Promoting ebooks through the Five Day Free Book Promotion!

Tuesday 31st January, 2012

          This will be the last day I'll be running any of my ten books through the five day free book promotion scheme until the end of February anyway. I put ten books on Kindle last year, so that fives me fifty free book promotion days. So far I have used forty one of these days. I'm not going to continue with this through February partly through diminishing results - there are far few free downloads happening now that I'm putting books up free again for one or two days - and partly because I want my download records clear of free downloads so I can see if I'm actually selling any books!

          On the 25th November, Amazon sent me £10:88 in royalties. I've discovered that they pay royalties 60 days after you've earned them, so those royalties were earned in September or before, when the books were all in the 70% royalties higher price band. I've had nothing from them since and I think the books have been at their cheapest possible selling price since around the 15th of October.

          I think the next thing will be to see if the free downloads affect sales in Febuary. So far the free downloads have produced no reviews at all. Someone on a discussion thread reckoned they got one review for every 185 ebooks sold. I've only picked up four or five reviews so far and none came from free downloads!

          I cannot see much difference between selling a book for 77p (this is the lowest price now that VAT has been reduced) and giving it away for free, but there are hardly any sales at 77p and quite a lot of folk seem to download the books if they are free. Here are my figures so far:

           41 days on the five day free book promotion.
           2,360 free downloads approximately.

          I looks to me that there is not much chance of a writer like me making much money out of Kindle ebooks!! I don't write in genres in any consistent way. What I'll do over the next month is see if sales have been affected at all by the five free book day promotions (which I very much doubt!) and then probably decide once again what price to put the books at. And then put this whole ebook thing on the back burner, which is where it would have stayed had I not stumbled upon this free book promotion nonsense.

          To promote your ebooks yourself you'd need to be prepared to spend a lot of long, boring hours doing  clicky clicky stuff, and if I'm going to spend time on the computer, I'd rather be writing. This week I started writing again after a  year where all I did was scan, edit and upload old books. Anyway, once I'm settled into writing a book again, I don't expect to be spending much time doing stuff like this!

Promoting Ebooks again!

          I stumbled upon this scheme whereby you give Amazon the right to lend your ebook and they allow you to give away your ebook in a five day promotional thing. At first sight it doesn't seem to make much sense, but amazingly enough you can get hundreds and hundreds of downloads for something that's free and almost none for something that's almost free. I suspect this is all about visibility. It was pointed out to me in the discussion thread I started about this that there are web pages, etc., set up to advertise what you can get free on Kindle, but none advertising books for 77p. Maybe folk are just filling up their devices. It's hard to work out what is going on.
       
          Anyway, I've got ten books on Kindle and ten on this scheme, so I've got fifty free book days in total. After using thirty two of these free days, just under three thousand four hundred free ebooks have been downloaded. This isn't a lot compared to other people's results. Some folk are getting 1500 downloads a day. Funnily enough, the book of mine which I expected to download the most, Remote Control  because it was a thriller was downloaded the least. So I don't understand what that's about!

          So far I haven't picked up any reviews as a result of giving the books away. Reviews seem to be important, but it's nice that some folk might get round to reading the books. And word of mouth is the only way anybody is going to hear of these ebooks, so giving them away every now and again has got to be a good idea.

          Only one of my books was borrowed during this time, so it's not as if it cost me sales.

           The download rate definitely drops after a couple of days. I put the first books up for five days in a row, but I suspect that it would be best to put up books for a day at a time. The rest of my eighteen days will be single days.

Are You Boys Cyclists? - review!

          Just found this on the Meet Our Authors forum at Amazon.

Elizabeth Jasper Writer says:

I bought and read 'Are You Boys Cyclists' and it was most enlightening. I haven't got around to writing my review yet, but will be giving it 4*s for originality and a most interesting insight into the male psyche.

Review of The Real McCoy!

          I thought this was a really good and honest review!

          Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic Read, 3 Jan 2012

By 

Ewan Walker - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Real McCoy (Kindle Edition)

I really enjoyed this book, although it did take a little bit of getting used to. At times I felt there were so many characters it was getting confusing who was who (such as the difference between Angus and Sam McSorely), but the plot was fantastic. The commentaries on the Christian faith were excellent, and well embedded in the character of Jacob, who is sent to the USA from Bolivia to "encounter God."

The idea of having God as a central character, complete with dialogue was something which I enjoyed about this book. As a Christian, the idea of God physically speaking English to you is quite comical, and the image that the author portrayed, of God having a dry sense of humour was fantastic.

Overall, I really enjoyed the book, and though it took a bit of perseverance at first, I found it was well worth reading to the end.

Free Books on Kindle!

          Ancient Futures has been downloaded 346 times as part of the five days free book promotion option you get if you join in the lending for free for 90 days scheme. That's about what TheBlissBook and Alma Mater did between them and there's two days out of the five to go, I think.

           Kind folk on the discussion thread I started about the five day free book promotions on Meet Our Authors forum has said that you get free books for Kindle from these two sites:
http://uk.kogrid.com/  and
http:/www.ereaderiq.co.uk

           Someone said the former has 300 plus new titles a day, quite a surprisingly large proportion seem to be pornography, which puts some folk off!!

La Belle France

               Someone keeps landing on this blog from Paris, Ile-de-France. I've no idea why. But Happy New Year to you! Vive La France!