Promoting a book – or not (Part 2)

The big promotion weekend is behind me and it is time to evaluate the results. My approach was not really scientific, having booked several promotion services on the same day, so I cannot give you an info about each one of them separately, just an overall effect they had on the number of downloads of my book. Plus, on this day, and the next one, I offered my book on Amazon for free. The idea was to entice people to look at the book and to create some buzz (am I using the right expression here?).

The conclusion: people looove free stuff.

And I am glad they do. I am absolutely thrilled that over 200 people have downloaded my book and are hopefully reading it now, even though I have not earned a single cent (and have actually accumulated some expenses due to the promotion fees). I will be even more thrilled if at least a portion of them likes the book enough to recommend it or write a review (like the persons who had given me the first reviews for my books – thank you so much!), and maybe even go ahead and read my other book. The experience with the publishing and marketing has sensitized me to a value of a good review, so I have decided to do my best to help other authors by reviewing their books (you can read all about it in my posts about book reviews). But, let’s get back to the promotional services I tried.

4.) Fiverr:

Fiverr, as I found out, offers all kinds of services, basically connecting freelancers with their customers. For around 30 bucks I booked someone to advertise my book on their Facebook pages over the course of 5 days. Oh yeah, the name was bookkitty. Oh, I just checked, my book ad is really posted there! Thank you bookkitty for keeping your end of the bargain. Unfortunately, no book downloads today 🙁 No likes on your post either. I guess you still need to work on your followers list, maybe?

5.) Books Butterfly:

I booked the cheapest option: an 80 $ top 200 push for free books (my book was free on the day of promotion) with guaranteed 1000 + downloads. Apparently, it should work in 92% of the cases. I guess I am in that 8% minority. Should I ask for a refund (I might be able to get a coupon to use it for their services again)? But, do I want to use their services again? I did get to a #214 rank in the contemporary romance category (if only for a moment), and to a #1014 rank in the overall Kindle free ebook download on the day of promotion, which is pretty good if one considers that there are over 60 000 titles in the contemporary romance category. However, only I am aware of that fact (and maybe my cat, if he was paying attention). And it might have been the effect of other promotion services, not them. Hmmm…. Therefore, my verdict: they promise too much. No need to do that. Why make people hope? I knew I was not going to get 1000 + downloads, and I was perfectly happy with my 200 + downloads, but I was kind of annoyed by their propaganda. And one other interesting observation: they seem to have something going on with BookBub (a fancy promotion site for books accepting only special books with a sufficient number of reviews) because they do not refund the money if the book had already been promoted over BookBub. Why? Add that to the mysteries of the universe…

6.) eBooks Habit:

For 12 $ (15 $ usually, but I had a promo code) you can book 24 tweets over the course of one day about your book on the day of promotion. Let me see, it amounts to one tweet per hour. Wow! I can do math! They claim to have a lot of followers, but I haven’t checked. Sorry 🙁 Anyway, it is not that expensive and it cannot harm to have your book promoted in the Tweeter universe, so I would go for it from time to time, maybe during some of my next book promotion actions.

7.) Reddit and Facebook:

On the day of the promotion I posted a few posts on Reddit and Facebook informing people that my book is free on that and the following day. I even got upvoted on Reddit and earned some Karma points! I really like those Karma points 🙂 And I had one like on the Facebook post. I feel so grateful! This did not cost me anything but my time, and I always get such a warm feeling when someone likes my post or upvotes me, so emotionally, this has been highly rewarding. Have I mentioned Karma points? 🙂 The conclusion: I would recommend it. There are many channels for posts about free eBooks and it’s free advertising. Plus, I became active on both Reddit and Facebook and had fun exchanging infos about books and favorite writers, which I intend to do in the future, as well. It’s nice talking to people, and even the messages from the Reddit bot make my heart beat faster.

Now to end this post, one interesting Amazon absurdity: several people came across my book and downloaded it (because it was free) by clicking on Amazon ads (which I’m paying for). So basically, I paid Amazon so that people would read my book. Whaaat? No wonder J.B. is (almost) the richest man on Earth.

Anyway, I have more plans for future promotions and one other promotion coming, so be sure to check my posts for new insights.