[Jan Hurst-Nicholson]

You can read the results here. (Please merge if already posted)

http://readindies.blogspot.com/2015/02/facebook-twitter-blog-book-promotion.html

Book promotion services are marketing services that help authors promote their books for a fee. As these services often charge a pretty penny for such work, the participating authors and I decided to research the low-cost book promotion services available at Fiverr. After all, we thought for $5 what did we have to lose?

Our findings may shock you - they certainly shocked us.

For this study, 24 authors participated, using the services to promote 39 books from 8 different genres, including:

Mystery
Thriller
Romance
Scifi
Fantasy
Horror
Literary Fiction
Nonfiction

 

[rosclarke]

I'm really only shocked that anyone was shocked by those results, tbh.

 

[ArchangelEST]

I don't consider fiverr gigs as something that is worth the money as a stand-alone investment, but rather, as an over the top "add-on" service. Meaning that the investment you make needs to be viewed as a part of the larger picture where the value of the end result will be greater than the sum of its parts.

For example, if you promote your books through high ROI promotion methods like BookBub or ENT etc, you will get great results, but you will be eventually capped out in terms of what those promotions can do to you. Not only are there limitations as to how far they can take you, but also how often you can run the promotions, and how effective repeat promos will be.

Let's say you promote your book in a fairly competitive niche and you go all out with a bunch of high value promotions and hit let's say #21 in a very competitive category. You're almost on the first page of the Top 100, but not quite. Or let's even say that you hit #1 for a while, but eventually you decline and find yourself in #21 not too much later. And now you have a problem. You're off the first page in the Top 100 in a niche, but you have no real good ROI promotion services left.

At this point, why not invest in a bunch of Fiverr gigs? While they are fairly ineffective in terms of immediate sales ROI, they can nonetheless give you that push you need in order to move a few steps higher in those rankings or to retain a current spot.


I just feel like you can never discount long term ROI. Over the long term, you may get more income from staying longer in the higher rankings than you lose because of the initial negative ROI from those low effectiveness gigs. Simply because of more potential follow-up sales, mailing list subscribers, secondary books sales etc.


But the thing is. How do you really test this? I think it's a solid line of reasoning, but it can be hard to make any solid conclusions.