Since going perma-free about 2 months ago it's 'selling' steadily, although in the past few weeks the number has dropped from about 40 sales a day down to around 20. I paid $50 for this ad to help me give away my work for free, and it was pretty effective.
Here's what my ad looked like:
The way I saw it there were three possibilities:
1: People don't read the book and nothing happens;
2: People read or half-read the book and leave poor reviews;
3: People read the book, like it, and buy books 2 and 3.
We'll see; the ad got me up to #15 in Epic Fantasy in Free, a good spot to be. With all my promos coming up in November I'm hoping to take that #1 spot for a day or two.
So How Did the Freebooksy eBook Promotion Go?
But boy did that $50 give me a boost! My book went live on the site sometime after midnight on October 29. I checked my stats at 5 AM before going to bed and they were at 598 for the month. My rank at that time was #2,978 in Free.
Those were for Amazon US, and that’s the only country I’ll analyze for this post. I had a lot of extra sales across the Amazon platforms as well, and I might write about those in another post on promoting your eBook internationally.
When I got up later, which was still the next day (something all you professional writers out there know all about) my sales had soared. I was at 844 total ‘sales’ for the month, a jump of about 250 in just 8 hours. My rank had also shot up to #1,302 in Free. That put me at #15 in the Epic Fantasy category – right in the Top 20!
The Next Day
I was also doing well on the charts still. My rank was #11 in Epic Fantasy, and #76 in the overall Fantasy genre, something I didn’t think I’d get into at all.
Now remember, my book was already doing pretty well. Before the paid promotion it was sitting at about #50 to #70 on the Epic Fantasy chart and had a ranking of around #3,000 to #3,500.
For $50 I was able to move that rank up by by 2,500 places or more and get an additional 600 ‘sales’ out of it. What’s more, I got higher in the categories, something it’ll take awhile to fall out of. Perhaps I’ll even claim a higher spot overall to hover at long-term.
I can’t help think that a Bargainbooksy ad would be a great investment when you want to kickstart a series. I think I might just have to go and purchase one, in fact, when the time comes in a couple weeks to promote Trouble in Jonguria.
So what do you think? Have you had similar successes with Freebooksy or Bargainbooksy? Are you thinking of an advertisement? I'd love to hear about it!