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Today, I’m doing a deep analysis of my recent KU free days promotion, what I did, and how it went. So, though it is October and therefore Spooky Season, our theme of the spooky side of publishing is going to start next week, because I have a feeling this postmortem may go a little long.
So last week, I mentioned what I’d set up to promote the free days for my first-in-series historical cozy mystery. Here’s how it went.
Over the course of five days I had 5,301 free downloads of The Poison in All of Us. I hit the top of the free charts in U.S. Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, and LGBTQ+ Mystery. Probably in Cozy Mystery as well, though I was traveling with only mobile devices which made it hard to check. I know I got pretty far up that one, but I can’t be sure. I was in the top 100 free overall several times during the course of the promotion. I didn’t rank in Amateur Sleuth, but I could have. And here’s your first lesson from my experience. If you think you’re in a category and you are getting ready for a promotion like this, make sure you’re in that category for the Kindle store, not just for Books. I though I was in Amateur Sleuths, but it was only for paperback.
I probably was better served in terms of visibility by the Cozy Mystery, Historical Mystery, and U.S. Historical fiction categories than LGBTQ+ Mystery, even though it is personally important to me to be in that category. Unfortunately, like many queer categories, it has a lot of books listed that aren’t mysteries at all. They’re clearly romance. Category stuffing is a problem in many categories, but it seems to happen more to queer categories and plays into a number of stereotypes that I could go on about. Suffice it to say, queer people have interests outside of romance. Surprise. Surprise. And while I applaud what queer romance writers have done in being pioneers of representation for our community, it is frustrating when some folks category stuff without paying any heed to what that does to other’s visibility or public perception of books labeled as queer. But I am getting off topic now.
But, still, I feel quite positive about the number of downloads and the rankings. No promotion can go perfectly. Next, let’s analyze each advertising platform one at a time.
The first day of the promotion, I sent a newsletter to my email list and promoted on social media. I had a pretty good result from that, with some of the downloads being due to Amazon algorithms. I was pleased to see downloads start piling up before I’d sat down to compose my email. 335 for day one.
Day two had trickle over effect from the newsletter the previous day, as more folks opened their emails, but I also had my Hello Books promotion going out. Now, they specified clearly that I needed to have the discount in place by Thursday for the promotion to run, because they have both U.K. and U.S. audiences, and free days that start on Friday U.S. time would not be running Friday morning for the U.K. But I noticed the email went out at 4pm Eastern. I’m guessing that U.K. readers get these emails earlier than U.S. readers. That would be pretty late for the U.K. But I could get a clear answer on that. The reason I wanted to know was that I didn’t see a big spike in downloads until the Hello Books email went out. So I’m guessing I just don’t have as much appeal to U.K. readers, which makes sense as the series is heavily focused on U.S. History topics. U.S. readers just have a closer connection to those issues. Total for day two: 523 free downloads.
Day three blew every other day out of the water. Since I don’t know for sure that Hello Books didn’t send at 4pm Eastern to the U.K., I can’t be sure that a chunk of this isn’t from U.K. readers opening the next morning—though all of the days have trickle over effects to the next days. On day three, I had 2,015 free downloads. I had a Fussy Librarian ad, a newsletter swap, and my Facebook ad turned on a bit early, so part of that day had the FB ad too.
Day four was more modest, just one newsletter swap and the Facebook ad. 523 free downloads. Now to analyze the ad a bit, I know I need to work on my Facebook ad skills. That cost per click was way too high for a free book. I was looking at just under 20 cents per click, with 199 clicks over the two days. I was getting much better results from the other ads. I also can’t track whether these 199 clicks led to 199 downloads, because Facebook did not like my affiliate link. Using affiliate links for Facebook ads is technically against Amazon’s terms of service, so user beware, but it is the only way we can track the conversion rate on our Facebook ads if we don’t sell directly from our own websites. I’ve used it in the past, no problem, but for some reason, I couldn’t create an ad with one this time. I especially wanted to know my current conversion rate, since I changed my book description, but I can test that later with Amazon ads.
Day five was the Freebooksy ad. I’d lost a little momentum in day four, but still a very good result with 1,899 free downloads. I ended the promotion, not with the same rank I had in the free store—Amazon doesn’t do that anymore—but with a better paid rank than I started with.
All in all, I’m certainly going to repeat Fussy Librarian and Freebooksy in the future and try to stack them close together for some big momentum. I’ll probably also ad in Ereader News Today, which I didn’t use this time, but I have had good results with in the past. Now, this is just one author’s experience and different books in different genres may have very different results.
Now, for the real fun. Let’s talk money. I spent $230 on ads for this promotion. In addition to the free downloads, I had borrows in Kindle Unlimited and I had folks buying the next two books in the series. Then I had folks buying due to increased visibility when the book went back to paid. So far I’ve made almost $130. So I’m roughly $100 to break-even point. I’ll let y’all know how that goes. This is one of those things that trickles in over time. And the data is going to be a little muddy because naturally I’m not going stop promoting my books. It was an amount of money I felt comfortable losing should I have a poor result, but as it turns out, I’ve already made over half back.
So take from all this what you will. I’ll be taking that Fussy Librarian and Freebooksy are pretty good bets for me, that I need to work on my Facebook ad skills to reduce that cost per click, and that I still need to revisit categories before I work on some 99 cent promotions to round out the year. I’m also fairly encouraged by the readthrough I’m seeing so far. People are enjoying the series enough to continue. I was considering ending it after four books, but now I’m thinking I want to give it at least six books.
Well, that’s a wrap. As I anticipated, this is quite enough for one episode. Upcoming episodes may change depending on guest availability, but for the rest of October expect this podcast to discuss writing spooky things as well as some dangers that authors can fall into in this business. Think of it as a warning so you don’t get spooked down the road.