Half-Price Promotion -

Paul Easton

24 Jun 2012, 09:56 AM | Post: #1

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Half-Price Promotion

This post was last modified: 24 Jun 2012 02:30 PM by Paul Easton.

Having had my fingers burnt by trying a KDP Select free promotion (gave away plenty of copies but it failed to result in any paid-for sales since) I'm thinking of trying a limited-period 'Half Price' promotion.

Has anybody else tried this - and how was it?

Is it worth doing?

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

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angeleyes40

24 Jun 2012, 02:14 PM | Post: #2

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RE: Half-Price Promotion

Hi Paul...

I recently done a promotion on The Cupboard Under The Stairs by Roger Knowles which resulted in over 5000 free downloads....

It peaked the top of the paid kindle books for 4-5 days and it resulted in over 1000 paid sales, so all in all with this promotion it was very successful...

I had advertised the freebie as many places as I could FB, twitter etc etc which helped I suppose, I think if I remember I started the free promotion on a Monday and it ended on the Thurs morning...

Sorry to hear that you didn't do as well with this free promotion, but at the start Paul when our books were just published I was struggling to get any recognition for them at all... But folks on this forum are amazing and through reading various posts on here I found other ways to advertise and promote my books....

Xx

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Paul Easton

24 Jun 2012, 02:25 PM | Post: #3

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RE: Half-Price Promotion

This post was last modified: 24 Jun 2012 02:35 PM by Paul Easton.

Thanks, angeleyes40,

That's very impressive. While I accept that freebies can work for some people I'm actually more interested in finding out whether anybody has had any success with doing a half-price (or a 99p) promotion.

To recap (from another thread) my own experience with freebies.

In late April I published my first book Programming Points: The Best of the Radio Magazine' Columns (2003-2010) on Kindle – it was a collection of regular articles I’d written for a UK trade publication over a number of years. As I have another book project in progress this seemed an interesting way to “test the water”.

In the five weeks between publication and the end of May I had managed to sell a modest 20 copies, which I felt wasn’t actually too bad for a specialist book.

Having sold nothing since, though – despite my continuing promotion through my own website and blog as well as Facebook and Twitter – I decided to try the KDP Select free promotional route after reading a number of articles and blogs by various authors who had achieved some considerable success in boosting paid-for sales after giving away large numbers of downloads.

On the appointed ‘freebie day’ my book managed just over 50 free downloads – at one point it even managed to reach No.1 on the Amazon ‘Bestsellers’ ranking for its own particular category! So I was quite pleased, especially as I did not promote the giveaway in advance.

Since then, though, I have not sold any paid-for copies, nor has it gained me any further revniews. Also once I came off the free list my overall Amazon rating quickly dropped back to where it was before the promotion.

Meanwhile a business colleague was also keen to explore the possibility of using a free promotion to boost sales of her own book, which is on a more mainstream and general-interest subject.

On her ‘freebie day’ (not the same one as mine) she managed to get 276 free downloads and while she has since sold a further 5 copies she does not think the free promotion as it seems they have been bought by friends etc.

So as you can imagine, we’re both currently feeling rather disillusioned by our experience and feel it’s important to stress that doing a free promotion may not be an effective way to help build sales and visibility for everybody’s book.

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TresaC Reading The Cult of Me by Michael Brookes

24 Jun 2012, 10:32 PM | Post: #4

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RE: Half-Price Promotion

Over on the KDP forums there have been plenty of discussions about changing prices. (And a few on here) In the US there now appears to be a trend where people are putting prices up by $2-3 and increasing sales. So the average is becoming $4.99. The idea being that readers are thinking that 99p/c is too cheap and it will be rubbish.

I am still not convinced either way with freebies. There seems to be not set pattern. I suppose part of it is that we are all still trying to see what works. It is all still rather new.

Angeleyes40, those are quite amazing figures, well done.

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