The marketing begins

As I mentioned in  a previous post, I decided to contract exclusively with Amazon for a 90 day period.  That gives me the ability to offer my book for free as a promotional tool for any 5 days within that timeframe.

The idea is that people download the book, hopefully read some or all of it, leave some positive feedback and then that will encourage others to buy the book once it returns to full price.  It is even better if you have multiple books to sell as you can use the free offers strategically to entice people to your other books.  Of course, at this point, I only have one book to work with.

Anyway, one of the things you need to figure out is how to use those 5 days.  Do you use them all up at once or do you spread them out across the 90 days>

I decided to try a 24 hour period and see how that went.  January 3, 2012 was the day.  Unfortunately, the fact that I was away from home made it a bit more difficult to advertise the fact that I was offering the book for free and as a result it was only for the last half of the day that I was able to get the word out on Facebook and a number of Kindle forums.

Even so, somehow people manage to sniff a free book a mile away and downloads came fairly thick and fast through the day.  By the end, 142 people had downloaded from Amazon.com and 24 from Amazon.co.uk for a total of 166.  I was quite pleased with this, especially for a first effort with limited marketing and no supporting reviews.

I was somewhat surprised at the disparity between North American and UK downloads, despite the fact that there are obviously more Kindle users in the former than the latter. I  was able to get as high as number 14 in the Action and Adventure chart (free) through this promotion which was pretty nice to see.  The key though is whether it generates any sales or reviews.

I have not had any reviews arising from this yet which is not surprising for two reasons:
1) It takes time for people to read a book
2) The vast majority of people never leave a review and have no idea how much I want them (positive ones of course!) - 166 is a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things.

On the sales side, I can report some  results there - sales were up in the following week and 6 were sold in the space of a few hours which was exhilarating - albeit short-lived!

There is no substitute for putting in the hard yards of marketing and that will be the task ahead of me.