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Death of Secrets hits BookBub

As I’ve learned the art of marketing an indie novel, I’ve been trying to inform readers about what works and what doesn’t. But in all those posts, there has been one name that loomed over everything I wrote about analyzing sales. As I wrote “E-Reader News Today is good” or “Facebook advertising stinks,” there was always a caveat. The huge, most effective marketing channel that everyone talks about is BookBub.com. And I couldn’t report on it because they would not accept Death of Secrets for promotion.

Until now!

Yes, DoS finally qualified for the (reputedly) most effective marketing channel out there for e-books. So after April 29th and 30th, I hope to be able to report on just how well BookBub works.

So I want to say a thank you to everyone who responded when I asked for reviews. Your actions directly helped make this happen. More and more five star reviews make it possible for an e-book to qualify for some marketing channels. Thanks to you, I guess I finally made it over BookBub’s threshold.

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Sample Chapter Coming April 28!

Life of Secrets is now to the point where I’m ready to release a sample chapter! Starting a week from tomorrow, I’ll make it available on www.bowengreenwood.com. At the same time, the Amazon.com listing for Death of Secrets will also change to include a sample chapter from Life of Secrets.

As for the full novel, although I’m a bit behind the schedule I set for myself, it will still be published on June 1. The timeline was built to allow for a few delays.

Currently, the manuscript is in what I call the “rough rough draft” format. The story is finished, and I’m cleaning up some of the errors that result from the way in which I work on books (several different files, writing the beginning, middle, and end in different documents, constant revision of what’s already written to accommodate new ideas — etc.).

My first choice for editor doesn’t have the time right now, so hopefully this week I’ll learn about my second prospect.

The book will be substantially shorter than Death of Secrets. Currently it’s 53,000 words, and I doubt it will grow much beyond 55,000. Death of Secrets was closer to 90,000. Hey, that’ll cut the cost of editing almost in half!

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E-Reader News Today: Current Marketing Champ

I just paid my bill from E-reader News Today. Are you wondering how much it was? Of course you are! Answer: Under $10.

Their billing system is simple: they invoice you for 25% of what you earn on books sold by people clicking on the e-mail in which they featured your book. You math whizzes out there will have already grasped hold of the secret: you literally cannot lose with ereadernewstoday.com. If you sign up for a paid promotion with them and only sell a single book, you will still profit because they only charge you 25% of what you make. On the other hand, if you sell more books, your profit is larger.

They billed me for 110 books sold. Personally, I credit that promotion with 150-ish books sold. Probably some of the sales that happened while my promotion with them was going on were due to how my book rose in the amazon rankings, rather than people clicking the specific e-mail link.

Either way, I made over $50 on book sales for those couple days, and paid less than $10 for the promotion that made that happen.

My fellow indie authors, I am proud to recommend you toward e-reader news today!

Incidentally, in addition to having the best pricing structure so far, I also had more paid sales while I was promoting with them than with any other marketing avenue I’ve tried so far, including the free promotion. So not only are they cheap, they’re also effective.

It should be pointed out here that the reigning conventional wisdom about indie authors is that bookbub.com is the best e-mail marketing promotion you can buy. So far, I have not succeeded in persuading bookbub to list Death of Secrets. I’ll report on them when I do!

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Sequel-izing

For people who enjoyed Death of Secrets, it might raise questions that Life of Secrets is a sequel, but features a completely new main character.

Don’t worry!

Congressman Mike Vincent is back in a pivotal role, and Kathy returns as well. D.W. Tilman will pass across the scene in flashbacks to his younger days.

Vincent finds himself a key player on the Presidential campaign of a man who might finally give Americans a leader who’s humble and sincere. Since it’s part of the marketing blurb for the novel, it’s not giving anything away to say that candidate dies early on. The whole story hinges on choices Mike makes.

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Free promotion – results

Holding a free promotion for an e-book on Amazon definitely does increase paid sales after the free promotion ends. So far, the increase is not as large as the increase from paid forms of promotion like e-mail lists, but it is definitely there.

On a normal day with no promotions going on and none recently concluded, Death of Secrets sells at most 1-2 e-books a day. It may sell zero, on depressing days.

From 12:01 am Sunday, when the promotion was over, through now, about 30 paid downloads have happened. So the rate is way higher than zero promotion. To compare, however, being listed in E-Reader News Today generated about 150 paid downloads in a day. And being Thriller of the Week on Kindle Nation Daily generated about 100.

To make the free promotion work, I submitted the fact that Death of Secrets was free for a limited time to about ten different e-mail lists that notify readers of free books. I also scheduled about a dozen tweets on @bowengreenwood and @deathofsecrets over the course of the two days, plus relatively fewer but still  a noticeable number of Facebook posts, Linked In, Google+, this blog, etc.

I also had a $75 Facebook ad credit, so I threw that into the mix as well, running $70 worth of Facebook ads to indicate that the book was free.

Over the course of the free promotion, the book was downloaded 5789 times. Facebook tells me that the ads generated 480 clickthroughs to the Amazon sales page. 480 is not immaterial, so I have found a way that Facebook can contribute to e-book marketing. However, considering that if I hadn’t had the $75 credit Facebook would have been the only advertising I did that cost money, its utility is really not on par with the free e-book lists.

In July, which I hope will be the second month of sales of Life of Secrets, I hope to repeat some of these studies with a book priced slightly higher. Death of Secrets is at $0.99 for its regular price as an e-book, which I used after reading a lot of discussion among indie authors that “$0.99 is the new free” and that readers were really sucking up books at that price. At this stage of the writing business, I am committed to long-term audience development, rather than huge immediate profits, so I didn’t mind pricing it low.

However, I have no experiential data of my own to indicate how the $0.99 price will work in terms of Sales numbers compared to a $2.99 price tag. I hope to see how the sequel fares if I keep it at $2.99 for longer.

Learning about e-book marketing has been super rewarding. I’ve enjoyed sharing the information as I get it.

Coming up next, a look at where Life of Secrets is in the writing process.

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Death of Secrets Free Promotion Ends Tonight!

Download Death of Secretsfor free right now! It’s free on Amazon Kindle through the end of the night. If you haven’t read it yet, this is your chance!

The sequel is coming out in two months, and it’s going to rock! But if you want to get the full enjoyment out of Life of Secrets, you really need to read Death of Secrets first. So get yours tonight before the promotion ends at midnight!

Click here to download Death of Secrets for FREE

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Free Promotion

You heard it here first: The e-book version of Death of Secrets will be a free download on Amazon starting tomorrow and ending Saturday.

Free Promotions are supposed to be one of the most effective marketing techniques for e-books. Many authors report that, even after the book stops being free, they enjoy several (many?) days of highly increased sales after giving it away for free for two or three days. As I understand it, the theory is that the days of being free shoots the book so high up Amazon’s rankings that many new people discover it.

I will report on how it goes!

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Kindle Nation Daily

As I evaluate the various electronic places where I have marketed my book, Kindle Nation Daily stands out as one of the more effective ads I placed. Although I would rank it slightly below e-reader news today, it was still very good.

My “Thriller of the Week” sponsorship there yielded over 100 sales, which is more than any other single form of advertising except among my personal friends. I studied the statistics they publish about sponsor sales figures, and saw that DoS had a bigger bounce from their advertising than any other sponsorship for which the book wasn’t free. It worked quite well for me.

It has to be said that my total sales were far from earning back the cost of the sponsorship. So from an entrepreneurial perspective, it was not a success. However, I view the writing project on an 18-month long timeline. The question isn’t what I’m making right now. The question is, what will writing earn for me in June of 2015. My hope is that, assuming my current job ends then, I will be able to write full time. So all the marketing efforts for Death of Secrets, Life of Secrets, etc are aimed at building an audience who will buy future books.

From that perspective, KND definitely succeeded. I assume that essentially every one of the 100+ sales was a new reader. Will they buy future books? Time will tell. But I hope so.

I have promotions upcoming with ereadernewstoday.com and thefussylibrarian.com. I will evaluate their effectiveness as they happen. I am also planning at least 2 more free promotions, and I hope to study on whether any one day works better than another. Posts on all those subjects will be published as the data comes in.

The big one is bookbub. They are supposed to be the giant of indie author promotion right now. so far, I have not had success in getting listed there, but if I have the opportunity to work with them, I will certainly post about the effectiveness.

Perhaps, once I’ve run through the marketing plan for Death of Secrets and life of Secrets, I’ll be able to write a book about successful marketing of e-books. How very meta…

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E-Reader News Today

Death of Secrets is featured on ereadernewstoday.com. As marketing opportunities go, this one may be the best I’ve encountered for self-published authors. I’ve sold about 49 e-books since the listing went live at around 9am mountain time — in less than 11 hours, in other words. And honestly those didn’t really start coming in until around noon. So really it’s about 8 hours to sell 49 e-books. Based on my experience with Kindle Nation Daily / bookgorilla, it seems likely this surge will continue at least through tomorrow morning. If so, there’s a good chance that this promotion will exceed the success rate of the previous promotion.

What makes ereadernewstoday.com the superior promotion, though, is their price structure. As I understand it, I will receive a bill in a few days for 25% of the dollar amount I make in the first two days of the promotion. That makes it effectively a can’t-lose proposition from a return-on-investment perspective.

I’ll report in a week or so on whether this worked out as expected. If it does, I would say ereadernewstoday gets my strong recommendation for any indie author to use in promoting their work.

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Goodreads

For those who haven’t heard of it, goodreads.com is a social network for readers and writers. It’s like Facebook, but with a focus on books instead of cat pictures.

Given the subject matter, I naturally thought that Goodreads would be a great place to advertise Death of Secrets.

As far as I can tell, I could not possibly have been more wrong.

I must state upfront that I did not create a specific url to track goodreads purchases. In fact, they prefer that people buy books through their system, so the specific URL wouldn’t really have worked.

That being said, I pretty much never saw any spike in my daily sales numbers that correlated to people “adding the book” on goodreads. It’s possible that a purchase or two snuck in while I wasn’t looking, but I never saw it.

One thing Goodreads does is manage giveaways. You can offer copies of your book for sale, and through the goodreads system people enter to win one of those copies. I did not take advantage of that system this time, but it’s the one thing I might try again on Goodreads. Other than that, this advertising market doesn’t really fit into the marketing plan for Life of Secrets.