Cue the comeback music!
Yesterday – thanks to promotional advertisements at Robin Reads and other assorted factors I managed to move 18 books in total.
Not all of these 18 books were GYPSY BLOOD and not all of them made me any money – but 18 books in one day is still a long away from the 1-2 books daily that I was moving from May 1 to May 23.
Let me break it down for you.
Yesterday I sold…
GYPSY BLOOD – 7 copies Amazon.com and 2 copies Amazon.co.uk
THE TATTERDEMON OPUS – 1 copy Amazon.com
BIGFOOT TRACKS – 1 copy Amazon.com
BIG HAIRY DEAL – 1 copy Amazon.com
TROLLING LURES – 1 copy Amazon.com
as well as these permafree e-books…
REVENANT: BOOK ONE OF THE TATTERDEMON TRILOGY – 4 free copies Amazon.com
FLASH VIRUS: EPISODE ONE – 1 free copy Amazon.com
***
Now, you have to understand that I usually move a couple or two of those permafree e-books nearly everyday. I don’t crow too loudly over them because – hey, they don’t make me any money. They are nothing more than freshly churned cow-guts thrown into the waters of the mighty Amazon as chum.
So – did ALL of these sales directly result from Robin Reads?
Maybe – but as I mentioned there are other factors to consider.
Some of the promoting I did yesterday and the day before might also have sold some of those book copies. Maybe you got a Booktastik newsletter in your e-mail box on May 25th and did not get around to reading it and acting upon it until May 26th.
Anything is possible.
Also there are the numerous Facebook pages that I have announced my GYPSY BLOOD promotion upon. Personally, I have really begun to doubt the effectiveness of these Facebook postings – but in all honesty, I am too chickenshit to NOT give them a try. I do try and space them out so that folks who follow me on Facebook don’t get inundated with something along the lines of STEVE VERNON JUST SHOUTED BUY-MY-BOOK ON THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY TWO AND A HALF FACEBOOK BOOK PROMOTION PAGES.
(That half a promotion was the one that the telemarketer interrupted me at, wanting me to purchase a brand new gold-plated Ginsu knife collection to fix my computer on my free cruise to Mexico)
So – a couple of those sales MIGHT have resulted from those Facebook postings.
Then too there is always the possibility that somebody might have read a recent blog entry and felt compelled to order a copy.
You never can tell.
That is the thing about promotion. It is a little like casting rocks into a pond. You cast one rock and you get a few ripples. You cast a whole handful of rocks and you get a whole pond full of ripples. You build yourself a catapult and chuck an entire dumpster-load of pebbles into that pond and you get yourself a non-stop freaking tsunami of promotional ripples.
Something that I have not done is to set up promotional blog appearances. You know – the kind where you write an informative blog entry for somebody else’s blog and make mention of your upcoming promotion. This is another important tool for indie writers who are trying to get the word out to as many people as possible. It isn’t just a matter of having a typical BUY-MY-BOOK! blog post show up on somebody else’s blog. It is FAR more effective to write something creative and interesting and useful that might possibly go just a little viral, even for a brief internet moment – and then to add at the end of that blog entry – “Oh, by the way – BUY MY BOOK!”.
However, I have a hard time these days following through on promises to write interesting blog entries for guest blog appearances, so I don’t hunt those up the way that I used to. Still, I have always felt this was a strong way of getting the word out – especially if you can get a more popular writing/reading blog to take one of your articles.
I hope this series of promotional advice is helping some of you writer-type-folks out there. This is still a big old learning experience for me and I do not claim to be an expert at what I am doing. I just like to put this out there to reach a few more folks and hopefully show them what I am doing right and just as importantly show them what I am doing wrong.
Good luck and keep on writing.
yours in storytelling,
Steve Vernon
No – because today’s Sweet Free Books listing has NOT gone live on their page just yet. Neither has their e-mailed newsletter. That is common with a lot of promotional websites. You do not ALWAYS know just when in the day that they will go live.
So – what DID sell those e-books I moved yesterday?
YOURS IN STORYTELLING... 