Okay, first, I’m glad to say that KU reads are not only still up for every book in the Tuyo series, but still rising at this point rather than falling. My best KENP pages read per single day may have come two days ago. If not, it was certainly close to the top. KENP pages read is statistically noisy, but for some reason, there tends to be a new peak every five days or so. Not seven, so this is not a phenomenon based on days of the week.
My best KENP pages read per month ever was February, which was about 50,000 pages read above any other month so far. Let me see … yes, February was also my best month so far in terms of direct sales. Obviously a lot of those were sales at $0.99, but they still add up. Roughly a quarter as many people bought the more expensive titles compared to the $0.99 titles.
Meanwhile, the Black Dog sale added a dramatic bounce to that series in terms of sales and a sharp increase in pages read. Hopefully the pages read will continue to increase for the next month for the books in this series, as has been the case for the Tuyo series. The bounce should only be starting now for the Black Dog books.
Now, results of the specific promotion services:
2/26, Freebooksy, Fussy Librarian, and Book Lover’s Haven. Because Freebooksy allows series promos, I dropped the prices for everything in the series, especially early books — in order, prices were Free, Free, $0.99, $0.99, $2.99, $1.99, $3.99, $3.99. Results: slightly over 1400 downloads, with 2/3 of the downloads being Black Dog and the remainder the first story collection. That ratio remained constant throughout the sale. This was the day on which the greatest proportion of people went ahead and bought some or all of non-free books. This was twice the proportion as on any other day, which I think shows the benefit of the series promo from Freebooksy.
2/27, Robin Reads — just over 1000 downloads, a very impressive response considering only one promo service was scheduled at this time. I didn’t use this service for the Tuyo sale because they were booked up for those dates. Very obviously worthwhile and the next time I schedule a Tuyo sale, I’ll try hard to use them.
2/28, Book Rebel, Book Runes, Book Sends, Book Cave — 1600 downloads, so these services all put together had the best performance. By this time Black Dog was #1 in all its categories and way up in the Top 100 Free Kindle Ebooks — I think it got to about #38 or so for a little while. Direct sales were better here than for Robin Reads.
3/1, Author Ad Network, Awesome Gang — a mere 350 or so downloads. Awesome Gang is free and does not have a big effect, which I knew, but it’s an easy promo service to line up. I think this result says a lot more about Author Ad Network. They are expensive and I don’t think I’ll be inclined to use them again, certainly not for this series. I think it would be more practical to move Book Cave to a day by itself next time to see how that works.
3/2, I piled everything on earlier days and did not schedule anything here, and wow, was that obvious. Just under 150 downloads and a commensurate drop in direct sales. Next time I will just schedule a sale for four days unless I put a decent promo service on every single day of a sale. Black Dog did remain at #1 in its categories through the day, but fell out of the Top 100 Free Kindle Ebooks early in the day.
All together, counting KU pages read, the 5-day sale basically paid for itself, but did not result in any profit to speak of. Therefore I’ll be watching KU reads very closely for the next month to see how that compares. Direct sales too, but mainly KU pages read. I expect a significant rise to continue all month. That will be where the sale becomes worthwhile — or doesn’t — but it should. So we’ll see!
Next up: a minor sale on the Death’s Lady trilogy. Because these books are not in KU, I can’t set anything free and will have to reduce prices by hand and take a whopping cut in royalties. I’m going to try reducing the prices of the first two books across all platforms to see what happens. That will be scheduled right before Shines Now comes out, in late May. That will let the effects of these earlier sales fade, giving me a clear look at how the Death’s Lady sale works out.
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