In an
attempt to figure out how things work on Amazon, more specifically Kindle, I
tried a new approach to free promotions of my mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, during the month of March. I still don’t
understand how things work on Amazon, but pulled together a few strands of
information that I’ll share for whatever they’re worth.
For
starters I decided to run three promotions during the month, all on weekends. The
first was Sunday March 3 and the second was Saturday March 16. I figured I’d
see whether Saturday or Sunday generated more downloads, then run the third
promotion the following weekend on whichever day yielded better results.
It wasn’t
even close. That first Sunday I moved 306 free books, the best day I’d ever had
to that point. The McHenry Inheritance
climbed to number 53 on the free mystery list. On Saturday the 16th,
the total was 72 books and my best showing was number 2660 on the overall list.
So I scheduled my third promo (and last for the 90-day period) on Sunday March
24.
Making a Big Push on Twitter
For that
day, I tried something different — a big push on Twitter (handle:
@Qgordonnovel). I always tweet that I’m offering a free promotion early in the
morning of the day it’s happening, but this time I went overboard.
The day
before I went to Twitter and followed 150 new people, which generated a number
of follow-backs while the book was out there. During the day of the free
promotion, I also tweeted every couple of hours about how the book was doing.
It’s hard to say how much, if at all, that helped. I wasn’t re-tweeted at all,
and my overall follower base is still relatively small (under 2,000).
Nonetheless,
the book did great, with more than 470 downloads — far and away the best day
ever. It was in the top 4 percent of free books downloaded on Amazon that day
and climbed to number 33 on the mystery list. If I’m not proving anything else,
I’m at least demonstrating that I can give it away.
The big
question, of course, is how many of those people who got it free are going to
read it at any time in the next year, never mind sooner. I can’t even imagine
how you could get a reliable answer to that question.
But Does It Pay?
Also
unclear is whether the run on free copies of the books translated (or will
translate) into paid sales of any significant nature. The week after that big
Sunday, my book sold a little better than it had earlier in the month, but the
numbers involved are so small that the difference is probably statistically
insignificant.
I’ve
visited a few online conversations about the value of free promotions, and the
consensus seems to be that there’s no immediate impact. No one, however, seems
to be looking at it as a long-term proposition. If ten percent of the people
who download the book free end up reading it in the next year and telling a
friend who buys it (or better yet, liking it on Facebook), that’s a good return
on the promotion, even if it takes a while.
“Even if it
takes a while” might actually be the operative phrase in evaluating
self-publishing results. For every Fifty
Shades of Grey that gets crazy-good sales results, there are probably
hundreds of good books that build an audience slowly through word-of-mouse and
through subsequent books the author writes. I can only keep moving forward and
hope that The McHenry Inheritance
will be one of those.
