Meredith Mansfield, Author

Okay, my $0.99 promotion for THE VOICE OF PROPHECY finished on Friday. The results were mixed.

Now I should say that I didn’t have enormously high expectations to begin with. I knew I was going with a relatively new site. (That’s why it was free, after all.)  Also, part of it was my fault. My first tweet of the promotion had the purchase url wrong. Can’t expect people to buy something if they can’t find it, now can you?

Now, there are two things I hope for from a promotion.

1. Enough sales to pay for itself
2. Most importantly, more people aware of the book. This is the single hardest thing for an indie author.

I don’t have any way of assessing the second. I suppose time will tell. For the first, well since the ad didn’t actually cost me anything directly, the only costs to recoup would be the decreased royalty from the price drop. I would have needed approximately three times as many sales as normal to offset the drop. That didn’t happen. Well, I’ll qualify that. I did break even in the UK, but not on Amazon.com.

My sales are still down a bit, but that’s to be expected following a sale. Hopefully they’ll rebound quickly.

So, what did I learn?

I probably made another mistake in promoting the second book in the series, even though it’s the new release (and this was a new-release promotion). It probably would have done more good to promote the first book–or to promote both together. I’ll try that next time.

Will I use SciFiFantasyFreak again?

Yes. Of all the promotion sites out there (that I’ve found so far) it’s the one that aims right at my target audience. The bigger and better-established sites are all more general, though the best of them do at least allow subscribers to choose their genres of interest instead of being bombarded with a lot of titles they’ll never buy. (Hint: There is no point in marketing a spy thriller to me. If I’m in the right mood, I might invest a couple of hours in the movie–for free on tv–but I’m not going to buy the book.) And I do think that as their subscriber list grows SciFiFantasyFreak will only get better.

Next time, though, I will try harder to combine that promotion with one of those other sites. That’s something I definitely haven’t mastered yet.

I subscribe to several of these bargain e-book sites. (Sometimes, I even buy something that’s advertised. Mostly, I consider it market research.) I often see books that turn up on more than one of the sites on the same day or within a day of each other. I don’t know how those authors manage that level of organization–while working, writing the next book, and trying to make at least a swipe at all the things that need to be done around this house. I need to figure that out.

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So, I’m nervous right now. I’ve got a promotion going this week. (It started yesterday afternoon and runs through Friday.) It’s a $0.99 Kindle Countdown deal on The Voice of Prophecy.

The promotion is on SciFiFantasyFreak. Not one of the big promotion sites, but at least hopefully targeted to my main audience. (And within my price range.)

I haven’t done a lot of promotion for my books. Not very good at it, though I know I need to learn to be. And my record for what I have done is kind of spotty. Some have worked pretty well. Some have fallen flat and actually hurt sales. Here’s hoping this falls in the first category. I’ll let you know on Sunday.

Any help getting the word out would be greatly appreciated.

Writing is the fun part, but people have to be able to find the stories, too.

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