Promo Week Preliminary Results

Though there are still a few days left at $0.99, the email promos are all sent and sales are settling down a little. As such, the near term apex has probably been reached. I achieved the following as of this evening:

• #16 best seller in Teen & Young Adult Wizards & Witches Fantasy
• #17 best seller in Teen & Young Adult Coming of Age Fantasy eBooks
• #36 best seller in Coming of age Fantasy eBooks
• #47 best seller in Teen & Young Adult Epic Fantasy
• #5,555 was my best Overall Sales Rank
• ~120 orders (I’m guessing this will probably grow by another 10-20 before my promo ends)
• ~10300 KENP read on Kindle Unlimited
• Probably about 150-170 readers introduced to my book (approximately doubling total readership).
• 3 people rated my book (so far)
• 0 people wrote a review for my book (so far)
• I made about $132 in royalties in the last 7 days, expecting $150 or so by end of the promo week.

Ratings and reviews of course come after people finish reading, so that may still grow. Any readers who want to see book 2 sooner rather than later can help by giving it 5 stars or 4 stars plus an insightful review… Any unexplained rating less than 5 stars is effectively saying “Don’t bother writing another”.

That sounds harsh, but how many 3 star books did you buy this year? None? Yeah, neither did anyone else… And I doubt Amazon ever recommends them either. Why would they waste screen space recommending a 3 star book when they’ve probably got a million or more 4 star and up options that the readers are much more likely to enjoy? The book market is is crazy competitive, and so if you aren’t near the top, you might as well be near the bottom.

To get the above results, I did the following

• Put my book on $0.99 promotion
• Advertised with amazon keyword ads (~$40)
• Advertised on Facebook ($100)
• Bought a BargainBooksy ($100)
• Cashed in my free BookSends deal from my editor ($25 value)
• Was reviewed by a booktuber (Fantasy Fiction Fanatics) just before the week started.
• Posted repeatedly on Facebook, & twitter.

So financially, in the near term, this week was a loss of over $100. I knew that the advertising I set up would probably be at a loss, but I hoped to pile on as many factors as I could to reach as high as possible. The hope is that I will get some more ratings and reviews that make future sales easier, and build readership, and that will pay dividends in the future. Hopefully some of the readers will tell friends, give my book as a gift in the future or nominate me as a read for a book club.

I took notes as the week went along and thus have material for a blow by blow, and also will review and compare the BargainBooksy vs BookSends in the near future. Also stay tuned for a tiny super early teaser regarding Book 2!

My guess is that, all told, since release on July 25, I’ve had 300 people read my book. I may have put in as much as 60 hours of effort to get there (half that preparing and attending the book signing at WizardFest. Promoting is draining and expensive, so after today, I’ll be putting promotional activities on pause for a while so I can get back to doing things like writing book 2…