Last week I
was thinking about free promotions on Amazon and whether they work any more.
I’ve been using them since I published my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, in July 2012
and have given away more than 4,000 e-books since then.
All right,
I know what you’re thinking. Go ahead and say it. At least we’ve established
what my books are worth. Can we move on, now?
Seriously,
anyone who decides to start writing novels, even popular genre novels like I
do, has to look at it as a long-haul proposition. Sure, there are people who
get a bestseller on their first try, but maybe one author in a hundred thousand
catches lightning in a bottle like that. The rest of us are doing well to be
making grocery money after five or six books. Rent? You’d better have a day
job.
Chasing Readers, Not Dollars
With my
third mystery novel, Not Death, But Love, about to be published on Amazon, I’m
still very much in the business of going after readers, not dollars. If I build
a reasonably sized, loyal audience for my books, I’ll eventually make some
money. And the good thing about self-publishing is that I don’t need to have
Stuart Woods or Mary Higgins Clark sales numbers to make a go of it.
That’s just
as well. My books are more Josephine Tey than Mickey Spillane, and they’re
aimed at the classic mystery niche. But finding the readers who inhabit that
niche takes a lot of time and effort.
For some
time now, I’ve felt that free promotions were part of that effort. When you’re
an unknown writer, one way to get people to give you a look is to offer a free
sample. If they like it, the reasoning goes, they’ll come back and pay for the
next one.
There’s a
lot of slop in that approach. When a book is free, plenty of people will
download it and never look at it. So I figure, based on the return rate for
direct mail solicitations, I’d have to give away a hundred books to get two
readers who will actually read my book.
Diminishing Returns
In the
beginning, I was averaging more than a hundred books a day on free-giveaway
days, with a few considerably bigger blockbuster days. Over the past six
months, the well has been running dry, and I’ve been wondering if free
promotions work any more. I Googled that question and found plenty of other
writers who shared my skepticism.
Monday of this
week, with misgivings and low expectations, I did a free promotion for my
second novel, Wash Her Guilt Away.
Halfway through the day, it looked as if I’d fall short of 100 downloads for
the day. Then, between 1 and 4 Pacific time, the book started moving like ice
cream in a Georgia July. It finished the day at #12 on the Kindle free crime
fiction list, and it was the second best day ever for free downloads of that
book.
So what do
I make of this? My guess is that it was an anomaly — that there happened to be
a large number of crime and mystery readers who started looking at free books
at the same time, and I just rode the wave. But I could be wrong. It’s hard
enough being an author, but the hardest thing of all is trying to make sense of
your sales numbers. My head is being perpetually scratched.
