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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.