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.
You could promote this in terms of: Buy one - get one free.
ReplyDeleteRods! You've got the job! We'll do a fifty fifty split!
ReplyDeleteRe the reduced Remote Control figures. I suspect thriller-readers are already spoilt for choice. Or maybe too thick for the technology.
ReplyDeleteAlbert? That has been very weird. It's about assumptions. My assumption was that folk somehow were sitting every day with their clicky clicky beepy thing downloading anything onto their Kindles, and probably never reading it. But one senses discrimination. Remote Control is far better than most thrillers although certain folk did not like it so much, but it is far better than most thrillers because it's not really a thriller. It's something trying to be a thriller. I don't even read thrillers. Goodis, Hammett... Chandler ... the last one took me ages; a real senior moment!
ReplyDeleteI think you should take all this stuff over. I do the spongy stuff and develop the ideas, then hand it over to you and you give me the gurls and the drugs, and the decent beers. The way the decent beers diminished ... Anyway, you've got the jobbie. I want Liam Neeson to play me.
When I retire, I'll take it over for 10% of the groupies and drugs. Liam would need make-up.
ReplyDelete