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!