Novel Promotion Tracking

The intent of this post is to make it easier for me and, possibly, other authors to see what promotions work…and which ones don’t. It has no other value, so don’t get too excited. No excitement is appropriate. Maybe a little ennui.

Ascendance Promotion Tracking

This is a work in progress. Amazon and FB ads are not shown.

Arachniss Promotion Tracking

This is a work in progress.  Amazon and FB ads are not shown.

Robin Reads promotion #1 was more successful than expected. I usually get less than the median (guesstimated) downloads for paid promotions on a given site, but in the case of Arachniss in the horror genre, I got 30+ downloads and purchases (which is more than the 22/23 median). Also noticed cross-sales for the first time on any promotion. Only odd thing was how KU reads plummeted on the same day.

ENT and Book Sends Promo on June 13, 2022 was hit by two bad reviews a few days before, which dropped ratings from 5* to 3.8*, which totally sucked. Someone really took a dislike to the book, which is fine, but other good reviews pending. Just makes comparing results on ENT in particular difficult. Probably cost 25-50% of sales. First one-star rating ever. Hurray?

BookBub Feb 1-3 First Ever in USA

This is a huge milestone. Wish it was on Beasts, but this is awesome. Category is horror and running for 3 days vs. 8 days of RLLR international-only deal based on this recommendation. Runs in USA, UK, AU and Canada, but AMAZON ONLY, obviously.

Estimated sales are 50-2,000, roughly 50% of what an equivalent SF deal would be, for roughly half the price. Ended up toward the low end of this, with 360 sales, around half of the RLRR count, though this ticked up to 375 by end of Feb.

So, this deal was not as successful as the first. Bummer, but what can I learn from it? Cover issue? Blurb issue? Weird 2nd email BB sent out on same morning pulling buyers? Not sure. Certainly, not being wide internationally is a negative (say, 40% of int sales) but this could be made up for by a bump in KU page reads (about 11k so far). Not sure of any of it. 🙁

I sent an email to Bookbub about the promotion, and they let me know the Arachniss promotion garnered 1,225 clicks (as of 2/15). This converted to 366 sales as of the same date (375 by end of month) and 11k kindle page reads (22k by end of month). That implies a conversion rate of 29% if you just look at sales (which seems…amazing), and 32% if you assume the 11k page reads equates to roughly 22 books read (35% by EOM). Obviously, many books may have been downloaded by KU readers and never read, but there’s no way to track that.

The problem then seems to be conversion at the BB level. The email went to roughly 720k subscribers, resulting in 1,225 clicks, for a CTR of 0.17%…which seems freakin’ terrible, but I have no idea how that compares to other genres or promotions.

Beasts Promotion Tracking

This is a work in progress.  Amazon and FB ads are not shown.

See Beasts of Sonara Milestones for more details.

RLRR Promotion Tracking

Amazon and FB ads are not shown. Silly early-stage promos (e.g., silly TikTok one, etc.) are not shown b/c they had no real value.

See Run Lab Rat Run Milestones for legacy details. New cover doesn’t seem to hurt sales, but doesn’t make dig difference either except on minor KU page reads.

Dec 2022 BookBub Promotion #1 (International)

(*!) First BookBub deal, international only for RLRR, but forgot to include Apple (a major EU publisher) :). Lesson learned, so we’ll see. Probably lost around 10% of sales? Ran deal Dec 29 to Jan 5 just to see what longtail looked like. Also note that I’ve never done any promotion of any kind on a publisher other than Amazon, and have thus never sold a single book (!) on any site other than Amazon until this promotion (meaning no ratings, reviews, etc.).

So, I’ll end up with 700+ sales during this promotion, and 3k+ kindle reads, putting me right in the middle of the 10-1600 estimated sales for Int-Only SF deals. Very satisfied, considering this includes publisher-backed major books. Note (*) that Kobo numbers are shifted back one day from dashboard, possibly due to time zone issues. Around 80% of all books sold were in the first days, so next promo will ge much shorter. About 72% of all sales were Amazon, but this is skewed by absence of Apple, so guesstimate 2/3 for Amazon internationally. Profit of $291.83-$167.00=$124.83. Better than nothing :).

Kindle page reads that I can reasonably attribute to the deal are roughly 6,000 (Beasts and Arachniss), which adds even more $ to the number above.

Oh, ratings also came in 1-3 weeks after, about 20 for Run Lab Rat Run on Amazon, 5 on Kobo, none on Google. Only one actual review, on Kobo. One or two and several ratings on Goodreads.

Update 2/21/23: According to BB, RLRR got 1,525 clicks during the promotion to a list of 220k subscribers, for a BB CTR of 0.69% (roughly 4x better than the CTR for Arachniss (see above)), and a wide conversion rate of more than 48% or 49%+ if you include page reads (vs. 33% for Arachniss).

Peace.