BANNER PROMOTION

BLACK BOX is in a Countdown Promotion this week, from right now through the eleventh of August.

Last week about this time, to promote the coming countdown, I modified the book's cover image (which is shown along the left-hand sidebar) to include a banner giving the appropriate information.

(Update: The promotion is over. Here's the book cover with the banner.)
 
My reasoning was this. If I write a post about a particular promotion (like the post you're reading right now), only a handful of readers will see it during the active period. The average reader of this blog comes not to peruse the latest post, but to grab copies of the Kindle or ePub templates (see the right-hand sidebar). In addition, Google searchers are attracted to posts concerning topics of interest to indie pubbers.

After getting what they came for, curious folk appear to make use of the "popular posts" list to check out other parts of the blog. (The first two items on the list are disproportionately viewed.)

As a consequence, the banner promoting a price countdown will be seen by a lot more people than a blog post describing the event.

Normally. This last week, for some reason, the traffic was particularly meager. Sure, there were more hits overall than I expect to see for this post by August 11th, but not by the factor I was expecting.

Still, I think the idea of the banner is valid, and I will definitely do it again. At least, during the actual period of the promotion.

This time, however, I put up the banner nearly a week early. I thought: maximize the number of eyeballs. But you have to figure the sales of a book will suffer during the pre-promotion period, buyers holding off for the coming sale price.

On the other hand, does anyone worry about the "grumble factor" arising in readers who buy your book just BEFORE it goes on sale?

I suppose if books were free, the banner might only be deployed during the special period. In that case, you could create a reusable banner version of each of your book covers with the words "Free Today!" added.

This technique could also work for temporary price reductions. Once you've created an image of the banner-swathed book, its easy to go into the layout of your blog (or Web page) and swap images.

Even countdown promotion banners could be reused if you avoid mention of the actual dates. Treat it like a series of price reductions, creating a banner for each stage. Not TOO much work...

Speaking of free: Last week I ran a stealth promotion for five books, all free at Amazon for five days. I wanted to see what would happen if I said nothing on the promotion sites or in this blog.

I expected it to be a test of the visibility of each of the books.

I assume there's a certain level of traffic visiting each of the sell pages on a given day, people who discover the item and are interested, but put off by the regular price. Then, miraculously, the book is suddenly free! You have to figure 90% of those lookie-loos would pull the trigger, right?

I was surprised by the results.

Generally, the pattern of "takes" matched the results of PROMOTED giveaways. Nearly 62% were grabbed in the first two days, with the first day responsible for two and a half times more than the second (44.1% of total).

Oddly, the fourth and fifth days rallied, accounting for 27.5% of the total.

So the curve (which is nicely shown on the new Kindle Reports page) has two humps, with the first by far the tallest. It resembles the horns of a rhino: tall and sharp in front, low and blunt just behind it.

I expected to see a roughly flat plateau. Why would the discovery rate be so high in the first day or so? Fast word of mouth? Did some promotion site pick up on the books and put out the word, without being asked by me?

Googol searches have turned up promotions for my books on sites I never submitted to. It's easy to imagine content-hungry Webmasters grabbing up stuff like this. Everybody is living on advertising (more than before, now that the Amazon Affiliate program has become less generous). But it's one thing to crib from someone else's site. Are there guys out there prowling Amazon for free books just to put notices in front of their steady readers? Beats me.

It could be the lookie-loos are persistent, checking a number of wish-list books on a daily basis, hoping for that special price. If so, those who check daily could skew the count for the beginning of the free period, other guys coming in later.

Hard to tell.

Are there Web sites out there doing that? You submit the names of books you want and they notify you when one of them goes free (or on deep discount)?

(I was recently shopping online for computer stuff and some service popped up asking if I wanted them to inform me when the price went down.)

Marketing and selling are still pretty much opaque to me.

By the way, the book grabbed the most was the full-length tech thriller called MAD MINUTE, possibly indicative of the interests of the average Amazon book patron. I think romances (to include paranormal romances) are still the biggest sellers of mid-list books.