I see a lot of folks talking about what paid book promos (if any) actually work. I've tried a fair few, through Fiverr, Twitter and other sites, which I didn't feel really panned out for me. One day (when I have some more free cash) I might try for a BookBub promo - they are about $250 but I'm told they have an ENORMOUS impact at getting your books in front of readers.
But right now, I'm gonna talk about a promo I did yesterday (September 16th) which I deliberately did no extra promotion for myself, basically just as a test to see how well it worked.
I booked a Bargain Booksy feature for my erotic novella, Dana's Duo.
I dropped the price from $2.99 to $0.99 for the one-day promo.
Now, this is actually a really big hit to take if you know how Amazon royalty structures work, because the moment you drop your price under $2.99 your royalties go down from 70% to 35%.
I was making $2.09 profit per sale: dropping it to 99¢ means I get just under 35¢ per sale. As I said. A big hit.
An erotic romance feature with BargainBooksy costs $70 (take a look at this page for pricing in your genre). A bit of rough maths tells me that I need to sell ~ 215 books to make the promotion pay for itself.
Here's my sales spike for the day for Dana's Duo. That is a 43-book sales spike, by the way.
Not great, you might think? Return works out to be about $15.
However, there's a few other benefits here that aren't immediately obvious.
The book made a BIG jump in rankings, leaping up into the Top 50 in Erotica (Kindle), which does put it in front of a lot more eyes, and hopefully will lead to follow-on sales - when the book is back at the higher price, helping me to recoup my outlay much more quickly.
Not only that, but the promotion appears to be having a knock-on effect on some of my other books, which I hope will flow on through the next few days as people read Dana's Duo and decide they want to see more of my work.
I'm hoping to get a few signups to my email list (if you're not already on it, why not???) because every signup increases the likelihood of future purchases from that buyer. I might pick up a few followers to my Twitter page or this very blog. Even more importantly than that, hopefully a few of those new readers will leave me nice reviews, which feeds back into Amazon's algorithms and gets my books onto Recommended To Buy lists for other readers.
Do I think paying for a BargainBooksy feature was worth it, even though as yet I haven't made back my outlay? Yes. Absolutely. I got my work, and my name, in front of the eyes of a lot more people, and if even a few of those become regular readers then it was well worth the outlay.
I'm planning to book a Freebooksy feature in the next few weeks for First Submission - even more money ($100 in the erotica genre) and NO immediate return as it has to be free.
HOWEVER, as that is the first in a trilogy, I do hope to see a lot more knock-on sales for the other two, and hopefully for Dana's Duo too, which is of course back at full price.
I'll make another post soon and update you with how the flow-on sales and promotion have been going from this particular feature, but right now, I'm going to say that I think BargainBooksy has worked for me and it's a promotional tool I'll use again.
It might not work so well for an author with only one or two books available, that said, but if you're getting no sales at all and you can afford to spend a few dollars taking a gamble to get your name in front of readers? I'd say go for it.
Click here to book yourself a BargainBooksy feature (you may have to register first, but it's free!) And I'd love to hear your experiences with BargainBooksy, or your recommendations for paid or free promotions for books!