My KDP Select Free Book Promotion Experience for Relic Worlds Book 2

I was releasing the second Relic Worlds book at Wondercon in March, so the plan was to have book 1 available for free on the same three days of the convention.  This way I could promote the free book at the convention while also having it promoted online.  I was hoping people getting this for free would go on to buy book 2.

To prepare for the KDP free promotion, I purchased advertisements on a bunch of sights.  I have learned that, when it comes to promoting your free days, you get what you pay for.  Every time I’ve tried free sites, or just tried to post to places to get attention, I get nothing.  But when I pay for some sort of promotion on some sight, I get a lot of downloads.  I spent approximately $200 on these promotions, and I promoted in a lot of Facebook groups, as well as my own Facebook and Twitter.  I also gave away a ton of flyers at the convention which gave the site where someone could download book 1 for free.  The final tally was 3,277.  1,859 were on Friday, 1,042 were on Saturday, and 376 were on Sunday.  Like my time at Wondercon, this was pretty much what I had expected, but not what I had hoped for.  I had hoped for between 5 and 10 thousand.  I expected somewhere around 3,000.  Unfortunately, VERY few of those led to sales of book 2, at least during that weekend.  The hope is that, after a bit of time, when some of those 3,000 have read book 1, they’ll go on to read book 2.

I also scheduled advertising to take place directly after the free book sale ended.  So from Monday to Friday I had ads running on Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, (where I had the book trailer running as an ad.)  Something very interesting happened here.  I got very few sales, so it would appear this was a failure.  However, I got a TON more followers on both Facebook and Twitter.  On Facebook I went from about 40 followers to 250.  On Twitter I gained a couple dozen, but a lot more people started retweeting my things and talking about Relic Worlds.  So it was successful in that more people learned about it.  This goes along with what happened at Wondercon, building my following, though in the short term I didn’t sell that much.  I’m hoping that turns into sales later on.  I met someone at Wondercon who makes her living just writing, and she told me this is the way it usually works, so hopefully I’m on the right track.

My plan for the next step is to use my last two free days of day 1 at the same time I do a countdown deal of book 2.  I’ll talk about how that goes later.  In the meantime, here’s a list of the places I promoted the KDP sale:

More Than 2 Weeks Before the Sale

Ereader News Today: http://www.ereadernewstoday.com/

Bookbub: https://www.bookbub.com/home/

Pixel of Ink: http://www.pixelofink.com/

Digital Book Today: http://digitalbooktoday.com/free-book-listing/

2 Weeks Before the Sale

Kindle Nation Daily: http://kindlenationdaily.com/

Kindle Book Promos: http://kindlebookpromos.luckycinda.com/

Freebooksy: http://www.freebooksy.com/editorial-submissions/

Indie Book of the Day: http://indiebookoftheday.com/authors/free-on-kindle-listing/

Free Books Hub: http://www.freebookshub.com/authors/

EBooks Habit: http://ebookshabit.com/about-us/

Awesome Gang: http://awesomegang.com/submit-your-book/

One thing to consider is that I got turned down by Bookbub and Ereader News Today.  Both of those are the most important lists to get on, but they’re the hardest.  I seem to have had my best luck with Freebooksy, but it’s hard to know for certain.

All in all, what I’ve learned is what I began to suspect when I started down this journey, that it’s best to do series, because short term results in independent publishing are typically slim.  Even the 3,000 downloads I got are relatively small.  If that was the only book I was releasing, I would think it’s really said, because only about 1% of those will probably turn into real sales of other people down the road.  But since this is a series, it’s only the first step in a much longer road.