All right – so my most recent blog entry told all of my blog followers about my latest Kindle freebie promotion.
Now that I have got that whole BUY-MY-BOOK madness out of my system – let me tell you a few of the tricks that I have used to promote this latest Kindle freebie in hopes that you might benefit from my experience.
First off let me tell you that I am on a severely deep-discount promotional budget – which is a long-winded way of telling you that after I pay my bills I don’t have all that much left over to spring for e-book promotions.
I’m not broke – but my wallet is pretty seriously bent.
🙂
So, for starters I tweet about it.
You can follow my tweets if you are REALLY that desperate for cheap entertainment. All jokes aside, you will find a LOT of informative retweets aimed specifically at all of you writer-types out there who are – like me – struggling to make it as an indie e-book writer.
Okay – so once I have tweeted it out I send a few carefully worded tweets to such Kindle freebie Tweet sites as @DigitalBkToday @kindleebooks @Kindlestuff @KindleBookKing @KindleFreeBook @FreeReadFeed @4FreeKindleBook. I also add hashtags such as #kindle and #freebie and #BookBoost.
Some of these twitter pages will retweet your original tweet. Also, if you have established a good relationship with some of your Twitter followers they will likewise retweet.
Now understand that Twitter is not necessarily your most effective tool to promote paid books – however, freebies are a nice and easy and reflex-driven impulse purchase – and a tweet does not take much time at all out of your morning.
Time is ALWAYS at a premium in promotion.
I have also begun posting about this freebie on various Facebook freebie promotional pages. None of this is high-quality promotion, you understand. Twitter and Facebook are the digital equivalent of stapling a photocopied poster of your next big event on a random telephone post – but every little bit of promotion is better than no promotion at all.
A couple of weeks before all of this e-book was scheduled to go freebie I set up several promotional campaigns. I have used bknights in the past and have been very pleased with their Fiverr offers. In fact, when my bkknights Fiverr promotion did NOT do very well, bknights promptly refunded my initial five dollars as a Fiverr credit. There isn’t a lot of promotional websites that offer that sort of service.
So I set up a bknights Fiverr promo for the freebie offer. Last time I used it on Not Just Any Old Ghost Story it helped me move almost 900 free copies which has done wonders for that e-books visibility.
I also reported my freebie offer to Pixel of Ink. They are a LOT fussier about which e-books they choose to promote. They are one of the bigger promotional websites, so they can afford to be picky – and I don’t expect them to pick up BIGFOOT TRACKS and promote it for free – but it only took a couple of minutes to send them my information and it never hurts to try.
Cover all your bets.
I also spent another five dollars on a spot at The Kindle Book Review – (thanks to good buddy, Jeff Bennington, who tipped me off to this service). The Kindle Book Review have always done well for me in the past and I expect good results with this advert – and here it is right here!
I also entered it at Free Book of the Day – which is a free listing for upcoming freebie Kindle promotions. I don’t know how effective this is – but I will knock on any door that I see in hopes of making a few more sales.
I tried Book Basset this time around because I had heard from a few writers I know that they had good results – but that does not go live until tomorrow. That one cost me $7.99.
That’s something I should mention. This is a TWO-DAY freebie offer. My last freebie offer was three days – and I found I gave away the majority of my free e-books on the first two days and the last day was pretty punky. So I have made sure that I have an equal amount of promotions going live tomorrow, as well as today.
I also sent a promotion through eBooks Habit – which will go live tomorrow as well as It’s Write Now.
SO – why do I want to give away all of these e-books?
In a word, visibility. The last big freebie promotion – as mentioned earlier in this blog – has resulted in a few more Kindle sales. In fact, this month is the FIRST month that my Kindle sales have out-stripped my Kobo sales. Each free Steve Vernon e-book that goes out there means one more new reader who might enjoy that read enough to go take a look at my other thirty-odd Kindle e-books.
Each one of those freebies is a teeny-tiny Steve Vernon jumping up and down and saying “BUY MY BOOKS!”
Remember, Kindle Amazon ranking is determined by how well have performed over the last thirty days or so. So any big push will keep your e-books afloat in that vast sea of visibility.
I’ve got a lot more promotions set up for October and a bit of November for my full-length Bigfoot novel BIG HAIRY DEAL and I will tell you all about them in the near future.
I will tell you that BIG HAIRY DEAL is NOT going to be free for quite some time – and that I have managed to get it noticed on several high-quality promotional websites. I’ll tell you all about that in the near future.
Now available for pre-order – a full length novel for a measly 99 cents.
In the meantime, I hope my words have helped you writer-types get a better handle on how to promote your next Kindle freebie.
yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
YOURS IN STORYTELLING... 