A week in the life of a promotion
On April 21-25, I ran a five-day promotion for my self-published fantasy series; here's how it went, by the numbers
My first fantasy series was called The Death Wizard Chronicles, a six-book epic fantasy for ages 18 and older. Its heyday was between 2012 and 2015. It doesn’t sell much anymore. The DW Chronicles, as I affectionately call the series, was published by a respected midsized house.
My latest fantasy series is called Dark Circles, a three-book teen fantasy adventure for ages 13 and older. I chose to self-publish this series because I wanted full control of marketing. Self-published authors who write genre series such as fantasy have a lot of promotional options: website, social media, newsletter, promotional sites, Facebook and Amazon ads, etc.
DARK CIRCLES (teen fantasy adventure series)
Book 1: Do You Believe in Magic? (debuted May 25)
Book 2: Do You Believe in Monsters? (debuted Oct. 30)
Book 3: Do You Believe in Miracles? (debuted April 21, 2024)
A typical promotion involves making the first ebook or first couple of ebooks of a series free with the hope that readers will download them, read them, love them, and then pay money for the subsequent books in the series. The reason this often works is because there are tens of millions of readers out there who do just that. In a way, it’s only fair. If readers love the free download, they will happily pay for the next books. And if they hate it, there’s no harm, no foul because it was free.
On April 21-25, I made the ebook versions of book 1 and 2 free exclusively on Amazon. Also on April 21, book 3 made its debut with the ebook version priced at $3.99. Book 3 quickly rose to as high as No. 7 in the Top 100 Paid teen and young adult category.
Meanwhile, books 1-2 did this:
Pretty cool!
All this will make more sense when you see the numbers. On April 21, I began obsessively checking my free and paid sales. Here’s how the promotion progressed:
April 21 — main promotions: FreeBooksy (1 day), Facebook Ad (five days)
Total sales/downloads: 2024
Free: 1998
Paid: 26
April 22 — main promotions: Fussy Librarian (1 day), EReaderNews (1 day)
Total sales/downloads: 1261
Free: 1214
Paid: 47
April 23 — main promotion: BookBub New Release (1 day)
Total sales/downloads: 1324
Free: 1269
Paid: 55
April 24 — main promotion: Book Barbarian (1 day)
Total sales/downloads: 2107
Free: 2028
Paid: 79
April 25 — main promotion: Book Gorilla (1 day)
Total sales/downloads: 1773
Free: 1712
Paid: 61
Grand totals:
Free: 8449
Paid: 268
(If I add in audiobook sales, the total paid was 298 books with an additional 5,000 Kindle Edition Normalized Pages read.)
As you can see, the overall number of downloads is quite extraordinary for a single week, but the money I earned was admittedly modest (less than $500). That said, I did all this with the hope that the thousands of people who downloaded books 1 and 2 for free will later purchase book 3.
That remains to be seen.
Fingers are crossed.
Wish me luck.
Hi Richard. I am serializing the first 10 or so paragraphs of each book, but for now I'm going to stick it out with self-publishing for the entire books. My wife is going to serialize her memoir, though, starting in June.
Thanks James. I thought that some writers might find the process interesting.