Well, apparently, not very well since I forgot to post the update. This time, this ad was a paid ad (meaning, my book wasn’t free), and I set the price of Wherever He Goes to .99. I thought, a dollar for a book, that’s pretty good, right? Heck, I spent three months working on it, I figured a dollar was a good price.
The problem is, with doing these ads, you just WON’T KNOW why your book doesn’t sell. It could be the cover, it could be your copy. It could just be that no one wants to pay. You never know.
So, in total, I sold 40 books on the day the newsletter came out and a couple days afterward. That is nothing compared to the 4,000 books I gave away during my Freebooksy ad I did back in February. You can read about that here.
As far as KU page reads are concerned, you can see that the newsletter created a bit of a spike, but nothing to write home about. And this is only for Wherever He Goes. My trilogy is still getting a few page reads, but I wanted to see what my ad would do for Wherever He Goes, and unfortunately, for 80 dollars, not much.
Here is what my ad looked like in the newsletter:
Would I do this again? I haven’t made back what I spent on the ad, so it will be a while before I try something like that again.
What I need to focus on is getting reviews, but for using any legit reviewing services, I need to pull my book out of Select because the one review service I contacted distributes the books through Bookfunnel. Amazon considers Bookfunnel as a distribution platform and will yank you out of Select if they catch you using it.
For my next book, I’m going to place my book with a review service first, before putting into Select and see what happens. Hopefully, if I get some decent reviews that way, readers will give all my books a chance.
And I think if I ever do another promo with Written Word Media (Freebooksy/Bargainbooksy) I’ll do the free one, since I kind of feel like I got more bang for my buck. At least, it sounds better to say I gave away 4,000 copies than say I sold 40. It would be great if any of that had turned into reviews, but so far nothing significant on that end, either.
But, that is my experience with Bargainbooksy, and if you’ve tried them, and have gotten better results, let me know!
Thanks for reading!
Vania Margene Rheault 
This matches my experience exactly. When I ran a $0.99 sale, I didn’t sell enough to cover the cost of the promo. What worked better for me was to run a free day for book one in my trilogy, while running $0.99 sales on the other two books. I advertised the free book, and Amazon convinced a lot of people grabbing the freebie to buy the rest of the trilogy, even though I didn’t advertise those sales at all. I don’t think I’ve quite made back everything I invested in the free promo, but as you know, the KU echo effect goes on for months, so I might eventually. And I’m certain that with more frugal selection of where I buy advertising of the free sale, I could have gotten my costs down to the point where I would have at least broken even.
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Yes, when I did my Freebooksy for Don’t Run Away, I did lower the price of my other two books in the trilogy, and Amazon did say it was the first in a trilogy, so that was nice of them. I think paid will always be different though. There are a lot of different promo sites, and I agree, some of them are cheaper, but some of them require a certain number of reviews my books just don’t have (at least, not on Amazon).
At this point I’m just dipping my toes in the water to see what works and what doesn’t, but covers, blurbs, taste, is all subjective so who even knows what will keep working and what won’t.
I’d like to see an update blog post from you! What have you been up to with writing and life?
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I agree, when my first book came out I had about 900 free downloads one weekend during an ad. After that…not much, even with bargain deals and other ads. I can’t remember who the advertisers were. I need more experience as an author and more books to make a real difference in sales before investing in more paid marketing (just my opinion).
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for sure. i’m only testing the waters to see what works and what doesn’t. but the best marketing for your books is releasing another book. i completely agree! good luck!
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