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.