[Laura_Meyer]

Hey there,

today I want to ask you for sharing your experience with me about amazon promotions.

I have started my first promotion on monday and I would like to analyze the figures, to understand more about planning future promotions more efficiently.
But I think, I need a bit of input from others for that, to evaluate the stats the right way.

How it started:

My 5-day promo started on monday, and has generated 480 downloads so far.
The first 24 hours were crazy, the downloads went uphill really fast and pushed my novel to rank 7 of the kindle free books category and on rank 1 on all three sub categories (urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy and fantasy romance). This is all on Amazon DE, the novel is available in german only for now.

Since yesterday things have slowed down, ranks are now #20, #1, #1 and #2. (Which is awesome!)

I've already received one additional 5 star rating since monday, which might come from someone who downloaded my book for free.

What I did outside of amazon was posting a tweet to my Twitter follower (about 1k people) and posting onto my Instagram account about the promo (about 700 followers). I have not a large community, but they are all awesome people who shared my posts eagerly.

I have no idea, if the promotion did well on the first two days, although I am of course thrilled about the great ranking.

My questions:

How many downloads did you generate with your free book promos?
Do you use more than 1-2 days of the free promotion at once? (Because if things slow down after the first 24 hours, I'd rather split my 5 days up the next time)

I know, I am late to the party, but I really want to understand the promotion thing better, to gain more readers for my stories.

Thank you guys in advance

 

[chrisliberty2019]

Hey there,

today I want to ask you for sharing your experience with me about amazon promotions.

I have started my first promotion on monday and I would like to analyze the figures, to understand more about planning future promotions more efficiently.
But I think, I need a bit of input from others for that, to evaluate the stats the right way.

How it started:

My 5-day promo started on monday, and has generated 480 downloads so far.
The first 24 hours were crazy, the downloads went uphill really fast and pushed my novel to rank 7 of the kindle free books category and on rank 1 on all three sub categories (urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy and fantasy romance). This is all on Amazon DE, the novel is available in german only for now.

Since yesterday things have slowed down, ranks are now #20, #1, #1 and #2. (Which is awesome!)

I've already received one additional 5 star rating since monday, which might come from someone who downloaded my book for free.

What I did outside of amazon was posting a tweet to my Twitter follower (about 1k people) and posting onto my Instagram account about the promo (about 700 followers). I have not a large community, but they are all awesome people who shared my posts eagerly.

I have no idea, if the promotion did well on the first two days, although I am of course thrilled about the great ranking.

My questions:

How many downloads did you generate with your free book promos?
Do you use more than 1-2 days of the free promotion at once? (Because if things slow down after the first 24 hours, I'd rather split my 5 days up the next time)

I know, I am late to the party, but I really want to understand the promotion thing better, to gain more readers for my stories.

Thank you guys in advance

Hello! I've never run all 5 free promo days at once. I usually run two days, on the weekends. I used Freebooksy and BKnights from Fiverr back on June 11, and I got about 1700 downloads, and from that I got around 15 or so mostly good reviews. On July 16, I ran another 2 free days of promos, and I purchased Fussy Librarian, Book Barbarian and BKnights, and I got almost 2,000 downloads, with another 13 reviews, mostly good. I have to say that I've been very pleased with the results of both campaigns. I hope this helped. Good luck with your future campaigns.

 

[Laura_Meyer]

Hello! I've never run all 5 free promo days at once. I usually run two days, on the weekends. I used Freebooksy and BKnights from Fiverr back on June 11, and I got about 1700 downloads, and from that I got around 15 or so mostly good reviews. On July 16, I ran another 2 free days of promos, and I purchased Fussy Librarian, Book Barbarian and BKnights, and I got almost 2,000 downloads, with another 13 reviews, mostly good. I have to say that I've been very pleased with the results of both campaigns. I hope this helped. Good luck with your future campaigns.

Thank you so much for sharing! I know that there are many authors, who don't want to talk about their sales.

Your numbers sound amazing! I've bookmarked the services, I wasn't even aware that you can use services like this. I've always thought you need to become an expert for Google and Facebook Ads, and honestly the whole micro targeting stuff is quite overwhelming there.

I will definitely check out, if these services are available for german books, but if not, I know what to do when my first english novel will be published, thank you SO MUCH!

 

[chrisliberty2019]

Thank you so much for sharing! I know that there are many authors, who don't want to talk about their sales.

Your numbers sound amazing! I've bookmarked the services, I wasn't even aware that you can use services like this. I've always thought you need to become an expert for Google and Facebook Ads, and honestly the whole micro targeting stuff is quite overwhelming there.

I will definitely check out, if these services are available for german books, but if not, I know what to do when my first english novel will be published, thank you SO MUCH!

You're very welcome, Laura. I wish you all the best

 

[Darryl Hughes]

Hello! I've never run all 5 free promo days at once. I usually run two days, on the weekends. I used Freebooksy and BKnights from Fiverr back on June 11, and I got about 1700 downloads, and from that I got around 15 or so mostly good reviews. On July 16, I ran another 2 free days of promos, and I purchased Fussy Librarian, Book Barbarian and BKnights, and I got almost 2,000 downloads, with another 13 reviews, mostly good. I have to say that I've been very pleased with the results of both campaigns. I hope this helped. Good luck with your future campaigns.

Would you recommend BKnights?

Dee

 

[Darryl Hughes]

I've used the two big non Bookbub sites freebooksy and fussy librarian from the launch of my current book back in september. The results have been consistent at around 400-500 downloads per site. I've never bundled them.

What has changed is the amount of KENP reads and reviews that I've gotten from both, which have gone down significantly to the point where I can't justify the cost because of the results I've been getting recently.

Now it could be a genre thing. My current book is in smaller genres on both freebooksy and fussy librarian so there are less people checking for it.

Recently I tried a $.99 on both Reading Deals (last month) and Bargain Booksy (monday) because I didn't just want to giveaway 100's of books again without anything to show for it KENP rteads/reviews/ratings wise. I got a couple of sales from both and because they were less costly then freebooksy and fussy librarian I didn't mind the cost. Just trying to keep my book in front of the Amazon algos while suffering through this KENP/sales down turn of late. The few sale I got just made me feel better to see.

Would I recommend freebooksy and fussy librarian? Absolutely. Especially if you're in one of the bigger genre categories. I did a thriller promo on freebooksy back in 2020 and the KENP tail lasted 2 months. But that was 2020. We're in whatever this is now.

Hope it helps.

Dee

PS. I'd also recommend fellow kboard member Kathy Dee's promo site White Dove Books. They went above and beyond when I used them and even went to my Amazon page and pulled reviews from there to spiff up my listing. Who does that? And they got me my first KENP reads in months. If you're looking for a small, low cost ($17), promo site that'' work it's ass of for you give White Dove Books a try. Shout out to Kathy Dee.

 

[chrisliberty2019]

Would you recommend BKnights?

Dee

I absolutely recommend BKnights for free books. I did a promo through them without bundling it with any other promo and I got almost 300 downloads. One thing I should share is that my book is a dinosaur action adventure, and the new Jurassic World movie came out around mid-June, so that might be one of the reasons people were interested in my novel. I would not suggest using BKnights for paid books. I used them for $.99 book and nothing happened, so I'd probably search elsewhere if I want someone to pay for it.

 

[Darryl Hughes]

I absolutely recommend BKnights for free books. I used them for $.99 book and nothing happened, so I'd probably search elsewhere if I want someone to pay for it.

Thanks. I'll give then a try.

Dee

 

[alhawke]

Hey there, today I want to ask you for sharing your experience with me about amazon promotions.

I shared my results on the 1st: My free promotion results for 2022 I second Darryl Hughes comments that Fussy Librarian and Freebooksy are top notch. BKnights gives away 400 on average for my books, very good for their cost.
Good luck with your free promotions!

 

[Laura_Meyer]

I've bookmarked all of the services, thank you
It's very interesting to see your results!

Today is my last promo day and my downloads hit 540.
The novel is still ranked #1#1#2 in my sub fantasy categories, which is great. I hope this will last for a few days longer, when the price is back up, maybe there will be a "tail", like you all say. I now know that 540 isn't possibly that great, but without running extra services, I'm happy with the result. That's what test runs are for, right?

Gotta admit: This book markting thing is all very new to me and exciting. I didn't think the possibilities apart from running classy Ads were so wide (feel a bit stupid, jeez). The german market for selfpublishing is much more narrow, unfortunately. There are not as many services and options, which makes it harder to push your promos without budgeting classy ads or networking with book bloggers, who will grab free copies and post your blurb on their site with reviews like "yeah was okay" 🙄

But! I'm working on the translation of my first novel (100 pages to go) and will soon be able to publish in english. A lot more options with that!
I think about splitting the novel into two parts, because with 200k words I'm one of the lenghty fantasy writers, but my story needs that space to breathe. Might even be an advantage to split, because it buys me more time to proceed with the second translation (and I gotta finish part three in german).

 

[chrisliberty2019]

I've never had 540 downloads on my Amazon free days without using some outside promo service, so I think you doing that is excellent! Congratulations, and hopefully you'll get a long tail of sales.

 

[Madeline2015]

KU freebies can do very well if you promote the promo. You can get a lot of page reads. I always set up promos on Fussy Librarian and Bookspry usually when I have a KU freebie. Sometimes other sites too. I've done many over the years so can't remember each one but I usually get 700 without any promo and about 1,000-3,000 with a promo. I also do a lot of cross promos with other authors for my freebies and those do fantastic. As good as Bookbub. I think the least I've gotten might've been 500 at one time. Honestly, I don't pay much attention to the downloads anymore. What's important to me is the page reads. That's when you know the promo worked when you get read-thru. You can have thousands of downloads but if it doesn't translate to reads it was a flop.

 

[alhawke]

I've never had 540 downloads on my Amazon free days without using some outside promo service, so I think you doing that is excellent!

Same here. That's an impressive sale without any promotion.

For KU, you might want to also check out KU addicts (focuses on KU reads).

 

[Kathy Dee]

PS. I'd also recommend fellow kboard member Kathy Dee's promo site White Dove Books. They went above and beyond when I used them and even went to my Amazon page and pulled reviews from there to spiff up my listing. Who does that? And they got me my first KENP reads in months. If you're looking for a small, low cost ($17), promo site that'' work it's ass of for you give White Dove Books a try. Shout out to Kathy Dee.

Dee - thank so so much. I am really pleased your promo went well and it is lovely to receive such a nice endorsement of our service from you.

Kathy x

 

[Laura_Meyer]

My promo ended saturday night and I thought you might be interested in the final results:

downloads: 586
downloads follow up (the second book of my series): 7
KENP-reads: 2.798 pages
KEMP-reads follow up (the second book): 380 pages
Ratings: +2 (5-star-ratings, without text)
#1, #1, #1 Top Ranking during the promotion in categories: urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy and fantasy romance

The best days have been monday and tuesday, wednesday and thursday brought reasonable downloads as well, friday has been only a trickle and saturday was almost lost (about 5 downloads).

Today the ranking "normalized" to #943, #236, #929.

I think, it has been a good promotion, given the fact that I have done nothing to support it outside from amazon. Which is perfect for the first try, so I can compare future promos with these stats.

 

[chrisliberty2019]

My promo ended saturday night and I thought you might be interested in the final results:

downloads: 586
downloads follow up (the second book of my series): 7
KENP-reads: 2.798 pages
KEMP-reads follow up (the second book): 380 pages
Ratings: +2 (5-star-ratings, without text)
#1, #1, #1 Top Ranking during the promotion in categories: urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy and fantasy romance

The best days have been monday and tuesday, wednesday and thursday brought reasonable downloads as well, friday has been only a trickle and saturday was almost lost (about 5 downloads).

Today the ranking "normalized" to #943, #236, #929.

I think, it has been a good promotion, given the fact that I have done nothing to support it outside from amazon. Which is perfect for the first try, so I can compare future promos with these stats.

Fantastic job, Laura. That is a promotion to be proud of

 

[Darryl Hughes]

My promo ended saturday night and I thought you might be interested in the final results:

downloads: 586
downloads follow up (the second book of my series): 7
KENP-reads: 2.798 pages
KEMP-reads follow up (the second book): 380 pages
Ratings: +2 (5-star-ratings, without text)
#1, #1, #1 Top Ranking during the promotion in categories: urban fantasy, contemporary fantasy and fantasy romance

The best days have been monday and tuesday, wednesday and thursday brought reasonable downloads as well, friday has been only a trickle and saturday was almost lost (about 5 downloads).

Today the ranking "normalized" to #943, #236, #929.

I think, it has been a good promotion, given the fact that I have done nothing to support it outside from amazon. Which is perfect for the first try, so I can compare future promos with these stats.

All that with no promo site usage? Two thumbs up. Impressive. I didn't even get that many downloads or KENP reads with my last Freebooksy promo.

I should move to germany. LOL.

Dee

 

[Kathy Dee]

I should move to germany. LOL.

This is the key takeaway here I think. There are many more opportunities in the German marketplace right now. See this article for more info:

https://kindlepreneur.com/german-amazon-market/

 

[Laura_Meyer]

This is the key takeaway here I think. There are many more opportunities in the German marketplace right now. See this article for more info:

https://kindlepreneur.com/german-amazon-market/

That's a truly interesting article!
It's funny how many selfpublishers on the german market want to publish their books in english, because the german readers are very rough with selfpublishing authors 😅 the authors I know would prefer a much wider audience, which is less... nitpicking than the german readers. But I guess, the grass seems always greener on the other side, doesn't it?

I definitely see why the "foreign books" categories are a smart move for non-german books!

 

[alhawke]

This is the key takeaway here I think. There are many more opportunities in the German marketplace right now. See this article for more info:

https://kindlepreneur.com/german-amazon-market/

Thanks a lot for this article, Kathy! I can spend some time studying categories for this for my books in English. I'm wondering if anyone has found it worth the cost to translate their fiction book into German? I've held back being wary of cost vs benefit.