An Experiment in Free Promotions

I've been wondering how effective advertising is for free promotions on Amazon. There are numerous sites to which you can apply for posting your free book. Some of these sites offer free advertising, others say they may or may not give you exposure but if you pay them some money they will guarantee it. They're only asking for five dollars but if you do that a few times it adds up. Do people really pay for advertising for a free book? Reminds me of the gold rush days when the only person making any money was the guy selling pickaxes and shovels.

I tried an experiment with free promotional advertising last month. I put out Tapestries of Betrayal, a new title, for free for five days and promoted it everywhere I could for free. I had five free days on Tales of Woe and Wonder, an older title, that were going to expire, so I put that book up for free for the same time period but didn't do any advertising. Tapestries is a single story; Tales is a collection, but both fall in the fantasy genre.

I expected the promoted title to do much better considering the hours I spent filling out submission forms. Ultimately, the promoted title out performed the non-promoted title but not by that much. Tapestries accounted for 58.5% of my free downloads while Tales took 41.5%. Remember that I had already done a free promotion for Tales a few months earlier. So, advertising appears to help some but readers still found the non-promoted title.

Most of my downloads happen during the weekdays and fall off during the weekends. As I watched the download counts I noticed a bizarre but very telling pattern if my hypothesis is correct. Tapestries initially led the race and surged ahead, but when the weekend arrived, the counts for Tales surged and passed Tapestries. The early part of the new week saw Tapestries move ahead of Tales. So what happened during the weekend when Tales started doing so much better relative to Tapestries? I place advertisements in the back of my books for my other titles. I'm speculating that some people read Tapestries, liked it, and clicked on the link for Tales. When they saw that one was free, they downloaded it, too. If I'm right, it appears those in book promotions of your other titles are one of your most valuable selling tools.

Going Free Results

There's one thing that every agent and editor will tell you. Short story collections don't sell very well, at all. So I wasn't expecting much when I published Tales of Woe and Wonder. I wanted to experiment with self-publishing and marketing and have something that was all mine out on Amazon. Last weekend I tried a three-day free promotion. Over fourteen hundred customers downloaded it. Immediately following the promotion, my sales and borrows briefly tripled, boosting the collection into the top 100 fantasy anthologies for a few hours. A successful experiment I think. Hopefully the customers will find something in the collection to like. Next up, I'm publishing a paperback version through CreateSpace to experiment with some giveaways. If you have some previously published stories languishing on your hard-drive or in some internet archives, take a leap and publish them.

In other news, volume one of Avenir Eclectia is now available on Amazon in paperback and kindle. I have four flash stories in this collection. The editors Grace Bridges and Travis Perry did marvelous work arranging the various micro-fiction pieces into a cohesive collection.