Sunday, September 02, 2012

Progress report: Amazon promotional giveaway event

It’s one day into the first promotional giveaway of my book, The Bones of the Earth, and I’m thrilled with the results. The numbers may not seem huge to some people, but for me, they’re great.

As I mentioned in the post last week, I’m participating in Independent Authors International’s first multi-author, multi-book giveaway through Amazon. Throughout this Labour Day long weekend, seven of us have used our Amazon Kindle Select program free days to give away copies of our e-books.

In total, there have been over 700 downloads of my book in the first 34 hours of the multi-author giveaway event. As I’m writing this, The Bones of the Earth is ranked the number two historical fantasy in Amazon’s Free lists, and number 1 in Amazon UK’s lists!

Strangely, traffic on my blog is not much heavier than normal. Other participants and friends like Cinta Garcia (who guest posted here a few months back) have noticed heavier blog traffic.

So, great results? Compared to my book’s sales since the beginning of the year, this is great! Compared to the big sellers, fair to middling.

Reasons? Perhaps the last long weekend of the summer was not a great choice: there are a lot of other things for people to do, like go to the beach one last time, or get the kids ready for school. Or maybe there are a lot of other giveaways to compete with.

Those are the results so far. I promise to publish further updates for anyone who is thinking of trying this strategy.

4 comments:

  1. It's great that you've had so many downloads. But don't forget, most of those who did are simply putting them at the end of their to-read list, so don't expect too many results overnight. Over the next few weeks people will begin to read your novel and then you blog traffic will hopefully soar.
    Good luck.

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    1. Thanks for the encouragement. I'm staying positive — the numbers of downloads are enough to make me happy!

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  2. 700 downloads and ranked #2 sounds pretty good! Keep up the hard work. :)

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  3. Even if the timing doesn't turn out to be the best, I'm a firm believer that group promotion events like this are far more effective than solo efforts. Congrats on the downloads and the rankings, and I hope the rest of the promotion went well too.

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