I thought I might share how I recently got to be a Amazon UK BestSeller. Below is a graph showing the dates, who I used to promote, how much I was charged and how many sales I received. Hopefully, from the below you will be able to ascertain whether running consecutive promotions is something you might consider.
| Promoter | Cost | UK | USA | CA | AUS | Total | |
| Weds 11th | Book Raid | $2.16 | 2 | 4 | 6 | ||
| Thurs 12th | Reading Deals | $29.00 | |||||
| & | Books Go Social | $39.50 | 1 | 7 | 1 | 9 | |
| Fri 13th | Fussy Librarian | $24.00 | |||||
| & | Book Cave | $25.00 | 1 | 34 | 1 | 36 | |
| Sat 14th | BookBub (not on in USA) | $188.00 | 78 | 6 | 18 | 21 | 123 |
| Sun 15th | Books Go Social | $39.50 | 7 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 16 |
| All 5 days | Amazon Ads | $25.00 | 2 | 2 | |||
| Total promotion cost | $370.00 | 89 | 57 | 21 | 25 | ||
| Total Sales | 192 |
I reduced the price of ‘Idi & the Oracle’s Quest’ from $2.99 to $0.99 on Tues 10th Sep. On the 10th I received 3 sales and this can confidentally be accounted for by friends on FB sharing my post and also tweeting. Throughout the entire 6 days I tweeted numberous times and it is hard to know if any sales came from these tweets. I use Bitly to monitor link clicks on Twitter and in total I had 122 clicks, whether a few of these resulted in sales is hard to determine. I also can’t be 100% sure if the sales on the lines match the promoter as there would of course been a merging of promotions at certain times. This time round what was dissappointing for me where the two Amazon Ads I ran, normally these bring a much higher amount of sales.
Although I didn’t break-even during this promotion, let alone make a profit, that wasn’t the object of the exercise. The point of this campaign was exposure, to which end I am very confident to having received a measure of success.
The biggest success, of course, comes from the BookBub sales in the UK which took me to #1 and awarded me the Best Seller badge, which I can assure you I was over the moon about and opened the champagne to celebrate!
With a book only earning $0.34 per sale you can see I only received back a 5th of output. However, besides the books sales I received 6 audio sales, at a far better rate of return, and had many downloads with KDP Select, some days hitting over 3500 pages read, which in turn generates a fair income.
The last thing that upped my return were sales on my other books in the series, both book 2 and 3 sold 8 copies each at full price of $2.99.
Do I think the promotion was successful, and would I do it again – yes and in a heartbeat. It’s only been a couple of days since the promotion stopped and I’ve already had a review, just can’t beat that.
