This last week, Pixie Noir has been on sale. I hadn’t publicized it, other than sharing the main sale page, as I wanted to see how that did in terms of sales boost, and then boosting the other books in the series. I suspected, when I looked at the sales page, with the scroll-forever to reach my book, that it wouldn’t do terrifically well, and I was correct.
The blue in the graph above is Pixie Noir, the yellow and red are Trickster and Dragon Noir.
Sales of series like this work like an inchworm’s progress. First the main book, the one on sale, shoots on ahead, then the rest of the series, slowly, with wobbles, catches up to the one in front.
Now, first of all this isn’t bad. The KU page reads show me a small but definite trend that a couple of fast readers have picked up the sequels and are reading them. The read-through for most is going to be a much longer delay, which Dorothy Grant has enumerated somewhere else. However, the selling rate from the sale itself is… well, there are variables here I’ll unpack. Firstly, this is a novel which has been out now for over a decade (where has the time gone?) and it’s not the first time I have included it in the sale, although it has been a year or more since I did that. I was curious, to see if the new platform on Substack affected the visibility of the sale, first of all. It looks like it did. Although the other big variable is one we figured out here on the MGC when we did Indie Book Sales in the past – if the post is too long, people get overloaded with books (the mental equivalent of me staggering around the used book sale recently with my arms practically falling off under stacks of books) and stop scrolling. Their brains are full, as are their kindles. Which is great! Unless your book is the one at the bottom of the page.
Today, on the other hand, I am going to publicize the book itself, and then the sale in the comments. I’m curious how this will affect the graphs (and I’ll share next week). I’ll put up the graphic I made a while back for the book, along with an announcement that it’s on sale today for a dollar, get it now.
There are many ways to promote your books. Doing a giveaway will get you the greatest volume of ‘sales’ but the follow-through on these tends to be at best delayed, and at worst abysmally low. I know that personally as I picked up a dozen or so books right after Christmas from a massive ‘free books! Stuff your kindle!’ giveaway. Last week, I finally started working my way through them. Most of them, I deleted after reading very little of the book. Just wasn’t my style, didn’t live up to the blurb which got me to grab it (or cover). One book sucked me in, had the handy live-link to the next book, and about two in the freaking morning I finally forced myself to stop reading. Finished the series the next day. So the author did get her payout from the free book, it just took a few months.
Putting the book up for the lowest price you can set on Amazon, the $0.99 price point, will filter out those who are going through a promotion hoovering up all the free books which they may or may not ever get around to reading. The reader who picked up my book at that level (all eleven of ’em in the last few days, bless them) is far more likely to read the book as they have some investment in it. A little skin in the game, and as I can see from my sales and KU peaks, this is showing a mite of follow-through on the reading already. I’m happy with that.
One last thing, to repeat what we’ve said before – if you only have one novel out, with more in the pipeline but not there yet? Don’t put it in the sales. The readers will not hang around until you put out the next book. You want at least one, maybe two, more out, with the last on pre-order is ideal. Put live links in the back of each book so the reader just has to one-click their way to reading bliss and less sleep. Set yourself up for success!
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Inching Along”
I need to go back through _all_ my books putting in live links . . . and updating covers . . . back matter . . .
it is tedious, but needs to be done. I updated all three of these with new covers, new editing, and new layouts in vellum, so they are done… for a while. Now, to get another book written and continue the revamping of back catalog.
My experience has been that free books, just don’t work all that well. Yes, you’ll see a lot of downloads, but you’ll get very few follow on readers. A lot of folks download free books, but never read them. A lot of folks who download free books will never buy one. I’m talking both ‘sales’ and ‘permafree’.
I used to have a huge spreadsheet on which I tracked all the data (cause yes, I’m an engineer
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My experience with $0.99 books is the same for books with that price permanently set. There used to be this huge thing in the writing community about making your first book 99 cents (or ‘permafree’) and that you’d sell more books and make more money. That also proved out to be false. The book is more likely to get read, true, but for you to even hit the breakeven point, they have to go in about 4 books, and the increase in sales is so small as to not make it fiscally worth while.
$0.99 SALES however work very well. People see it’s a limited time, and if they’ve ever been putting off buying a book or looking at a series, that will bring them in. Everybody loves a sale, because they know they’re getting a deal because the price will go back up. More of the readers you get from running a sale will read through into the series enough to make it pay off. They tend to be ‘on the cusp’ people who aren’t sure if they want to spend the money to ‘start’ a ‘new’ series, but are willing to pay full price for everything else if they know they’ll enjoy it.
I personally agree, that unless you have a fair number of books out, doing a sale isn’t going to help you. But low pricing will. By low I mean 2.99 to 3.99. You want people to take a chance on you, but you don’t want them to think that you’re too cheap.
(As a note: For those who don’t know me or aren’t familiar with me, to date I have sold over a million copies. YMMV, but if you’re willing to work hard, you can very much do it too.)
Not as good a data tracker as you but similar results. I seem to be getting marginally better followthru now that I actually put links in the back of the permafreebies, but we’re talking about an improvement from like 0.1% sellthru to 1% sellthru.
I continue to do the permafreebie thing mostly because I’m too lazy to change it back, but I guess I need to fix that.
Note to new authors: if you are in Kindle Unlimited, Amazon lets you list KU books for free 5 days out of every 90. I don’t claim to use them effectively, but it seems like a shame to let them go to waste.
In the early years of KDP the free period was useful for an unknown author.
Now? With millions of titles available? You’re lost in the huge selection.
looks to me like there was a significant number of people that had read the first two and not the third…
Yet.
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