My Bargainbooksy eBook Promotion Results - Meh!

Last week I did a Bargainbooksy paid eBook promotion for my latest novel, Tarot Card Killer. You might remember reading back in my latest monthly report that I was hoping to get just a few sales. Here’s what I said:

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Hey, after getting just 2 sales on that book in 3 weeks I’d love to get even 5 to 6 sales – 10 would be a good day.

Well, I did much better than 5 to 6 sales, and even got more than 10. All in all I pulled in 22 sales for the book, about twice as many as I was hoping for, but still not nearly enough to even pay for the ad.

The ad cost $50 and I made 22 sales at $0.99 with a $0.35 royalty for each sale, giving me a profit of $7.70 and a loss of $42.30.

Still, making money wasn’t really my intention with the promo, it was to get my book read and seen by more people. I did both (well, they downloaded it so they may read it) and here’s the rundown of some of the other benefits I got from the Bargainbooksy paid eBook promotion.

Increased Amazon Ranking

Before I did the sale I had only had 2 sales on the book since putting it out on December 9, and I was sinking fast in the rankings. I can’t remember exactly where I was at, but it was around #770,000 or so.

At first I wasn’t getting much traction from the Bargainbooksy ad that I could see, even though I had gotten up to around 7 or 8 sales by 3 PM. I even posted something on Kboards about it because I was feeling nervous.

Finally the Amazon rankings kicked in come evening and I had a ranking of #15,039.

That put me #1 in the non-fiction Tarot category and #9 in the Books Tarot category. That’s great, but the audience I really wanted for this book were people interested in mysteries and thrillers and such.

I continued to climb in the rankings until I got up to around #12,346. After that I got a little higher then started to sink down again.

Still, I was nice enough to let others know that things had worked out alright, although I don’t believe anyone was biting their nails over it.

More Amazon 'Also Viewed'

Before I ran this promo I had about 2.5 pages of ‘also viewed.’ You know that’s bad because you don’t even have any ‘also boughts.’  What's more, many were my own books!

For those that don’t know, the more people that look at your book the faster this little carousel on the screen shows up. It’s a great way for other interested people to see your book.

After the promo I managed to get up to 9 pages of ‘also viewed,’ which made me feel pretty good.

More Amazon 'Also Boughts'

I decided to take the book out of the Tarot category completely and put it in the thriller and mystery categories.

It may have been a mistake taking it out of that non-fiction Tarot category as now I have no Top 100 Category rankings at all. In fact, in the week since the promo I’ve not had a single sale on that book and have sunken down to #229,124. Bummer.

One nice thing is that the string of ‘also viewed’ I had turned into one page of ‘also boughts.’ And what I was really happy to see is the book right there in the middle, Bloody Mary by Joe Konrath. I’ve never read any of his books but he’s one of the big self-published authors so hopefully a couple of his readers bought my book, liked it, and gab about it to their friends.

He’s also got a book called Black and Tan, which is what I plan to call the third volume of the Vigilante Justice series. That’s named not after a drink, however, but the characters’ names (Black Walnut and Ernie Tanner).

Anyways, that’s for another day, which I guess Tarot Card Killer has to wait for as well. So far no boost on this fun and exciting action adventure thriller mystery suspense shoot ‘em up novel. Well, I’ll just get to work on the next one.

Is Bargainbooksy Worth $50?

So is Bargainbooksy worth it? I like Freebooksy, which gave me a great boost on my fantasy perma-free novel, but this ad didn’t really help me much in any way that I can see now. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a review out of it.

If I would have been in thriller categories I might have gotten some more action, but even getting up to a rank of #10,000 doesn’t guarantee you placement into any subcategories of that genre. In fact, many of the Top 100 in the subcategories of Mystery, Thrillers & Suspense have rankings of around #7,000 or so, even the #100 book!

In other words it’s real tough to get noticed. So should I continue to write these books? I think I’ll write another volume of Tarot Card Killer and see what happens, but right now my fantasy novels are selling the best and I’ve got another one coming out, so I think I’ll focus on that genre for a time.

How about you? Anyone had luck with Bargainbooksy?

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