The Finish Line

It’s been a couple of days since I finished my free promotion on Kindle for “On Unfaithful Wings”, so it’s time to round-up the results and see how everything came out. Let’s start with the numbers.

Total downloads: 9558 (9399US, 97UK, 61DE and 1IT). My highest overall ranking on Kindle’s free “Bestsellers” list was #23; I hit #1 in both fantasy and horror. Of course, this was over a two-day period (Thurs. and Fri., April 26 and 27), which works out to an average download rate of 199/hour. In comparison, my promo in March was three days (Fri-Sun., March 23-25) and I had a total of about 8400 downloaded for a rate of 117/hour on average.

What was different this time? Three things. On the plus side, I was listed on both ENT and POI this time while only ENT picked me up on the first free run. Also, I employed the services of Book Tweeting Service to tweet my promo to over 60000 twitter followers. On the negative side, I was working my day job through this promo, so didn’t have much time to concentrate on it (I was on holidays last time). Enough background; on to the questions I know all the authors reading want to know the answer to:

Did the tweeting service help? I know you’d all like a definitive ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but it’s not as easy as that. Here’s what I know: for $57, they tweeted about my promo a total of 60 times over 6 different twitter accounts, a cost of just shy of $1/tweet. It’s a very cheap rate if you think 60000 pairs of eyes saw it ($0.00095/view if everyone tuned in). I’m sure it wasn’t that many; in fact, I can’t say how many unique pairs of eyes there are between the accounts. I used 2 different bitly links for tweeting purposes (I intended one to be for my tweets and one for theirs, but there was crossover as I retweeted theirs and they retweeted mine). In total, the two links were followed 142 times during my promo days, equating to a rate of $0.40/click if you attribute all the clicks to them. Which leads to the big question:

Was it worth it? Again, this is a difficult one to answer. My post-promo sales haven’t seen the same boost as they did after my first promo, but my sales for Sat/Sun are considerably more than my average weekend. Because of Book Tweeting Service? To some degree, maybe, but impossible to say for sure. And there’s no way to know if all (or any) of those 142 clicks equated to downloads. Your decision as to whether that’s worth the $57 or not.

Would you use them again, Bruce? I think I probably would, but I’d do two things differently. First, I’d work a little harder at the wording of my tweets. Second, I’d run with the service the day before to build anticipation and perhaps capture a few more views, and I may also continue the day after to see if it captures additional paid sales.

Final observation. I am extremely happy with the results of both of my promotions. My book is now in the hands of around 18000 people in the space of a little over a month. Wow! And my paid sales in the month between promos are 13 times what they were the previous month (and 29 times greater than the month before that). The thing I’ve noticed, though, is that the real success experienced from a Kindle free promo comes to those who make the top 10 on the free chart. Reaching that height puts you onto some popularity lists and the movers and shakers list where people can find you. The book that hit number one while I was on my free promo (“No Turning Back”) is still on the movers and shakers list two days later and is currently #63 on Kindle’s overall paid bestsellers. As happy as I am with my results, that is more what I’m looking for, so next time I will probably use the tweeting service again and look at adding a couple of other avenues of promotion to my bag of tricks. I’ll let you know what and how it goes when the time comes.

All I want is for everyone to have a copy of my book. That’s not too much to ask, is it?