How Much Do You Promote?

Hi,

I don't promote. I just put the book out there and move on to the next one, hoping that each book will work as it's own add. But I'm probably in the minority, and my sales aren't spectacular,

Cheers, Greg.

 

Hi,

Unfortunately I'm even more basic! Sometimes I have made an announcement here and there. Not always.

Cheers, Greg.

 

Hi,

I currently have nineteen books out, a dozen of them novels. It was my second book Maverick that first took off. Published in 2011 - nearly a year after my first it's sold about 5k copies now - as I said not spectacular but I'm happy with it. Since then it's been up and down, usually relating to genre. My epic fantasies usually sell around 2k copies in the first year after they're published, my sci fi's about half that, and my Christian fiction less again. Short stories and novellas sell very few copies.

And actually I'm a kiwi. But yes, on the dashboard Amazon provides authors, you get a series of sales numbers which tell you which Amazon store sold how many of which books. Currently it's the US first, the UK second at maybe a quarter of US sales, then Australia and Canada have to duke it out for the bronze medal at maybe ten percent of the US numbers.

The other stores, France, Germany, Italy and India have to settle for "also rans". I don't think I have had a month from them where any have sold more than a dozen copies, but English is not their primary language so that's to be expected.

One of the things I am considering is getting translations done for these countries.

Cheers, Greg.

 

Derek Murphy over at CreativIndie has a lot of good advice about marketing and promoting, especially utilizing social media.

creativindie.com

 

Without proper promotional strategies and without implementing them i don't think so there might be some possible chances of getting to some where at the world wide web. Being precise and by sharing quality content at your business website could have definitely leads toward great results.

 

I mostly just focus on writing more. I've started using writing contests as a way of promoting my work, and having fun. Perhaps I'll enter the next one on this forum. On social media only about 20 minutes a day: Twitter's getting easier, but Facebook is still hard for me.

 

I've done a bit of promotion lately - the 2-week launch of my second book (The Fire Mages), and a discount week for the first one (The Plains of Kallanash). Broken down by weeks, you can see the effect of the promotions on sales (numbers are sales AND borrows for both books):

Pre-promo: 23 per day {pre-orders plus 3 days of social}
Jan week 2: 13 per day {Fire Mages Promo - free and cheap sites}
Jan week 3: 30 per day {Fire Mages Promo - big hitters}
Jan week 4: 23 per day
Feb week 1: 16 per day
Feb week 2: 11 per day
Feb week 3: 30 per day {Fire Mages 10/day; Kallanash 20/day via a Countdown promo}
Feb week 4: 13 per day
Mar week 1: 11 per day
Mar week 2: 10 per day

You can see that the promotion increases sales dramatically at the time, and then tapers off quite quickly. ETA: I should add that before the pre-orders for The Fire Mages kicked in, sales of Kallanash were basically flat-lining - maybe 1 or 2 sales/borrows per week. So the promos made a huge impact.

I pay for ads on websites that advertise free or discounted ebooks (eg Ereader News Today, FreeBooksy/BargainBooksy, etc). The Fire Mages promo used a dozen or so sites and cost $171. The Kallanash one used 4 sites, and cost me $55. I don't do any other kind of promotion, apart from announcing new releases, sales, etc., on Twitter, blog, mailing list, and a few forums.

I've said this before, but absolutely the best resource for this kind of information is the Writers' Cafe over at Kboards. Or read David Gaughran's books, Let's Get Digital and Let's Get Visible.