They say book marketing tends to be more like a marathon than a sprint. For me, it feels like an around the world journey on foot with multiple maps. You plod along and change course when needed. The thing is you have to keep moving.
Right now, I'm throwing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks. I enrolled Bumped back into KDP (it'll be exclusively sold on Amazon for three months) so I could run a free promotion to reinvigorate interest. Mark Coker of Smashwords says the latest results from his Smashwords survey show that free is losing its luster because everyone is doing it. And it's true.
"Free remains one of the most powerful book marketing tools because it makes it easier for readers to take a risk on an author brand that is unknown or untrusted. Free ebooks, according to our data derived from iBooks downloads, generated 39 times more downloads on average during our survey period than books at any price. Yet the effectiveness of free is down dramatically compared to our 2013 (91X) and 2012 (100X) survey results. While there is still much untapped greenfield opportunity for indies to leverage free, I expect the effectiveness of free will continue to decline as more authors learn to take advantage of it. If you've never utilized free, now's the time to do so before your window of maximum opportunity closes further."
Over the course of 5 days, I received almost 3,000 downloads and hit #3 on Amazon's Free category under Women's Fiction (whoo! hoo!). Based on my last free promotion, I knew the bump (no pun in intended, well, maybe a little) in sales would be questionable because the second the promotion ended, my rankings plummeted back to it's pre-promotion nosebleed levels.
I knew the best I could hope for was generating additional reviews. I wasn't disappointed. 5-star reviews have been coming in, which is crucial.
Reviews are the online version of word-of-mouth that keeps your book alive. Not to mention, you also need a certain number of reviews to even place your book on some paid sites during promotional periods. Speaking of which, I submitted my book to a variety of sites to post my Kindle free days. That was hit or miss. Some sites are better than others, some charge and some just plain don't exist anymore. I worked from this list to submit my book.
I also posted chapters of Bumped on Wattpad and mentioned the free promotion at the end of the chapter and I think that helped as well. I'm almost at 10,000 reads and hope to keep that number growing.
The long and short of the free promotion is this, you have to be willing to take your book off all other platforms for at least three months if you want to offer your book free through Amazon's KDP Select program. Is it worth it? Probably more so for those with series because you can hook people on your first book and if they like it, they'll be willing to pay for the remaining books. Standalone books face a steeper road uphill but the additional reviews do pay off in the long run. At the end day, it's another tool to get your work out there in front of new readers and build your audience.
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