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.