YET MORE PROMOTION RESULTS

Last week I ran some promotions on Amazon. Here are the results:

The techno thriller HOT STATUS was free for three days. First day downloads amounted to 77.5% of the total; 97.25% for the first two days. The third day was, as usual, a waste of a free Select day.

For the police procedural (SALESMAN OF THE YEAR), the results were similar: 63.4% the first day; just over 83% for the first two days. In this case, the third day was almost 17% of the total—over six times the downloads of the thriller. Don't know why.

I think my previous rule still holds. For maximum downloads, schedule your free days in one or two day chunks.

In the US, the thriller accounted for 59.77% of the total; in the foreign markets it was only 39.39% of the total. Does that mean folks outside the US like police stuff more than we do? Or do they shy away from techno stuff? Hard to say. SALESMAN is also much shorter (just a novella), so maybe foreigners are more receptive to short fiction.

Or maybe it means nothing.

This time I also had a Countdown promotion going, offering the sequel to HOT STATUS at various prices. The result is I sold copies of the sequel, but only at the lowest price (99 cents).

On the other hand, folks buying the prequel on a given day are probably more likely to grab the sequel on the same day (unless they plan to wait until they've read the first one). And the vast percentage of people who grabbed HOT STATUS did so when the sequel was offered for 99 cents.

If the giveaway were scheduled so the first two days coincided with the $1.99 price for the sequel, would MAD MINUTE have sold just as well? Don't know. For that matter, what would have happened with the countdown deal if there had been no prequel offered for free at the same time? It seems I've muddied the waters a bit here.

One thing I noticed from earlier promotions: When MAD MINUTE was given for free, the sales of HOT STATUS (at 99 cents) was twice that of the sales of MAD MINUTE when HOT STATUS was free. Folks were twice as willing to pay 99 cents for a short prequel as they were to buy a much longer sequel at the same price. Is that something to do with the difference between prequels and sequels? Or are folks more willing to buy a short book than a long one?

Or does it reveal a reluctance to buy longer works at bargain prices, on the theory the book can't be any good if it's offered at such a low price? I'm always haunted by that question.

In any case, I sold the same number of sequels in the countdown as I did the last time I offered the prequel for free—and at the same price (99 cents). But because the countdown promotion allows the book to earn the same royalty as it does at its regular price (in this case 70%), I did make more money. Figuring in the delivery fee (nine cents), the adjusted royalty rate was 63.64%.

That was nice.

I know this: Giving away the prequel always stimulates sales of the main book. Now the question is: How much actual money can I make from this (apparent) fact? My next experiment will be to give HOT STATUS away again, but this time leave MAD MINUTE at its current price of $4.99.

I'll let you know how that turns out.

COUNTDOWN EXPERIMENT

Here’s the thing about the new Countdown promotion scheme from Kindle Select: You might not be able to jump in and do it the day you first hear about it. There may be some prep time needed.

The idea is you're going to place an existing book at a significantly lower price and hold it there for a short time. For best results, there should be several "ticks" to this countdown clock, starting at the lowest price and jumping by stages back to your regular price.

For that to work, you need to have a regular price somewhere north of 99 cents, which is the lowest price you can set for the promotion. For a series of steps, you need to start with a significantly higher price.

I suppose you COULD drop your $1.99 book to 99 cents for a day or so. But for the full effect, it would be best to have available multiple steps. This pattern of higher and higher prices is designed to put the spurs to the customer, to create a fever for action as the price mounts—and to enrage and frustrate customers unwilling to act quickly.

(Okay, that last result might be an unwanted side effect.)

So, in order for me to work my best countdown I needed to first raise the "regular" price of the book. And according to the rules, that regular price has to be in effect 30 days before the countdown can begin. (And survive the promotion for at least 15 days afterward.)

With this in mind, over a month ago I raised the price on my techno thriller MAD MINUTE from 99 cents to $4.99.

Starting tonight at midnight, the price will plunge back down to 99 cents. It will hold there for 48 hours, then jump to $1.99 for another 48 hours, and from there to $2.99 for the last 48 hours. It will then resume its lofty life at $4.99. (After that, I don't know.)

These price breaks—and the length of time the book spends at each price—are adjustable from the Manage Promotions page. I just chose the bottom price and set the steps to three. At four steps, the book would spend less time on each plateau, as well as adding $3.99 to the list. Either way, the promotion would run six days.

(Technically, this is called a seven day promotion, the longest countdown period available. [The shortest is apparently one hour.] The price on the seventh day is the full price. Just think of it as a SIX day promotion.)

In the case of MAD MINUTE, I've also set up a FREE promotion for the book's prequel (HOT STATUS) that runs for the first three days of the countdown period. I want to see if having the prequel free for a few days will drive potential buyers to the sequel, where they will discover the relentlessly ticking clock of the countdown promotion.

In my experience, the vast majority of free book grabs will take place in the first day or so, pointing folks at the sequel when its price is lowest (and annoying the stragglers).

In previous times, giving away the prequel led to sales of the sequel. With the added lash of the rising price, the number of secondary sales should be higher—at least, that's the theory. In addition to increasing sales at the lowest price, I might also see some buys at a higher price. We'll see.

Confusing the numbers is the fact I'll be promoting MAD MINUTE's countdown on a few Web sites. Maybe next time I should let the countdown run without notice.

By the way, I've made another book (SALESMAN OF THE YEAR) free for the same three day period as HOT STATUS: Wednesday through Friday (Jan 15 – Jan 17).

I'll let you know how this all turns out.

PROJECT FROM HELL

It's a new year and there are new projects.

For the last month I've been getting organized on a major rewrite. The project started more than twenty years ago.

Here's the back story:

I had written four in shared world novels for a book packager called Byron Preiss Visual Publications, a situation I sort of lucked into.

In the late eighties I was contacted by an editor at BPVP about writing a juvenile in a series called ROGER ZELAZNY'S ALIEN SPEEDWAY. I ended up writing two of the three novels in their contract.

Later, I got the idea the editor had confused me with some other writer, one who had already published novels. (I had not; just a dozen or so stories in magazines.) Apparently my performance met the minimum requirements.

They offered me what I thought was a ghost rewrite of a first draft an author was abandoning for greener fields. I did that one and another one in that universe, called DR BONES.

At that point I decided to step away from shared world work. They suggested I come up with an idea for my own series. I did that, they said okay. Time dribbled past. I held out for a copyright in my own name, and some other more standard provisions in the upcoming contract. There was slow movement in that direction.

Then the editor left.

Six months later I suggested maybe the project was dead. BPVP countered with a contract for six books--but they all had to be completed in one year or they would own the series outright for something like $3000. I would also have to write a bible to assist the authors who would complete the series.

I countered with the idea of turning the project into a shared world deal, in which several authors would toil (myself included). They said (quite rightly) my name was not big enough to sell a shared world series.

They suggested I get an agent to finish the deal. I got an agent who suggested I walk away from the deal and sell the series directly to a publisher. I said okay; no sale was ever made.

After a while the agent dropped out, and the project languished.

In the mean time, I moved away from the vaguely sketched novels of the proposal (there were to be six of them) and wrote a single volume that covered maybe the first three chunks. It ran 125,000 words.

Rather too long for science fiction.

I was also worried about ending the book in a cliff-hanger.

Over time, I cut the novel severely in order to make room for more material, pushing the story closer and closer to a firm resolution (at least, firm enough for volume one). I made that work, but couldn't get another agent to handle it.

I went on to other stuff.

Now, in the more straightforward world of indie publishing, I find I can revive the project. I still want to avoid a cliff-hanger ending of the first volume, but the problems of how long I can go (or how short) have vanished.

A traditional publisher doesn't want to take a chance on a long book. Production expenses make the project risky. And they absolutely won't publish a short novel (or novella) in a stand alone edition, unless the name of the author makes it a sure thing.

But I have no worries on that score.

My main problem is the wealth of versions I have to work with. I dug around in my pile of floppies and came up with 54 disks covering this project. Some only had a few chapters, but most contained at least one complete version of the novel. And some contained two.

All in all, a crap-load of words to work with.

I spent a long time making notes on the various versions. Characters came and went, cut for considerations of length. The story extended just so far in some, went further in others, included "special" circumstances in others (material that encroached on the stuff of future volumes, giving away too much at once).

It was a nightmare, of course.

(Remember Y2K? I actually got caught up in that, several times. The program I was using [Volkswriter 4] was not Y2K compliant; dates on saved files were messed up. As a result I loaded up what I thought was the most recent version of the book and began making revisions. Maybe twenty thousand words in I became aware I was making stylistic changes I could have sworn I had already made, months earlier. I had. Turns out I was not working on the latest version at all. I had to convert the texts to rtf and run the two versions in Word, comparing them for changes. There were hundreds of differences, some in red, some in blue. Some changes I wanted to keep, some I didn't. A day of craziness. And I actually made that same mistake TWICE in a year and a half. I finally took the plunge and converted the book to Word, which I've been using since. At least the save dated are accurate.)

Doing what I'm doing now is maybe twenty times worse, with multiple versions competing for a smooth rewrite. And I have to jump through loops to convert the old Volkswriter files, where every single line terminates in a paragraph mark, for use in Word.

After weeks of grinding I have now got a single version together, sloppily compiled from the texts found on many different disks. I still have character name-change confusions to straighten out, and so forth. It's a copyeditors vision of hell in there.

But it's coming together. Another couple of weeks of rewrites and I'll be ready to convert to HTML and lay in the smart punctuation and paragraphs styles. Then it's on to proofing the thing in my browser, ahead of shoving it through KindleGen.

I'll let you know when it goes up on KDP.