Okay, so, having let sales fall as far as they were probably ever going to, I pretty much pulled out all the stops with the Tuyo-series sale. I stacked up promo services with the following results:
Day 1: Freebooksy, Robin Reeds, Book Cave, Digital Books Today, all with series promos if that was an option — 1200 downloads of TUYO
Day 2: Book Runes, DangoBooks Partners — 300 downloads
Day 3: Booklover’s Haven, JustKindleBooks — 120 downloads
Day 4: Fussy Librarian alone, because I really wanted to know how this service performed — 360 downloads
Day 5: EReaderIQ with a series boost, Book Rebel — 250 downloads
The service with the best reputation of the above is Freebooksy. The second is Robin Reads. The third is Fussy Librarian. Unsurprisingly, that is also the order of expensiveness. Freebooksy performed best for me the first couple of times I used it. My assumption is that a substantial part of the people on their mailing list who want to download Tuyo have already done so during an earlier promotion and that Tuyo is unlikely to ever get 2000 downloads just from Freebooksy in the future. I will add that Freebooksy is the most user-friendly service and that counts for something. And I like the analyses Written Word Media sends out — that’s the parent company that runs Freebooksy.
DangoBooks is a brand-new promo service. They’re trying to build their customer base and offered to promote for free, so I added them to the list at the last minute. Next time I will put them on a day by themselves to better see how they perform. Book Runes has done very well for me in the past and did less well this time, again probably because a lot of subscribers who want Tuyo already have it. The combination produced almost as many series sales as occurred on the first day, an impressive result that in contrast makes Freebooksy’s series promo not look worth the extra cost.
JustKindleEbooks is probably too expensive for that low a number of downloads and I don’t know that I will bother using it again. Booklover’s Haven is so inexpensive that I wouldn’t hesitate to throw it on a day with another service, but I certainly wouldn’t use it by itself. EReaderIQ and Book Rebel did pretty well and aren’t very expensive, so I would probably use them again.
As only Fussy Librarian was placed on a day by itself, only that service can be truly evaluated. I was fairly satisfied with Fussy Librarian’s performance. For the price, this is a pretty good performance, especially as I’ve used them several times. Waiting six months between promotions with them seems to have helped performance here. Next time, the service I will put by itself is Robin Reads. My impression is that it doesn’t live up to its reputation for me, but maybe I’m wrong, so I would like to find that out.
Tuyo went right up to the top in its categories and stayed there for most of the promotion. Amazon doesn’t seem to have updated and is still showing it up pretty high in the Free Kindle Books category even though it isn’t free today, which is kinda unimpressive and I wonder whether that will be updated by the end of the day. I would like to see its rank stay up high for a good while.
Tano paid for its cover, yay!
Subtracting Tano from the equation, royalties in the past 7 days are twice what they were for any week during the past three months, not as great a result of the sale as I would have liked, BUT I hope to see both sales and especially KU pages read stay substantially higher for at least a couple of months. As a rule, the KU pages read begin really increasing several days after a sale ends and stay up for quite a while. That did not happen last time and so that is what I most want to see this time. KU pages read are twice what they have been lately, but Tano is responsible for a lot of that boost. I want to see a better response for everything else in the series in addition to pages read for Tano. The next week or so will show whether that’s going to happen.
Whew! Next up, the Black Dog series sale.
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I have always assumed, but thought I’d better confirm – you reap more benefit if a reader buys the book than if they borrow from Kindle Unlimited and read the whole thing, right? Just wondering. As a closet book hoarder, I really like to OWN the books I love!
Yay for paying off the cover already! I’m glad the series is getting the appreciation it deserves.
And thank you for sharing the sales data. It’s interesting to see (at least, I find it so).
Oh darn, I got swamped at work and missed the sale entirely.
Mary, if you’re paying Amazon, you don’t own the books no matter what. You are renting them and they have the right to take them back at any time.
Mary, it normally works out sort of in the same ballpark, but the royalty can come out higher for a direct sale, especially for a shorter book; or higher for being read in KU, especially for a longer book.
TANO is 520 normalized KU pages. KU pages are short compared to actual pages in the book, as you see, though the difference is much greater if the print book is 6×9 rather than 5×8. Anyway, 520 pages x 0.0045c per page = $2.32 in royalties. Right now it’s set at $4.99 for a direct sale, and 0.7 x $4.99 = $3.49 in royalties. So for TANO, a direct sale is nice. Paperback is in between, hardcover yields a royalty a hair above an ebook sale.
TARASHANA is a whopping 950 normalized KU pages. So royalties for someone reading the full book in KU is $4.27, while if someone buys a copy at $6.99, the royalty is $4.80, or almost the same.
TASMAKAT is substantially longer than TARASHANA, and my best guess via working out a simple proportion is that KU royalties will actually come out about a dollar more than royalties for a direct sale, but I can’t see normalized pages because that’s not shown until you enroll the book in KU.
Now, obviously my personal preference is for someone to read the book in KU, then decide they love it to pieces and buy it in ebook to read AND in hardcover to display on a shelf. Plus in audio when an audiobook finally appears, which I know can be quite a wait, especially for TARASHANA.
But as a basic rule, for a book of ordinary length and fairly ordinary price, then yes, a direct sale is a bit better than a KU read.
I’m sure anyone self-publishing, or thinking about self-publishing, appreciates tips about what seems to work best — I know it’s not directly relevant to anyone else, but surely it helps to hear that Books Butterfly was a complete waste of money for me (previous promotion) and that Book Runes looks like a good value for the money, for example. I sure find hearing about someone else’s experience helpful!
R Morgan, obviously that’s not true for paper books, but also, that’s why a good number of people use Calibre to download their Kindle or other ebooks and keep them on their hard drive or on flashdrives rather than solely on a Kindle or the Kindle cloud.
I have to say, I am woefully behind in adding books to my Calibre library, but if I were concerned about possibly having an ebook book pulled back or substantially altered, I would definitely put it on a hard drive or two to prevent that from happening.
>> Now, obviously my personal preference is for someone to read the book in KU, then decide they love it to pieces and buy it in ebook to read AND in hardcover to display on a shelf. Plus in audio when an audiobook finally appears, which I know can be quite a wait, especially for TARASHANA.
Uhhh, I haven’t gotten around to buying the hardcovers yet (money, argh) but they’re on my wishlist. Otherwise, er, it me!
Good, good, that’s what I like to hear, Ailis!
I know the hardcovers are pricy, but there’s just no way around that because of the way Amazon sets the prices.
I never returned my Death’s Lady’s books, so they are still in my ebook library, even though they are no longer available in KU. I should probably return them and buy them for real….
Well, Alison, you might make a note to do that on March 17th, when all the Death’s Lady books will be on sale. March is very much my sale month this year!