So my backlist has been up on KDP for about 40 days, and predictably sales have started to slow a bit compared to closer to the start of their release date. Gravity is still chugging along well, but the other two books are dying on the vine, so to speak. I was thinking about running a Kindle Countdown Deal, reducing the price of my first book, Under the Knife from, $3.99 to $0.99 for 7 days in September. Anyone with experience running these have any suggestions? Caveats? General advice or socially distant fist bumps for moral support?
I was planning to do promo on my social media for it. I'm still not at the point where I want to invest money in advertising - I will probably wait until I actually get my first royalty check for that.
that can be a bit chicken and egg... i'd suggest that even if you don't want to go into the wonders of AMS of, BB, or FB ads you might want to boost your KCD with something like bargain booksy or book barbarian promo (probably not barbarian actually - they are mostly thrillers... but whatever the romance analog is) the trouble with social media promo is it only organically reaches people who are already following you, and they probably already bought your back list... good for new releases, less so for those you are currently marketing.
I know you said you're not ready to invest, but it's still worth mentioning. FB ads don't have to go to followers. You can target an audience by their likes (Romance, specific books, etc.) and things like region and age. It's not free, but it's cheap. You basically pick your price and get a certain number of ads seen. It always worked well for my store. I don't know about books. It would be interesting to find out.
I totally understand what you're saying, it's just that I've been out of work for 7 months except for a tiny part-time gig that doesn't even pay for groceries, so right now I can't let myself go into the hole as an author. That said, I literally just got a job offer yesterday with a big pay increase from anything I've ever made before, so in the future I'll have more disposable income to throw at my books.
Can you do Facebook ads if you don't have a FB fan page? I only have my own personal account, and I don't want it associated with my writing at all. I don't need 84 year old aunt Rita down in Florida finding out that I write sexually explicit books!
you need a page - but its very easy and free to set one up.. david gaughran has a decent blog series on it found here https://davidgaughran.com/2018/11/28/how-to-make-pretty-facebook-page/ point of note though if you are new to advertising i'd say start with AMS ... facebook and bookbub can wind up more expensive... its actually quite hard to get AMS to take your money so they are the better learning tool
Congratulations! This is such a worrying time for so many people for so many reasons. Not the least of which is financial uncertainty. Glad you landed well with this one.
Thank you! It's by far the longest I've ever been unemployed - Mr. Kelly's job is stable and has been keeping us afloat, but it's definitely been tight. I'm really looking forward to contributing to the household in a meaningful way again.
Something interesting I've observed today is possibly the benefit of networking via social media. When I sent my original announcement email this morning I had no new purchases for most of the day, but after a few retweets from my followers who in turn have over 5k followers of their own total, I now have 1 sale per retweet in a single day, more than the book has sold total in the last 36 days. At a reduced price, for sure, but if they like what they read it could build my audience for new releases going forward.
Well, with less than 5 hours left in the promo, I'm ready to chalk my Kindle Countdown down as a rousing success considering that it cost me zero out of pocket dollars. At the time I began the promo, UTK had been self-published on Amazon for 49 days. In one week I sold 80% more books than I had up until that point historically. Very impressed for a book that's going on 4 years old at this point! The other thing I did was to set up a custom link on bitly.com that was only associated with the free marketing I did on social media (i.e., originally posted to only people following me on those accounts). I had 50% as many sales during the week as I had clicks - it's not a hard and fast conversion rate since they might have found the book to purchase through some other way, but I'm guessing via the big uptick in sales/clicks that there's a correlation somewhere. Once my KU renews I'll throw From Blood to Roses in the 90 day window out there to see if I get similar results!
