First, there are the two options that are free to you: the Kindle Countdown Deal and the Free Book Promotion. Of these two, you would think Kindle Countdown Deal is the better one. First, it puts your book on sale without making it free, so you make some money from it. It also places it prominently on the website so there's more exposure. There's also a timer with this ad so people feel under pressure to buy it soon. This sort of advertising works a lot with larger companies.
But somehow it hasn't seemed to work so well with independents. When this option first came out, a lot of people tried it, and quickly said they were going back to Free Book Promotions because they saw better results with it. I experienced the same thing. I think that ultimately it comes down to people not wanting to take a chance, not even with a dollar, on something they don't know.
As for the Free Book Promotion, this allows you to give away your book for free for five days. There's still a part of me that rolls my eyes when I hear that. Gee, can I really give away my own product for free? Thanks! And what's worse, the book does not get placed in a better position; people still need to find it and happen to notice that it's free without a catch. Generally, you have to pay other sites to show off that this sale is going on. So why does it work so well?
It basically puts your name out there to people who weren't going to take a chance on you otherwise. I think people who are giving a chance to unknown authors are wanting to see as much as they can for free before purchasing anything. That's why series work best for indie authors. If you have a solo book, once you've given it away for free, that's it. They might buy it as a physical book, but what you're really hoping for is that enough people download it that the book raises high in the rankings, and when it goes up for sale at a price again, it's more visible on the site. This does happen, but it fades back into obscurity pretty quickly, and whatever sales you got is what you got.
But when it's a series, that one book is given away, and people become curious as to what the next book will be, and the next, and so on. The general strategy today is to release the first book for free as much as possible, always advertising the fact that it's free, and have the second and third one available for a price, sometimes 99 center for the second, then 2.99 for the third to get the readers slowly into it.
The paid ad campaign is the newest feature. Ads never work as well as reviews in books, but they certainly don't hurt. Sometimes all the social media work in the world doesn't help as much as just having your book image appear on thousands of computer screens. And best of all, Amazon only charges you for the clicks that went through, meaning you're only paying for the ad when it's successful enough to grab a customer.
In this way, I believe it's helpful. It's not the end-all be-all. You need to remember that the ad campaign needs to be run in conjunction with other efforts, and it's more of a long-term goal rather than a short one. You'll get more people looking at your work and who you are when they see this ad, which will hopefully turn into sales. This is another reason series are a bit better, because they can stick with you, checking you out from time to time as your work keeps getting released. And that journey sometimes begins with an ad.
So what I'll be using is Free Book Promotions on the first book in my series in conjunction with an ad campaign that comes out more and more the closer we come to the release of book 2.
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