Back in November I did a blog post about my first experience doing a free promotion with KDP Select on Amazon.
This initial free promotion was a bit of a failure considering I fell ill and didn’t manage to tell a single person about my free book. However, the results were interesting, giving me a baseline for what to expect with zero promotion.
Just to recap, I managed to get a bunch of downloads;
Amazon.com – 87
Amazon.co.uk – 33 (one of these was me)
Amazon.de – 11
Amazon.fr – 1
And the book reached spot 98 in the Amazon UK Erotic Fiction Free Bestseller category.
This time, I’m giving away a different book, Just Another Day at the Office – I and I even have a bit of a cunning plan.
- I’m spamming the hell out of Facebook especially and to a lesser extent Twitter and Google+. If you’re my FB friend, you might want to ignore me during this period, after getting your free copy of course!
- After reading the free book, readers who want to read more of my work can actually do so because I have more published (Last time the free book was my ONLY book).
- Just Another Day at the Office – I, obviously, is only the first part of a larger work. My free promo coincides with the launch of part two. Hopefully my free promo will hook readers into buying the next part.
- Compared to last time, I have some lovely writer friends who are helping to put the word out about this promo, and I even have some reviews already up on the book I’m giving away which should make it more attractive.
I cannot wait to see how this promo will play out!
Check back later, when I’ll update this post with the results.
Please note when comparing figures that the first giveaway lasted only one day, the current one will last two days.
The results are in!
Downloads; 2157 in total!
Amazon.com – 1887
Amazon.co.uk – 202 (one of these was me)
Amazon.de – 55
Amazon.fr – 2
Amazon.es – 2
Amazon.it – 1
Amazon.co.jp – 1
Amazon.ca – 7
Rankings:
#4 in Free Erotica on Amazon.com!
#9 in Free Erotica on Amazon.co.uk!
Reviews/Likes
I’ll be honest, I am not sure how many likes I had before the promo so it would be hard to measure any effect. But on 6 and 7 February (while the book was free) I did manage to get two awesome reviews on Amazon.com and one on Goodreads. Also, a few people marked it as “to read” on Goodreads on the 6th.
Resulting sales
It’s too early to tell if now that Just Another Day at the Office – I is no longer free, I might get sales based on how it performed in the rankings. I will post an update about this in a week or two. But, part two, which I launched at the same time as the free promo (with very limited marketing efforts comparatively) managed to achieve quite a few sales in these two days. Some will have been by readers who were already waiting for it to come out, but I suspect that a fair number were from people who may have wanted more of the same story after reading part one.
UPDATE:
18th Feb – Almost 2 weeks after the free promo, I can see a clear trend in my sales on Amazon. Note the graph below. the horizontal axis represents days, 1 being the day I did the free promo. The vertical axis shows the total sales up to that day. (Growth = I’ve sold something, Flat = no sales).
After giving away part one for free on 6 Feb, you can see a sharp rise in sales immediately after, since things have calmed down but I am still seeing more sales than I normally would during times when I’m not actively promoting my work. There is also a little effect on sales of Ladies’ Day, which I haven’t promoted at all for months.
Verdict
This went way better than I expected! I never thought I’d get close to 1000 downloads, never mind exceeding 2100! And hopefully using the free giveaway as a hook to get readers to try out more of my work will pay off beyond these few days as well. I’ll definitely do this again, whether with the same book or something new perhaps.