Wow...tried a giveaway for a week

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RikWriter

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I decided to raise the prices of the second and third book in my series so to get people interested in the series, I set up a giveaway of the first book in the series for this week.
It's been free since this morning and there have already been over 200 downloads.
Where the heck were these people when it was only 99 cents?
Anyway, hope they like it enough to buy the other two books. We'll see how well this works in raising my royalties.
 

plumone

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Interesting strategy. Smart to raise the prices of the other books, too.

Good luck- keep us updated.
 

RikWriter

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Interesting strategy. Smart to raise the prices of the other books, too.

Good luck- keep us updated.

I have seen other self published authors do this on Amazon but I do not know how well it has worked. Anyway it's only for 5 days so I figured I won't be out that much in the way of royalties even if it doesn't work and maybe I'll get some more reviews out of it.
 

Elly_Green

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Did you do anything about announcing the giveaway? Where and how?
How are you offering the books free?
Ebooks or paperbacks?

Just curious, I thought of the same but don't know how to get started. Good job!
 

RikWriter

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Did you do anything about announcing the giveaway? Where and how?
How are you offering the books free?
Ebooks or paperbacks?

Just curious, I thought of the same but don't know how to get started. Good job!


I announced it on a couple websites I frequent, on my author blog, twitter feed and Facebook page. I am offering them as e-books---jeez, offering free paperbacks would bankrupt me! :cry:

I went on Amazon and went into the setup for my book and set up a 5 day free download offer.
 

RikWriter

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BTW, FIVE HUNDRED now. Damn...I didn't think I'd get that many downloads the whole 5 days. Wonder how many of them are going to actually read it?
 

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That's pretty good for minimal advertising. You can bump these up in the four or even 5 digits per day with good planning and marketing support.

Sometimes you get lucky and one of the medium sized freebie sites picks you up and you see a huge spike. First day tends to be the best unless you get that stroke of luck.

There are people who just horde free books. A small percentage read them, and then an even smaller percentage will do something of value like review or buy followup books in the series. But the raw numbers of readers in many genres are massive enough that if your book is good you can generate more sales of book 2+ than you could of a .99 book 1.
 

RikWriter

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That's pretty good for minimal advertising. You can bump these up in the four or even 5 digits per day with good planning and marketing support.

It's hit nearly 700 already just today. I wouldn't be surprised if it comes close to four digits.

The book is currently at 384 in free in the Kindle store and #2 overall in the space opera subgenre.
 

RikWriter

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Well, the sales of my other books hasn't really changed much yet, but the giveaway has currently hit 1053 and the book is #182 in free Kindle books and #1 in military SF and space opera both.
 

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That's brilliant, Rik.

I remember that you reported elsewhere on AW that you had sold a lot of copies already: I wonder if that is helping your giveaway?

It would be great if once the free period end you could post any information about how this boosts your sales. I know we have a lot of members who would find that information very helpful.
 

SamCoulson

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I know for my part that when I published my book I put it out for free for a few days and gave away just under 400 copies, it was followed by about 18 sales in the next 3 days that I can trace directly to the giveaway (since I had not advertised the book/told anyone I knew that I'd published it at that point).

I credit that to it being higher on the 'suggest' lists due to the surge of downloads. I'm curious if Rik sees anything similar, especially with a larger library backing him up.
 

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I've got a five day freebie pending on Amazon. It should be up tomorrow. I'll report the results here too.
 

Fruitbat

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@RikWriter (or anyone else who knows)- How are you seeing how many free ebooks have been downloaded? Mine is free for five days now and I'm getting a lot of hits on my blog, so I assume some of them are downloading the e-book. But I don't see any statistics anywhere. ?
 

RikWriter

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@RikWriter (or anyone else who knows)- How are you seeing how many free ebooks have been downloaded? Mine is free for five days now and I'm getting a lot of hits on my blog, so I assume some of them are downloading the e-book. But I don't see any statistics anywhere. ?

You go to the KDP page, hit Reports and then hit Month to Date Sales and look for Free Units Promo under your title.
 

RikWriter

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Right at 2,000 downloads since Monday morning now. Sales of the other books may have picked up slightly----too early to tell right now.
 
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lauralam

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Awesome! I'm going to do the Kindle Countdown in a few weeks for my first story. Will be curious to see how the numbers work out.
 

RikWriter

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Numbers are slowing down now. I'm right around 2500 downloads now with one day to go. Don't think I'll quite hit 3000 if the trend continues.
 

RikWriter

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Just to add a postscript here, the final tally for the five days was about 2800 downloads. So far, I've got two more (5 star) reviews from it. Sales on the other books took a slight uptick from where they'd been going the rest of the month, but if the promotion does much there I don't expect to see those results for a month or two, as people get around to reading the book.
 

RikWriter

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Thinking about raising the price of one of my books

I recently ran a free promotion on the first book of my Duty, Honor, Planet military SF trilogy, which has been priced at 99 cents since I put it online in 2011.
I had very good sales with the book when it was first released, and sales climb whenever I put out a sequel, but I was wondering if it's time to raise the price.
Would it be better to keep it at 99 cents since it's the first in the series? Or would it make more sense to raise the price to say, 2.99 and run free promotions periodically?
 
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