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text 2019-07-20 05:52

Freebooksy delivers downloads, but that’s it

Rod Raglin

Last year I blew my book marketing budget on entering writing contests, a total of $305 including entry fees, books and postage.

Two good things came out of that experience. One was a positive and insightful review by Judge Number 54 of my novel Abandoned Dreams that I entered in The 26th Annual Writer's Digest Self-Published Book Awards. The other was the understanding the entire contest thing was a waste of money, or, to put it another way, it was a lot of money to spend for one review.

Though I have no evidence to prove it, I am convinced most, if not all contests are nothing more than revenue generating opportunities for writing platforms, groups and publications.

Aside from the monthly stipend I receive for facilitating creative writing circles, I am determined this year to make more on my writing than I spend. That brings us to my latest novel, The Bird Whisperer, the Mattie Saunders Series Book 3, launched on May 6 of this year.

The book was published simultaneously on Draft to Digital, Smashwords and Kindle Direct Publishing.

After five weeks that included giveaways on BookLikes and LibraryThing, an email campaign with a free coupon code sent to 276 people on my email list, and numerous tweets and Facebook postings of a similar nature all I had to show was nineteen free downloads and one four-star review.

I changed my strategy, What did I have to lose?

I decided to promote The Rocker and the Bird Girl, the first book in the Mattie Saunders series in hopes it might create sales for The Bird Whisperer. I decided to enroll The Rocker and the Bird Girl in KDP Select and coordinate two of the five free days this exclusive listing affords you, and free email blasts with Awesome Gang, PrettyHot and MyBookPlace.

June 22 was the day and I assume the free email blasts went out, but nothing happened on Amazon.

Since research indicates fiction sales almost always peak within the first two to six weeks of the release the window for The Bird Whisperer was running out. I decided to take a chance and spend some money. I booked The Rocker and the Bird Girl on Freebooksy and coordinated it with the three free days I had left on Kindle Select.

The genre I chose was literary, the email would be sent to 123,660 Freebooksy subscribers, and the cost was $60 USD.

I held my breath.

The day the Freebooksy promotion broke 1,033 free books were downloaded and my author ranking went from 715,187 to 85,209 for All Books; 41,906 for Kindle eBooks; 56,679 for Kindle eBooks Romance; and, 24,882 for Kindle eBooks Romance Contemporary. The following day there were 131 downloads, and 31 on the third day.

Giving away books is one thing, but my benchmark for success is, and always will be, sales. As of July 20, 2019, twenty days after the Freebooksy promotion, two copies of The Bird Whisperer had been sold. However, The Rocker and the Bird Girl had picked up one text review and seven ratings with a 4-star average. There may be a few more sales and reviews trickle in over the course of this month but beyond that I wouldn’t attribute them to Freebooksy.

With the Freebooksy promotion and expenses such as proof books, books for beta readers and postage I’m in the red $152.15 so far this year. So much for my 2019 goal to make more on my writing than I spend.

But then there are still five months to go.

Stay calm, be brave, watch for the signs

Author’s Amazon Book Page https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003DS6LEU

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text 2019-07-10 09:14

Author services sites that don't deliver - but still charge

Rod Raglin

It’s a rare day indeed that I don’t receive promotional material regarding some writing related program, service, publishing platform or marketing gimmick.

There seems to be no end to people who, for a price, will support my career as an author. Where do they all come from and considering how many there are how do any of them make a living?

You wouldn’t think there were that many suckers out there.

Here are three more sure fire suggestions to polish your manuscript, generate reviews and enhance your sales that don’t work.

Reedsy Discovery. Reedsy took umbrage when I described their new Discovery site as a “Another paid review, bogus up-voting book marketing site”, so I’ll let them describe it for you (how fair is that?). Visit https://blog.reedsy.com/announcing-reedsy-discovery/

Let’s assume you send your manuscript plus $50 and the Reedsy team smiles upon you. Your book gets a high quality review and your promoted on their Discovery Feed. Reedsy doesn’t appear to have any shortage authors ready to anti up $50. I receive at least two emails a week from them with a list of newly launched titles.

But does it work?

I’ve been tracking a few titles and here are the results to this date, July 10, 2019. The dates indicated are the Reedsy Discover launch date. Many of these books were actually published months before.

In Verse by Tex DeJésus was launched May 15th. It has no reviews on Amazon and one review on Goodreads posted by the author.

Nobody Drowned by Peter Kingsmill was launched on May 22 and has three reviews on Amazon (two are prior to the Reedsy release date) and two on Goodreads - one duplicated from Amazon and one from the author.

Martyrs al Sabra by Dan Kalin has no reviews on Amazon and three reviews and two ratings on Goodreads, the majority of which were posted prior to the Reedsy launch.

In Case You Forgot by Aubrey Stack was launched on May 23 and has no reviews anywhere.

The Alchemy of Noise by Lorraine Devon Wilke had its Reedsy launch on July 3 and has 32 reviews on Amazon and 40 on Goodreads, all posted prior to the launch.

One thing for sure, this site isn’t going to launch your literary career.

Following the Reedsy release most of the titles I tracked showed no increase in reviews on Goodreads or Amazon and no bump in Amazon book ratings.

BetaReader.io invites you to “share your unpublished manuscript to selected readers. Collect feedback and reading data to understand what works and what needs polishing. Private, secure, and easy to use.” I took advantage of their Basic Forever Free Plan which allowed me to upload one active manuscript, and get response from three readers for up 30 days. I got zilch response. Let’s face it, good beta readers are hard to find, why should they be more successful at it than anyone else?

Free email blasts. http://awesomegang.com http://pretty-hot.com https://mybookplace.net/ An incestuous cluster using “free” as a come-on to get you to buy up. Don’t know what you get when you pay, but it’s not even worth your time to fill in the meta data for the free option.

Stay calm, be brave, watch for the signs.

Author Amazon Page https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003DS6LEU

book marketing indie authors beta readers reedsy discovery betareaderio free email blasts sellf publishing paid review sites

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text 2018-08-21 08:36

Promoting your books on discount book sites

Rod Raglin

The internet has a plethora of sites that offer free or deeply discounted e-books to members.

They get their product from authors who are enticed by the opportunity to have a promo template of their book sent free to the site’s membership in hopes that some members will download it, read and review it.

The free offer is a teaser to encourage you to pay for their enhanced list - more members and prolonged exposure.

They also offer a free author interview template. Answer the questions, add your picture and they’ll post it for free.

I discounted Local Rag to 99¢ and submitted it to the four sites listed below, taking advantage of free option only. I work hard to write and produce a decent book and I won't pay to give it away for free.

Like so many things that are free, and I suppose that goes for most free e-books, you get what you pay for. I didn’t see a whiff of interest.

I’ve researched a few authors who have documented how much they spent versus how much they made in sales using this approach. They claim to have broke even, but I have my doubts. I’m reminded of my friend who makes frequent trips to Las Vegas. When he wins, I hear about it. When he loses, well, he’s back talking about the time he won.

The other thing I noticed is that their book sales were not sustained. There may have been a blip, but there was not enough reviews, word of mouth, or buzz, in general, to elevate their book from self-publishing oblivion.

Stay calm, be brave, watch for the signs

Discount book sites

http://discountbookman.com

http://pretty-hot.com

http://mybookplace.net

Awesomegang.com

My Amazon Book Page in case you want to purchase Local Rag for 99¢ until the end of August

https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003DS6LEU

self-publishing book marketing free e-books indie authors email blasts discount book sites promoting on discount books sites

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text 2018-06-10 06:44

Do targeted email blasts generate sustained book sales?

Rod Raglin

Do targeted email blasts generate sustained book sales?

In the ongoing quest to find effective marketing tools for my nine novels and two plays, I've compiled a list of over two hundred email addresses of those who have expressed some interest in my books. Sending them an email has become part of every book launch.

My email blasts consist of three themed emails space two weeks apart. Each one offers the coupon code for a free e-book edition of the novel.

The response of my last blast was: opened 20%; clicked 6%; reviews 2

Many sites provide a similar service for a fee. For $25.00, Free Kindle Books http://fkbt.com/for-authors/ will include your book in a daily post to 750,000 addresses of which they claim 100,000 take action or about 13%. Take action does not mean buy, read or review your book.

Is this a good way to market a new release? Will it enhance sales of my backlist? How to tell?

Why not take a look at the results another author, Matt Manochio http://www.mattmanochio.com got from email blasts.

In his 2015 blog entitled Lessons in Advertising my Ebook, Manochio meticulously documented his experience http://www.mattmanochio.com

https://mattmanochio.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/lessons-in-advertising-my-ebook-what-worked-what-didnt/

I have no idea how I came upon this information, but it is a caution that once you post on the internet, it never goes away.

To summarize, he used fourteen sites, spent $500 and sold approximately 1100 books @ 99¢. After the publisher's cut (he wasn't self-published), he concluded he broke even.

He also got some amazing short-term results with his book hitting #411 on the paid Kindle list and single-digit ranking in its respective genre. These numbers, however, were not sustained and currently, the book he was promoting is on the Amazon Best Sellers ranking at #2,012,826

If you deeply discount your book and send it to hundreds of thousands of people, some are going to open it, some even read it.

It's what happens after that's important. Does this investment enhance sales of your backlist at the regular price?

In Manochio's case did this happen?

Looking at the author's website and considering what he's written since, and where his books currently rank I'd say no, though it does sound like he had a hell of an exciting ride for a couple of weeks.

Will I consider email blasts in the future for my books keeping in mind that some of my novels may not be eligible on some sites since they don't have the required number of reviews or may not be considered to have a professional cover?

Maybe. In some cases, it's less expensive than sending a paperback edition of your book to a reviewer. The real payoff, however, won't be a blip in ranking, but rather if the book they got cheap was good enough to encourage them to buy one of my other titles at full price.

Stay calm, be brave, watch for the signs.

Some Email blast sites:

BookSends https://booksends.com/expanded_guidelines.php

EReader News Today https://ereadernewstoday.com/bargain-and-free-book-submissions/

Buck Books http://buckbooks.net/

Free Kindle Books and Tips http://fkbt.com/for-authors/

Digital Books Today https://digitalbooktoday.com/

BookBub https://www.bookbub.com/home/

Amazon Author Page https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B003DS6LEU

Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100013287676486

Advertising book marketing indie authors self-published authors email marketing email blasts

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text 2014-03-28 05:11

Discussion: Book Blasts

Falling For YA

While I was perusing twitter the topic of book blasts came up and I felt like discussing them on the blog since they have become a rather polarizing topic. Some bloggers love them and others hate them with a vehement passion. The biggest complaint I've seen is that:

Books blasts don't offer any unique or exclusive content

A book blast is just the same information offered on multiple blogs on the same day. There isn't anything new or any reason to visit other blogs on the blast because it is just the same information.

While I agree, it is mostly the same thing over and over, there can be different content on each blog. Different excerpts from the novel being promoted or different quotes/photos to break up the monotony. I think it depends on who is hosting the blast as to how much different content will be featured on each blog.

Book blasts only seem to focus on New Adult books or books that aren't in my favorite genre

This is something I've heard multiple times and I don't know if it's true or not. I can't find any evidence supporting this hypothesis that New Adults are more represented in book blasts. I do think, from what I've seen, the majority of books featured in blasts are self-published. Maybe self-published is what people really mean when they say "books outside their genre".

In my opinion though, it is self-published books that benefit the most from Book Blasts. The internet can be a big, scary place and without the help of a publisher books can be listed on Amazon and never heard from again. It is up to the authors to do all the marketing and be the hype-person for their novel. That is really hard! Book blasts are an easy way of getting a variety of bloggers who would probably never reply to the author's review request to feature and take an interest in their novel.

They are annoying, I hate seeming them on everyone's blogs

Isn't that the point of a blast? Have the novels information featured on a multitude of different blogs to get the word out about new titles? Book's that are on blast should be featured on a wide variety of blogs because, I think, Book Blasts are really meant for non-bloggers.

As book bloggers we often forget that the bookish community is a whole lot bigger then our little corner of the blogosphere. This isn't a criticism, merely something I've noticed. Before I became a blogger, back when I was just someone who really liked to read, I rarely ventured away from Goodreads. In my Pre-goodreads days I got almost all of my books from Half Price Books, Powells, and my mom's or sister's shelves. It would have taken a lot for me to notice a book. Something that would have caught my notice would have been 10 or 20 sites featuring a new book all on the same day.

Last Thoughts

These are just some of the main point's I've heard in the polarizing discussion on book blasts. So tell me: do you love them? Hate them? Have my explanations and arguments swayed you one way or another? Tell me in the comments!

In interest of full disclosure I haven't participated in a book blast since December when I promoted The Offering by Kimberly Derting (a book I would have been more then happy to feature book blast or no). I'm not sure if my lack of participation is due to a decline in book blasts or if I haven't had space in my schedule, I'm thinking it's a little of both.

blasts book book blast bookish discussion Falling For YA interesting opinion