website only, no newsletter, and you only get 50 words for your blurb, so I passed. Didn’t think it was worth rewriting my blurbs for what’s probably only a few downloads. If you’ve got an elevator pitch that you really like, maybe you could use that instead.
Individual promotions using these sites
For organizational purposes, based on the results above, I copied Nicholas Erik’s system and separated these sites into tiers, with the best first.
Top Tier
AskDavid—greatly diminished results on day 5 for second promo run
Reading Deals—no second promo run
Book Praiser
BookZio
Bookorium
Second Tier
Awesome Gang—no second run
Digital Books Today
Free Kindle Books—no second run
Pretty Hot
Third Tier
My Book Place
Discount Book Man
Ereader Café
Fourth Tier
Website only
1. Golden Key Promo (Oct. 8 – Nov. 10): Starting Out
Well, in technical terms this one was poorly managed, which isn’t surprising. I had only done this promo once before, for Dragon Hoard in April of 2018, and then I just took the first available date for everything. Since no planning went into that one, when I had a lot of downloads, I didn’t know which newsletter was responsible. I did take some data, on my sales rank before and after, reporting it in real time. Those results are here: https://www.kboards.com/index.php?topic=262685.0.
But since I didn’t take data on individual newsletters in April, I didn’t have any way to improve upon this promotion until after I repeated it more carefully in October.
Biggest mistakes for this promo:
I led with my heaviest hitter first, instead of building up to a gradual crescendo. Since I didn’t have the data yet to build my tier system, it was basically just a scattershot. I ended on a strong note, but that was serendipitous.
I promoted on Mondays and Tuesdays, which tend to be light days. Future promos should be mostly Wed-Sun.
I might have gotten a bigger boost in rank on my last day (the best I reached was #4 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mythology & Folk Tales > Fairy Tales) if I hadn’t input the date wrong on the last promo. It was supposed to be Nov. 1st, but a typo had it as 11-10 instead of 11-01, which left me with nine days of low volume in between and spoiled any crescendo effect I might have had going. Once you hit the submit button there’s no taking it back, apparently, or at least no way that I saw. I’m going to be more diligent about double-checking dates in the future.
The main advantage of this promo:
This one has the best data. Golden Key was down to around a download per day when I started, so there are relatively few outside factors. Dragon Hoard, OTOH—it’s been out for a while, it’s permafree, and it’s been featured in a lot of places--blogs, social media, and reviews. There have been days when I’ve done nothing, and I still had an inexplicable spike of 40+ downloads, with no idea where it came from.
Speaking of data, here’s a visual for the Golden Key promo:
The final Amazon tally was 491 downloads, instead of the expected 30-something. Definitely a significant improvement, so this was worth doing, even though it lacked finesse. : )
However, I only netted one random GK review plus one goodreads rating during this time period, although sometimes there’s a lag between downloads and reviews, especially for free books.
2. Dragon Hoard promo (Oct. 29 – Nov. 26): Promoting a book the second time
This one went a little better, technically speaking, than Golden Key, but I still made some mistakes. Sometimes, really, I despair over this stuff. I mean, this is as easy as promotion gets: you line up the newsletters, you wait, you record results. No generating a thousand keywords to test and track for your Amazon ads. No watching your money melt away like water if you take your eyes off of it for a few days, which can happen with sponsored ads for BookBub or Facebook. These promos don’t even cost anything. It should be easy-peasy.
As a quick aside, Dragon Hoard is the only one of my books where its Amazon free ranking really matters. It’s permafree. For GK and 12T, I’m putting them back to paid after the holiday season, so their free ranks will go away. For GK and 12T, all that ultimately counts are the number of books downloaded. The rest of this exercise is mostly data gathering and practice for when I try promoting with paid newsletters again. But since DH is going to stay free, I wanted two things: to hit a #1 category rank, but not to do it as the result of a one-day blast. Those rankings don’t tend to “stick.”
But my quest for the perfect rising crescendo hit a few snags. I was testing a few sites that The Golden Key didn’t qualify for, due to length, so I didn’t have any idea how they’d do going in. And then Free Kindle Books, which had always featured me before, decided not to—and that left me a hole right in the middle of my line-up, from Nov. 15-20. Also, Awesome Gang didn’t feature me this time. I’d planned on them taking up some slack for day four of the AskDavid promotion, which had been pretty flat with GK. Since that didn’t happen, that day didn’t do much better for DH, although fortunately I’d also scheduled Contentmo, which helped a little.
So, one of the most important things I learned from this promo is who features you only once, and who’s willing to give you another shot six months later. Both Reading Deals and Choosy Bookworm chose not to feature DH this time, which meant my finale was weak. (At least Bookzio came through.)
I’ve color-coded how I scheduled. Tier 1 (best)--brown, Tier 2—purple, Tier 3—green, Tier 4—gray.
Oct.26-29—Book Praiser
Nov.1-5—Read Freely, Ereader Café Nov 3-4
Nov. 6-10—Digital Books Today
Nov 11—Bookorium
Nov 14—Pretty Hot
Nov. 15-20 Free Kindle Books, not featured
Nov. 21-25, my finale: Ask David—all five days, no Choosy Bookworm
Nov. 24 Awesome Gang scheduled but not featured, Contentmo
Nov. 25 Reading Deals and Bookzio
And the list by promoters, with notes on who wouldn’t repeat.
First Tier
AskDavid—greatly diminished results on day 5 for second promo run, probably because Choosy Bookworm didn’t pick me up
Reading Deals—no second promo run
Book Praiser
BookZio
Bookorium
Second Tier
Awesome Gang—no second run
Digital Books Today
Free Kindle Books—no second run
Pretty Hot
Third Tier
My Book Place
Discount Book Man
Ereader Café
Fourth Tier
Contentmo
Read Freely
I stretched this thing over the course of a month because that best mimics reader engagement, which results in more Amazon recommendations. My second goal, hitting a #1 free category rank, is mostly for me. I know it’s not that big a deal—people did it so often (in paid rankings, which is probably harder) on the old kboards that there was a running thread for it. But for me it’s the kind of thing that does matter if you haven’t done it yet.
I really want to hit a #1 category rank. : )
Here’s the raw data for the Dragon Hoard promo run:
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for (drum roll, please)…
(Here you’ll have to imagine the sound of the drummer dropping a stick, which then smacks a cymbal half-heartedly on its way down, before rolling under an amp.)
At least partly due to the unexpected holes in my line-up, my quest for a rising crescendo is still just that. And I have yet to hit a #1 category rating—the best I did was #4 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mythology & Folk Tales > Folklore.
And it might have been a mistake to schedule this thing over Thanksgiving weekend, what with Black Friday and all. If I had it to do over again, I’d compress my schedule and finish up ahead of the holiday.
But the news isn’t all bad. I gave away 389 books during this run, which was better than my previous attempt in April of this year, which netted me 295. So, even though some sites didn’t feature me a second time, my downloads were higher overall. My guess at the greater volume for this run is the slight overlap between the Golden Key and Dragon Hoard promos. I think some of the readers scooped up both books. This is backed by my also-boughts and also-viewed on DH’s Amazon book page.
In fact, I think that happened with Twelve Tales of Christmas as well. If you’d like some irony, that book did show a rising crescendo for the same time period, with absolutely no effort on my part, other than spill-over from the other two promotions.
3. Twelve Tales of Christmas promo (Dec. 1—Dec. 9): The Quest for Rank
Due in part to my thwarted attempts at hitting a #1 ranking during my Dragon Hoard promo, I decided to compress this promotion. I already had a gradually rising crescendo going in, and nine days is still a respectable amount of time, hopefully enough to convince some algorithms to pitch in with the heavy lifting.
This was the first time I’d ever run this book through these promoters, so I had the full list to work with. The schedule looked like this:
Dec. 1-5: Read Freely, Book Praiser
Dec. 2: Ereader Love and Free Books
Dec. 4-9: Contentmo
Dec. 5-9: Discount Book Man, Ereader Café, Digital Books Today, Ask David
Dec. 6-9: Bookzio
Dec. 7-9 Reading Deals and Bookorium
Dec. 9: My Book Place, Pretty Hot, Awesome Gang
There’s no point in trying to sort out individual results because every day had multiple promoters. I did my best to set up an upward trend and let it rip. All but four promoters were aimed at the final day.
Dec. 1st—16 downloads, Dec. 2nd—20, Dec. 3rd—12, Dec. 4th—12, Dec. 5th—103, Dec. 6th—55, Dec. 7th--72, Dec. 8th—244, Dec. 9th--91.
As regards rank, I'm afraid my quest is still an ongoing thing. The best I did was:
Still, that was over 600 books moved in a little over a week. As of writing this post, 12T is showing a higher download rate than I had pre-promotion, so that bit panned out, but part of that could simply be that this is a Christmas book, and the calendar’s ticking down toward the holiday. Also, I’ve scooped up a new review already, which got me off the 29 reviews spot that I’d been stuck in for a while.
And it didn’t cost anything. And okay, maybe I would have made a pile of hypothetical money if I’d sold the book instead, but the most likely case is that I’d have spent more than I brought in. My catalog is just too small, and it doesn't as yet include any novels (two novella-length collections and two novelettes).
What I really wanted out of this thing was more readers, especially ones who’d read more than one of my books. According to Joanna Penn (and I’m sorry, but I didn’t save the link, so you’ll have to trust me on this one), on average, it takes readers 3-4 books to reliably recognize your name.
My also-boughts and also-viewed are showing my other books, so hopefully, I had some success in this area as well, although there’s no way to back that up with actual numbers.
There’s also no way to tell how many copies were actually read. The old kboards metric was ten percent, but that was based on sell-though in a series. Factoring in an average of one review per thousand copies given away, my guess at reading rate is around 20%, but that’s only a guess. If accurate, that means around 300 people read my work who probably wouldn’t have otherwise, or at least not in this time frame.
I’m also blogging about this promotion, although I broke it into parts. Other than that, it’s meant to be my holiday gift to AW. Hopefully, it can help someone else. : )
Promoting Your Free Book
(There are also a few places listed that will promote a book that you’re asking actual money for. Look for the orange font.)
There’s a certain underlying philosophy concerning free books that I want to touch on only briefly here. Some people (including me) believe that a good way to find new readers is to remove the bar to entry by making your book free. Others believe this devalues their work. Both sides of the argument have merit. (If you want more on this topic, I blogged about it here: https://cathleentownsend.com/2018/11/13/free-books-why-you-might-want-to-give-your-work-away/, but this post is already long enough.)
A more important consideration to me is that paid promotions cost money, and when you start, there’s a learning curve. (It seems like everything has a learning curve.) And with paid promotions, you’re spending money to learn, which gets expensive fast. Not only that, but with newsletter marketing (where a promoter includes your book in their emails to their audiences), even though you can re-use the same promoter again later, you’ll never get the same oomph you got from the first run. (It’s worth noting as an aside that BookBub is supposed to be an exception to this.) At any rate, if you muck up your paid promo like I did, this means that with a lot of the heavy hitters—Freebooksy, BookBarbarian, Ereader News Today—you’ve already diminished the usefulness of this resource for that book. I decided to learn how to do this for free before I spent money on it again.
Newsletter promotions don’t usually work for full-price books—that’s usually better addressed by Amazon, Facebook, and/or BookBub ads. The whole point of readers signing up to get yet more stuff in their inboxes is that they’ll also get free and cheap books.
As a result, paid newsletter promotions usually don’t “earn out” in terms of the particular book being advertised. That’s easy to see with a free book. If you pay a hundred dollars to promote a free book, the way you’ll make most of your money back is by sell-through to other titles. (There’s also a tail, a leftover from the promotion, that can result in some paid sales.) And if you advertise a $.99 book, it’s very difficult to break even just on the one book. Thirty-odd cents of profit per copy doesn’t add up very fast.
Well, earning out on sell-through is great for folks who have a whole series out there. With five strong books, you can afford to lose money on book one. But what about the poor author who only has one or two books published?
In the paid arena you have two choices, and neither of them are attractive. 1. Lose money, or 2. Do nothing until you have more books out and watch your offerings sink like a rock in the meantime.
Social media is an option, since that’s free. If you’ve built up a presence on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and/or blogging, I certainly wouldn’t overlook that resource. But the results from this endeavor tend to be small and very time intensive. You have to go be a real person in all these places. Nobody likes a feed that’s nothing but commercials.
Newsletter promotions give you more results, especially if you’re looking for something short-term, like getting some copies out there before you fall off the 30-day cliff. People expect to be marketed to in a free or discounted book newsletter. They actually want to read about your story.
And there are lots of free newsletter options if your book is free. If you can stand dropping your price to nothing, at least intermittently, then you can practice free advertising on it. Get some copies out into the world, build your skills, and at least your only expense was time.
It’s worth noting that the process of lining up free newsletter promos is quite similar to that of paid. When I return to paid newsletter advertising, I don’t think the process will overwhelm me so much.
Success with these promos depends heavily on the size of their email list and how squarely your book fits with their reader preferences. But if an individual site doesn’t work out, it’s no big deal. You just don’t use that promoter again. Learning how to do this stuff for free is the main reason I took this route.
Also, it’s important to remember the YMMV thing, especially when it comes to advertising. I write noblebright fantasy, with a heavy emphasis on myths and folklore. I’d expect someone who writes contemporary romance to have somewhat different results.
In addition, it’s worth noting that I ran these promos in October, November, and December, which are all good months for sales. July and August tend to have lower volume, both for free and paid books.
And finally, I’m not in KU, but I have read posts about promos from other authors who are. In the past they’ve set free promotions, and some of their new audience ends up reading their books in KU instead of downloading a permanent copy. In that case you’ll get the page read income for your free book.
TL,DR note: The newsletter notes are mostly about stuff folks might need to know when they’re actually planning the promotion. If you like, you can skip down to the promo overviews afterward.
Newsletter sites
Ask David: https://askdavid.com/
David does some nice stuff, like giving you lots of free tweets, but the main thing is that if you sign up to his site, he’ll send you an email link to automatically promote you with up to a dozen more, which is a great timesaver. Other people may shrug this stuff off, but it takes me hours to fill out all their forms, and any shortcut is greatly appreciated.
On that note, you’ll save yourself a ton of time if you have the following tabs open: your blurb, your bio, your pages for Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple, etc.
You can schedule as soon as the next day, and it includes the following sites:
Armadillo eBooks: https://www.armadilloebooks.com/
BookBongo: bookbongo.com/
Choosy Bookworm: https://www.choosybookworm.com/
eBookasaurus: https://ebookasaurus.com/
eBookLister: http://www.ebooklister.net/submit.php
Some good fantasy picks at this site—I clicked on one.
eBooks Habit: https://ebookshabit.com/
Be sure to check your inbox—this site requires you to respond to their confirmation email.
Frugal Freebies: www.frugal-freebies.com/
It’s Write Now: https://itswritenow.com/
NFKB—New Free Kindle Books: newfreekindlebooks.com/
It could have also included the following sites, if I had qualified:
Digital Books Today: fiction books need to have 100+ pages, requires a 2-day notice.
eReaderGirl: ebook must be non-fiction or children’s ebook or Christian fiction.
The Kindle Book Review: requires a 14-day notice—This site I used only once for Dragon Hoard in April of 2018 and didn’t see any bump in giveaways. I’d only use it if you’re scheduling this far in advance anyway. I checked their website, and it looks like they’re charging now, though, so maybe they’re only free through David.
There’s no way to separate out results for all the individual promoters here, since the whole point is that you put them in all in one go. The ones who emailed me are It’sWriteNow and Choosy Bookworm, and both those days did well.
I used a five-day date range every time I scheduled with Ask David. I don’t know if having a longer date range gives me more choices for free promotions or not, since I’ve never tried free for only a few days (I don’t use KU).
I believe all these promos are kindle/Amazon only, so don’t expect any wide results from this group.
A lot of these places will send you an email stating that no free promos are guaranteed. To ensure a spot, you have to send them some money. I never have because the whole point of this is a free promo for free books.
Another nice thing about AskDavid is that the site saves your information, so you don’t have to re-input your bio, ASINs, etc. He also allows you to promote the same books with only a fifteen-day break. I’ve never pushed it that far—there’s no point in exhausting a newsletter audience—but I have used him a couple of times in the same year. That sort of thing is useful if you have a permafree book.
Also, if I were in KU I’d definitely use AskDavid for my free days every few months.
Regardless if you’re KU or wide, if I were to use only one promotion from this article, I’d choose AskDavid.
Golden Key: Oct. 8-12 (M-F) Good spike for the first two days—66 and 15, up from around one a day. This included ItsWriteNow on Oct. 8. Not much on days three and four, and then a very nice surge on day five: 133 downloads. Choosy Bookworm featured GK on Oct. 12, and I think that accounted for much of the volume that day.
GK total results from the AskDavid promo: 218 downloads.
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 21-25, part of my finale.
Nov. 21: 93 downloads, Nov. 22 (Thanksgiving): 20 downloads, Nov.23: 13, Nov. 24: 10, Nov. 25, 25 downloads. Total downloads: 161
Awesome Gang: https://awesomegang.com/submit-your-book/
This site offers to post a free author interview as well. I did that just on general principles, trying to shed the dreaded internet cloak of invisibility, but I don’t know if it netted me anything. : )
They email you a confirmation right after registering.
Golden Key: Oct. 13 (Sat) 20 downloads.
Dragon Hoard: scheduled for Nov. 24, not featured. Perhaps this site will promote your book only once.
Bookorium: http://bookorium.com/authorspublishers/book-a-promotion/
Wide promos. They send email confirmation.
Golden Key: Oct. 25 (Th), 25 downloads
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 11 (Sun), 32 downloads
Book Praiser: https://bookpraiser.com/promotion/
Choose the free plans tab from the top menu. No guarantee of being featured when free. Wide promo—multiple vendors, not just Amazon.
Saves your data so you don’t have to resubmit when you re-promote the same book.
If you tell them your book is permafree, you don’t get to set a date range.
They also have free promos for $.99 books.
Dragon Hoard requested Oct. 26-29 (F – M) 7, 1, 1, 45
Bookzio: https://www.bookzio.com/tall-book-promotion/
Allows promotion of same book with 90-day break. May request promotions of up to three books within a 24-hour period. No guarantee of booking unless you pay. Free is Amazon only. Must request a date at least 48 hours in advance. You have to subscribe to their email lists, which I think is technically a GDPR infraction, but I’m not going to kick up a fuss about it. Besides, their newsletter isn’t bad—I picked up a couple of free books from it.
DON’T USE CURLY QUOTES OR APOSTROPHES ON THIS SITE! Make sure all your blurbs are done in “straight quotes,” so they won’t come out as the letter a with a hat on top.
Golden Key: Oct. 17 (W) 26 downloads
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 25, part of my finale, 25 downloads
Digital Books Today: https://digitalbooktoday.com/join-o...t-your-free-book-to-be-included-on-this-list/
Your book must be…
- Free on Amazon for a minimum of 24 hours
- Fiction: 100+ pages, 4.0+ stars, 18+ reviews
- Non-Fiction (less than 100 pages): 60+ reviews, 4.2+ stars
- Non-Fiction (100+ pages): 40+ reviews, 4.0+ stars
- Children’s Books: 60+ reviews, 4.0+ stars (added at our discretion)
If you tell them your book is permafree, they’ll schedule it four times over four months.
Amazon only.
This promoter is actually part of the AskDavid promo group, but I separated it out for Dragon Hoard because I wanted to fill what would have otherwise been a hole in my promo schedule. (Golden Key didn’t qualify due to length.)
Dragon Hoard requested Nov. 6-9 (Tues-F): 8, 11, 10, 12
Discount Book Man: https://discountbookman.com/book-promotion/
Enter title of book as Book Name by Author Name, or it might not be approved. Amazon only.
Other than that, the site is fairly straightforward. There was a two-day delay when I scheduled for 12T.
Somehow, this site got lost in the shuffle when I copied-and-pasted to alphabetize this list, so I don’t have any download numbers on DH or GK. I know I used Discount Book Man for both, however.
Ereader Café: https://theereadercafe.com/promote-your-books/
Requires a three-day notice, at least 100 pages, no erotica, and at least three reviews with a four-star average. Kindle only.
Dragon Hoard requested Nov. 3-4 (Sat-Sun) 6 and 7 respectively.
Free Kindle Books: http://www.freekindledeal.com/
Requires you to click a confirmation email. Can choose up to five free days. They send you an email the day the promotion begins. Free books go on a page like postage stamps—no blurbs or description, so you must have a good cover for this site.
Golden Key: Oct. 18-22 (Th-M) 8, 5, 8, 4, 3
Dragon Hoard: Nov 15-20, did not feature. Perhaps this site won’t re-promote books. (I used them earlier for DH in April.)
MyBookPlace.com: http://mybookplace.net/submit-your-book/
This site promotes wide books, not just Amazon, and they have a little social media support. They offer a very nice author interview which I filled out on general principles, but there’s no way to tell if it actually matters.
They email you on the day your promo goes live, and they’ve always given me the date I requested.
Golden Key: Oct. 16 (T) 4 downloads
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 1 (Th) 8 downloads
Pretty-Hot.com: https://pretty-hot.com/
With all the bright pink on the site and the name, you’d think this place would be geared to romance readers. But they have plenty of genres there, including fantasy and sci-fi.
Golden Key: Oct. 14 (Sun) 13 downloads
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 14 (W) 6 downloads
Reading Deals: https://readingdeals.com/submit-ebook/free
Requires a minimum of 5 reviews & 4.0 stars on Amazon.com. Wide promo. They send you an email on the day of the promo, which is nice.
They also have a service that will submit your free ebook to 25+ sites for $29, paid through Paypal: http://bookmarketingtools.com/submission-tool-features. They likewise have a service to connect you to reviewers: https://readingdeals.com/reviews, but it’s $79 for 10-15 reviews, and I think that’s a bit pricey. I prefer Hidden Gems and goodreads Reading Rounds, but YMMV.
Golden Key: 11-10 (Sat), 118 downloads.
Dragon Hoard submitted for Nov. 25, not promoted.
Newsletter also-rans
These are sites I’m including for the sake of completeness. I no longer submit to them (except for Freebooksy) because they don’t feature me. YMMV.
Book Angel: http://bookangel.co.uk/submit-a-book/
This is a UK site, so your book must be available at Amazon.co.uk, not just Amazon.com, although they also allow Kobo book links. I wasn’t able to choose a date for free promotions, so I don’t think this site will work well for free promos on KU.
Book Hippo: https://bookhippo.uk/
Another UK site, Amazon only. If you don’t provide your editor’s link, they are unlikely to feature the book. They email you on the day of the promotion if they feature you.
PeopleReads.com: http://www.peoplereads.com/list-your-ebook.html
Below are the requirements to be considered for a listing with PeopleReads:
1) 10 reviews on Amazon (US and/or UK) with an average rating of 3.9 stars or better (review requirement does not apply to New Release Listings. For books with 50+ reviews an average of 3.8 stars or better must be maintained and for books with 200+ reviews an average of 3.5 stars or better must be maintained.
2) The work must be reasonably free of typographical errors.
3) The work must have professional cover art.
Meeting the above requirements does not guarantee a listing.
Golden Key: requested Oct. 26-31 (Sat-W), not featured
Dragon Hoard: requested Nov. 22-26 (Th-M), not featured
Freebooksy: htpps://freebooksy.com/editorial-submissions/
This one is the best to snag in terms of results if you can get it. They haven’t featured me, but it would be really neat if they did. Freebooksy is frequently referred to as one of the best non-BookBub sites out there, so I keep trying. It’s quite expensive to pay them for a promo.
Website only: these sites will feature you on their homepage. Generally not as good as newsletters because readers have to take action (go to the web page), rather than just having the recommendations show up in their inboxes.
Contentmo: https://contentmo.com/submit-your-free-ebook-promo/
Wide promo, and the website’s free, but they’ll try to talk you into paying three dollars for three tweets. YMMV, but I don’t think promotional tweets are worth that much. Most people just ignore them, in my experience.
They email you when they feature you, but it’s a two-click system on their site. You have to first click on the blog for that day, and then see the books, rather than having the day’s covers showing on the home page.
Dragon Hoard: Nov. 24, 10 downloads
Ereaderlove.com: http://www.ereaderlove.com/contact-us-submit-a-book/
Free is website only. You can’t schedule ahead of time.
Golden Key: I requested to be added to site on Oct. 11. Could have contributed to the spike on Oct. 12.
Twelve Tales: submitted on Dec. 2
Free Books: http://www.freebooks.com/submit/
If you have a permafree book, you’re supposed to use the contact me feature. The short-term free promo is pretty easy, just ASIN and date range. Amazon only. After I submitted, they said they’d add it to their promotion page shortly. They do allow date ranges, though, so this site should allow scheduling in advance.
Golden Key: Signed up on Oct. 10, so it probably went in with the Ask David promo. Could have been part of the spike on Oct. 12.
ReadFreely: http://www.readfree.ly/newsletter-promotion/
Promoted on homepage for 2 days.
Promoted in our Promoted on social media platforms.
Guaranteed acceptance of all books submitted Books priced up to $1.99 accepted.
You can resubmit a book every 6 months.
Submit book at least 10 days before start of promotion.
Not guaranteed they’ll post your book if you don’t pay them anything.
Lots of romance titles.
Golden Key: submitted for Oct. 24 – Nov. 11
Note: This was a mistake. In the future, I’m using date ranges no longer than five days.
It’s too big a pain to keep checking back to see if they featured you.
Dragon Hoard: submitted for Nov. 1 – Nov. 5: 8, 7, 6, 7, 4.
And an also ran:
Book Brag: http://bookbrag.com/add-your-book/
A few guidelines
- Book must be priced at $5.99 or less
- We do not promote Erotica or BDSM on our site.
- Books must be 100 pages or more
- Book must be available on Amazon, but we do promote BN.com, iTunes, and Kobo if your book is on these sites.
Free is website only, no newsletter, and you only get 50 words for your blurb, so I passed. Didn’t think it was worth rewriting my blurbs for what’s probably only a few downloads. If you’ve got an elevator pitch that you really like, maybe you could use that instead.
Individual promotions using these sites
For organizational purposes, based on the results above, I copied Nicholas Erik’s system and separated these sites into tiers, with the best first.
Top Tier
AskDavid—greatly diminished results on day 5 for second promo run
Reading Deals—no second promo run
Book Praiser
BookZio
Bookorium
Second Tier
Awesome Gang—no second run
Digital Books Today
Free Kindle Books—no second run
Pretty Hot
Third Tier
My Book Place
Discount Book Man
Ereader Café
Fourth Tier
Website only
1. Golden Key Promo (Oct. 8 – Nov. 10): Starting Out
Well, in technical terms this one was poorly managed, which isn’t surprising. I had only done this promo once before, for Dragon Hoard in April of 2018, and then I just took the first available date for everything. Since no planning went into that one, when I had a lot of downloads, I didn’t know which newsletter was responsible. I did take some data, on my sales rank before and after, reporting it in real time. Those results are here: https://www.kboards.com/index.php?topic=262685.0.
But since I didn’t take data on individual newsletters in April, I didn’t have any way to improve upon this promotion until after I repeated it more carefully in October.
Biggest mistakes for this promo:
I led with my heaviest hitter first, instead of building up to a gradual crescendo. Since I didn’t have the data yet to build my tier system, it was basically just a scattershot. I ended on a strong note, but that was serendipitous.
I promoted on Mondays and Tuesdays, which tend to be light days. Future promos should be mostly Wed-Sun.
I might have gotten a bigger boost in rank on my last day (the best I reached was #4 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mythology & Folk Tales > Fairy Tales) if I hadn’t input the date wrong on the last promo. It was supposed to be Nov. 1st, but a typo had it as 11-10 instead of 11-01, which left me with nine days of low volume in between and spoiled any crescendo effect I might have had going. Once you hit the submit button there’s no taking it back, apparently, or at least no way that I saw. I’m going to be more diligent about double-checking dates in the future.
The main advantage of this promo:
This one has the best data. Golden Key was down to around a download per day when I started, so there are relatively few outside factors. Dragon Hoard, OTOH—it’s been out for a while, it’s permafree, and it’s been featured in a lot of places--blogs, social media, and reviews. There have been days when I’ve done nothing, and I still had an inexplicable spike of 40+ downloads, with no idea where it came from.
Speaking of data, here’s a visual for the Golden Key promo:
The final Amazon tally was 491 downloads, instead of the expected 30-something. Definitely a significant improvement, so this was worth doing, even though it lacked finesse. : )
However, I only netted one random GK review plus one goodreads rating during this time period, although sometimes there’s a lag between downloads and reviews, especially for free books.
2. Dragon Hoard promo (Oct. 29 – Nov. 26): Promoting a book the second time
This one went a little better, technically speaking, than Golden Key, but I still made some mistakes. Sometimes, really, I despair over this stuff. I mean, this is as easy as promotion gets: you line up the newsletters, you wait, you record results. No generating a thousand keywords to test and track for your Amazon ads. No watching your money melt away like water if you take your eyes off of it for a few days, which can happen with sponsored ads for BookBub or Facebook. These promos don’t even cost anything. It should be easy-peasy.
As a quick aside, Dragon Hoard is the only one of my books where its Amazon free ranking really matters. It’s permafree. For GK and 12T, I’m putting them back to paid after the holiday season, so their free ranks will go away. For GK and 12T, all that ultimately counts are the number of books downloaded. The rest of this exercise is mostly data gathering and practice for when I try promoting with paid newsletters again. But since DH is going to stay free, I wanted two things: to hit a #1 category rank, but not to do it as the result of a one-day blast. Those rankings don’t tend to “stick.”
But my quest for the perfect rising crescendo hit a few snags. I was testing a few sites that The Golden Key didn’t qualify for, due to length, so I didn’t have any idea how they’d do going in. And then Free Kindle Books, which had always featured me before, decided not to—and that left me a hole right in the middle of my line-up, from Nov. 15-20. Also, Awesome Gang didn’t feature me this time. I’d planned on them taking up some slack for day four of the AskDavid promotion, which had been pretty flat with GK. Since that didn’t happen, that day didn’t do much better for DH, although fortunately I’d also scheduled Contentmo, which helped a little.
So, one of the most important things I learned from this promo is who features you only once, and who’s willing to give you another shot six months later. Both Reading Deals and Choosy Bookworm chose not to feature DH this time, which meant my finale was weak. (At least Bookzio came through.)
I’ve color-coded how I scheduled. Tier 1 (best)--brown, Tier 2—purple, Tier 3—green, Tier 4—gray.
Oct.26-29—Book Praiser
Nov.1-5—Read Freely, Ereader Café Nov 3-4
Nov. 6-10—Digital Books Today
Nov 11—Bookorium
Nov 14—Pretty Hot
Nov. 15-20 Free Kindle Books, not featured
Nov. 21-25, my finale: Ask David—all five days, no Choosy Bookworm
Nov. 24 Awesome Gang scheduled but not featured, Contentmo
Nov. 25 Reading Deals and Bookzio
And the list by promoters, with notes on who wouldn’t repeat.
First Tier
AskDavid—greatly diminished results on day 5 for second promo run, probably because Choosy Bookworm didn’t pick me up
Reading Deals—no second promo run
Book Praiser
BookZio
Bookorium
Second Tier
Awesome Gang—no second run
Digital Books Today
Free Kindle Books—no second run
Pretty Hot
Third Tier
My Book Place
Discount Book Man
Ereader Café
Fourth Tier
Contentmo
Read Freely
I stretched this thing over the course of a month because that best mimics reader engagement, which results in more Amazon recommendations. My second goal, hitting a #1 free category rank, is mostly for me. I know it’s not that big a deal—people did it so often (in paid rankings, which is probably harder) on the old kboards that there was a running thread for it. But for me it’s the kind of thing that does matter if you haven’t done it yet.
I really want to hit a #1 category rank. : )
Here’s the raw data for the Dragon Hoard promo run:
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for (drum roll, please)…
(Here you’ll have to imagine the sound of the drummer dropping a stick, which then smacks a cymbal half-heartedly on its way down, before rolling under an amp.)
At least partly due to the unexpected holes in my line-up, my quest for a rising crescendo is still just that. And I have yet to hit a #1 category rating—the best I did was #4 in Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mythology & Folk Tales > Folklore.
And it might have been a mistake to schedule this thing over Thanksgiving weekend, what with Black Friday and all. If I had it to do over again, I’d compress my schedule and finish up ahead of the holiday.
But the news isn’t all bad. I gave away 389 books during this run, which was better than my previous attempt in April of this year, which netted me 295. So, even though some sites didn’t feature me a second time, my downloads were higher overall. My guess at the greater volume for this run is the slight overlap between the Golden Key and Dragon Hoard promos. I think some of the readers scooped up both books. This is backed by my also-boughts and also-viewed on DH’s Amazon book page.
In fact, I think that happened with Twelve Tales of Christmas as well. If you’d like some irony, that book did show a rising crescendo for the same time period, with absolutely no effort on my part, other than spill-over from the other two promotions.
3. Twelve Tales of Christmas promo (Dec. 1—Dec. 9): The Quest for Rank
Due in part to my thwarted attempts at hitting a #1 ranking during my Dragon Hoard promo, I decided to compress this promotion. I already had a gradually rising crescendo going in, and nine days is still a respectable amount of time, hopefully enough to convince some algorithms to pitch in with the heavy lifting.
This was the first time I’d ever run this book through these promoters, so I had the full list to work with. The schedule looked like this:
Dec. 1-5: Read Freely, Book Praiser
Dec. 2: Ereader Love and Free Books
Dec. 4-9: Contentmo
Dec. 5-9: Discount Book Man, Ereader Café, Digital Books Today, Ask David
Dec. 6-9: Bookzio
Dec. 7-9 Reading Deals and Bookorium
Dec. 9: My Book Place, Pretty Hot, Awesome Gang
There’s no point in trying to sort out individual results because every day had multiple promoters. I did my best to set up an upward trend and let it rip. All but four promoters were aimed at the final day.
Dec. 1st—16 downloads, Dec. 2nd—20, Dec. 3rd—12, Dec. 4th—12, Dec. 5th—103, Dec. 6th—55, Dec. 7th--72, Dec. 8th—244, Dec. 9th--91.
As regards rank, I'm afraid my quest is still an ongoing thing. The best I did was:
- #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mythology & Folk Tales > Fairy Tales
- #2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Fantasy > Anthologies & Short Stories
- #27 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Holidays
Still, that was over 600 books moved in a little over a week. As of writing this post, 12T is showing a higher download rate than I had pre-promotion, so that bit panned out, but part of that could simply be that this is a Christmas book, and the calendar’s ticking down toward the holiday. Also, I’ve scooped up a new review already, which got me off the 29 reviews spot that I’d been stuck in for a while.
And it didn’t cost anything. And okay, maybe I would have made a pile of hypothetical money if I’d sold the book instead, but the most likely case is that I’d have spent more than I brought in. My catalog is just too small, and it doesn't as yet include any novels (two novella-length collections and two novelettes).
What I really wanted out of this thing was more readers, especially ones who’d read more than one of my books. According to Joanna Penn (and I’m sorry, but I didn’t save the link, so you’ll have to trust me on this one), on average, it takes readers 3-4 books to reliably recognize your name.
My also-boughts and also-viewed are showing my other books, so hopefully, I had some success in this area as well, although there’s no way to back that up with actual numbers.
There’s also no way to tell how many copies were actually read. The old kboards metric was ten percent, but that was based on sell-though in a series. Factoring in an average of one review per thousand copies given away, my guess at reading rate is around 20%, but that’s only a guess. If accurate, that means around 300 people read my work who probably wouldn’t have otherwise, or at least not in this time frame.
I’m also blogging about this promotion, although I broke it into parts. Other than that, it’s meant to be my holiday gift to AW. Hopefully, it can help someone else. : )
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