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It has been a long time since I’ve paid to promote any of my books. Most of my reasoning for this is because my book sales, page reads and reviews have been rising without the real need for any investment in advertising. My last book promo effort was all the way back in September of 2022 and combined the release of my 8th book with my 1st book securing a BookBub Featured Deal. What followed was probably my best ever run of months for sales.
As someone who is constantly analysing things, I predicted that perhaps my run of luck would dry up soon enough and so I decided to book some much needed advertising but from the title you can see this is just part 1 of my April 2023 plans to sell a bunch of books.
You shall find my analysis, results and who I advertised with below. Let us dive in.
2022 was strong…
2022 happened to be my successful year ever as an indie author but it took a bunch of years to get there. It was the year of my best ever book launch and royalties – that is without mentioning the personal sales records I smashed but enough with the boasting. How did I make 2022 my best? There were lots of factors and I’ll link some further reading below but a good book promotion will bring results long after it has happened.
Having a complete book series all available via kindle unlimited has become a lucrative endeavour for me in recent times and my advice for series writers would be simple: get that book series finished – readers want a complete series and they will read them all if they are available. Much like my next bit of advice – backlist is King.
Having a backlist that includes a completed series and then advertising that successfully has brought me rewards that only really tailed off in the early days of April this year. As you can see above, the spike in the first graph represents that BookBub featured deal and then the results kept coming in.
As well as page reads, sales remained consistently strong and the amazing thing about these sales is that they were driven mostly by social media and most likely returning readers. Until April 2023 I had not advertised since September 2022. If you want to know how I sell regularly on via social media, check out my Twitter coaching sessions – they lay it out in detail.
The Promotion
Knowing I hadn’t advertised in a while, I thought maybe it was time to, but this would be a multiple book and multiple week plan of attack. Week 1 of my plan would be to run one of my oldest promo tricks in the book. A free book promo while also linking others in the series and reducing their price. My Order of the Following Series would be the instigator of this method with book 1 Open Evening being free to download while the others in the series were 99 cents or equivalent to download.
My best results from a free promo with other books attached comes from just doing this for a day or two. The factor of time and this being a ‘one off’ or once a year type of deal will entice potential readers and when it comes to a free promo, quantity is key.
The second part of this process would be to then bring the price of book 1 up to 99 cents for day 2 and advertise the whole series as discounted.
Results
On Friday April 7th 2023 Open Evening was free to download with the 4 other books in the Order of the Following Series discounted to 99 cents. Here are the results:
521 total free downloads – a great number.
82 paid sales of the 4 books in the rest of the series with Darke Apocalypse leading the way on day 1. As you can see with this graph sales continued for a few days after as the series remained discounted.
Total combined sales with free and paid came to 676 a week after the promotion. A decent spike in readers for me and probably a much needed influx of potential new readers.
A good book promo will drive sales and potential page reads for some time after. Although it is still early days, this promo brings promise of more.
Advertisers
This promo was advertised by the following book promo sites:
Freebooksy – Horror Series Promotion
My Book Place
E Reader News Today
Other Factors for Success
Advertising was a big driving factor for these results but here are some other factors that helped:
Free promos are a please all and hope to appeal to as many as possible types of deal. No matter what many people say, free promos do result in some readers.
Time – this was a limited time deal, this can tap into urgency or even impulse for potential readers to grab a deal.
Existing reviews/Ratings – the earlier books in the Order of the Following Series have a good number of reviews. Darke Blood hit 70 Amazon ratings just before the promo. You can also see that my books have decent professional covers that I invested in. Visual is everything when it comes to potential readers finding your works.
Social media is something I tend to pick and choose my moments with. I didn’t mention the free promo but the day after I did mention that all books in the series were discounted. I also put a blog post out advertising the fact.
Final Thought
An important a probably needed book promo. The Order of the Following Series sells better during fall/winter months and so I shall put my promotional efforts for it on hold over the spring/summer. Of course this is just part 1 and you can expect the next part to cover another book with another promo – stay tuned and thanks for reading.
You shall find some relevant resources below including the link for my author/blogger/social media guide book Consistent Creative Content.
Lee's Hall of information 