The new Kindle reporting system. It's very clever and informative. This screenshot just shows the top five titles from the promotion, with the number of downloads for each.
Over a five-day period (22-26 January 2020) I have been running a "Kindle Ebook freebie" promotion, in which all 8 of the Angel Mountain books, and "Icefall Zero", have been available on Amazon websites around the world for free download. Amazon allows publishers to do this now and then as an acceptable method of advertising / promotion. They don't do a lot of promotion themselves, except for new books that are being promoted on the day of publication -- so all of the work of promoting the promotion (if you see what I mean) falls on the publisher or author of the titles on offer.
The results? It's easy to read these from a new tool that Amazon has developed on its KDP web site for the use of publishers. All in all, I got 1,423 downloads of the free books -- my hope was that I would hit the 1,000 mark, so we exceeded expectations. The daily figures:
Day 1 -- 294
Day 2 -- 193
Day 3 -- 228
Day 4 -- 228
Day 5 -- 393 (and 30 paid units)
Day 6 -- 49 (and 4 paid units)
Day One was good (as you might expect). Then things levelled off a bit for the "middle days". And the last day was by far the best. The campaign spilled over into Day 6 because of the time difference between UK and the USA. All the books are now back to their normal pricing arrangements.
Individual breakdowns:
On Angel Mountain -- 185
House of Angels -- 185
Guardian Angel -- 171
Dark Angel -- 170
Flying with Angels -- 169
Rebecca and the Angels -- 169
Icefall Zero -- 133
Conspiracy of Angels -- 121
Sacrifice -- 119
Conclusions:
1. Was it worth doing a five-day promotion rather than a shorter one? I think so, since you can put in a lot of effort on social media over an extended period. If you do several short promotions at widely-spaced intervals, you have to repeat the hard work, over and again, in the knowledge that "slow responders" may miss the promotion altogether, and maybe get irritated as a result! The fact that we got 393 downloads on the last day of the promotion shows that many interested people are actually quite slow to react to a promotion.
2. Was it worth lumping all the books together in a single promotion, rather than staggering them and doing one title at a time? Again the answer is yes -- if one does one-or two-day promotions for different titles, staggered across a month or two, one could devote an extraordinary amount of time to social media promotion work, with very modest returns. It could become almost a full-time job. Better to work hard for a limited time, and then get back to normal again....... there are other more important things in life than Kindle promotions.
3. Maybe I should have done "Icefall Zero"as a separate promotion, at a different time. That might have given more focus in social media, and resulted in more downloads. Maybe.....
4. I was surprised how well balanced the downloads were, across all titles. The "download preferences" varied from day to day, as we can see from the bands in the bar chart. That means there were no duds in the list, and that the new covers for "Dark Angel" and "Flying with Angels" have made those books look just as attractive as the others.
5. I thought that "Icefall Zero" would have done better, given that it is a rebrand and effectively a "new title." But it just goes to show how incredibly difficult it is to market a thriller in a heavily overloaded marketplace.
6. Given that none of the Angel Mountain titles is "just published" (in fact "On Angel Mountain" has been around for 20 years now), I was quite pleased that the promotion was attractive enough to encourage a total of 1290 downloads of the titles.
7. My social media marketing consisted of my mailing of the "Angel Mountain Newsletter" on the first day of the promotion; a lot of Facebook promotion on my personal page and on other special group pages; mailings to some of my mailing lists (family, business contacts etc); mailings to selected special interest groups using email addresses on club membership lists which I had access to; several promotions on Linkedin; and a lot of targetted tweeting involving hashtags and the hunting down of special twitter groups using the @ symbol. I also joined and used assorted Facebook "free for Kindle" groups. I didn't pay for any Facebook or Google advertising, and I didn't pay to join any special book promotion clubs or groups.
8. Which social media work was most effective? It's very difficult to say. I don't think Twitter and Linkedin are very effective promotion vehicles -- there is just so much twittering and chattering out there that promotions get completely lost and ignored. But I did notice that campaigns on Facebook Groups seem to work, because interested contacts tend to share posts and spread the news pretty fast. Potentially there is an exponential effect. I did notice some peaks in downloading, for example, when I posted things on the Honey Harfat and Haverfordwest Grammar School Facebook pages, partly because I was reaching new people and partly because of sharing..
9. One spinoff is that during the promotion there has been quite a sharp increase in the number of Kindle "pages read" -- for which one earns a minute amount of "royalty" money. So a few quid will have gone into my account.
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All in all, I'm quite pleased -- but now that 1423 downloads have happened, how will that affect future sales? Time will tell..........
