Midway through day 3 on a promo right now - 198 downloads total.I think you are misleading yourself when you say "rocketing up the charts".Edgewriter said:Why are free promotions a disaster?
When I put a book up for a free promotion, It rockets to the top of the free lists and I get a feeling of euphoria. But the instant it comes off the free promotion, it rockets down to the bottom of paid.
How is that supposed to help promote your book? How does that bring in sales? One moment #20 free for epic fantasy, the next #38,000 Paid. This happened this morning with my new novella Hilt's Pride. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANZK75K
This also happened with my First book. I was selling between 20-30 copies of the book at the time and decided to do a promotion to really ramp things up. I had it on KDP free for five days and it was ranked 2-5 in epic fantasy free for the last two days of the promotion. Then when the promotion ended it plummeted to like 50,000 paid overall because no copies had been paid for during that five day period. It destroyed the visibility of the book and sales afterwards were like 4-10 a day. It never climbed back up to where it was.
The second and third books in the series faded fast after that.
Perhaps I just don't understand. When other people talk about the free promo it sounds like they come off the promo high on the paid lists. What really happens?
Didn't even think of this issue. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.olefish said:I think the free run messed up with your also bots. When you were selling the 20-30 a day, the recommendations engines were somewhat in sync with those who might buy your book. The Free run introduced all sorts of spurious noise of people who might not like your genre, or your kind of book.
Free works immensely if you make it to the very top. So not just to the top of epic fantasy which is a niche list, but to the top of the overrall free list. If you don't think you can make it to the very top and you were selling well to begin with, then I wouldn't use a free run. It's too much of a gamble.
At this point, you just have wait and hope you catch up. Or try again with a free run and hope you get to the top of the mountain this time.
When you first come off free your Best Seller ranking plummets. That is to be expected. It happens to everyone.Edgewriter said:Why are free promotions a disaster?
When I put a book up for a free promotion, It rockets to the top of the free lists and I get a feeling of euphoria. But the instant it comes off the free promotion, it rockets down to the bottom of paid.
How is that supposed to help promote your book? How does that bring in sales? One moment #20 free for epic fantasy, the next #38,000 Paid. This happened this morning with my new novella Hilt's Pride. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ANZK75K
This also happened with my First book. I was selling between 20-30 copies of the book at the time and decided to do a promotion to really ramp things up. I had it on KDP free for five days and it was ranked 2-5 in epic fantasy free for the last two days of the promotion. Then when the promotion ended it plummeted to like 50,000 paid overall because no copies had been paid for during that five day period. It destroyed the visibility of the book and sales afterwards were like 4-10 a day. It never climbed back up to where it was.
The second and third books in the series faded fast after that.
Perhaps I just don't understand. When other people talk about the free promo it sounds like they come off the promo high on the paid lists. What really happens?
WOW! 5000+ I don't see me making that LOL - But I am pondering, should I extend today's promo through tomorrow? I'm only at 1000 mid-day-one.leedobbins said:I've found getting to the top of my category doesn't really mean diddly. Its the number of downloads you get and most recently it seems you need 5000+ in a two day period (I've never done a promo longer than 2 days) to have it make a difference in your sales and rank.
Since downloads only count as a fraction of a sale, I could see where having a 5 day promo could hurt sales if you are already selling several per day.
Agree. Unless it's part of a series, you need to have 10,000 downloads to get anything at all, and even at that level, you don't get much.leedobbins said:I've found getting to the top of my category doesn't really mean diddly. Its the number of downloads you get and most recently it seems you need 5000+ in a two day period (I've never done a promo longer than 2 days) to have it make a difference in your sales and rank.
Since downloads only count as a fraction of a sale, I could see where having a 5 day promo could hurt sales if you are already selling several per day.
I think you do need to give away much bigger numbers to get the "bump." In May I gave away 18,000 over four days (hit #17 free overall) and then sold about 200 over the next month. That was definitely a bump for me, as it'd barely been moving before the giveaway. But at 20-30 sales/day, you were already doing better before your giveaway than I did after mine. For some reason, you got the opposite of a bump. I think olefish's idea about the messed-up also-boughts is pretty convincing.Edgewriter said:I see. So when my first book hit 2000 free over a five day period, it didn't do enough to make a difference. All I was doing was hoping that the people who got it free read the book and like it enough to buy the rest of the series.
