I recently participated in a book giveaway referred to as promo stacking, using Written Word Media. The gist of it is that authors pay (naturally) to put their books into Newsletters that readers have signed up for. The pricing depends on how many Newsletters your book will run in and for how many days. There are deals where you offer your book for free, or for .99 cents. I paid about $200 to include one book for one day for free, but I made the book free on Amazon for three days so readers would have extra time to go grab it. It was book 1 of 6 in my first series. Here’s how it worked out for me.
Over the course of three days I had over 8000 downloads. 6000 on the first day, just under 2000 on the second and about 500 on the third. These numbers are phenomenal and I’m excited for them, but let’s break down what they mean.
Downloads doesn’t equal readers
8000 downloads is not a guaranteed 8000 readers. When readers see FREE, they tend to just grab anything remotely interesting. Many will grab more books then they could read in a year, and will never get around to reading my book. Others will read, but will stop at book 1 and not continue with the series. Mostly this is due to not reading the genre to begin with, but only reading my book because it was free to begin with. This is not a negative or an attack against these people, this is just the reality of book giveaways.
The people that are most important to me are those who continue to read through the series. That, after all, is the whole point of participating in a book giveaway. You give them book 1 for free in the hopes that they continue to read through the series in KU, or will buy the following books.
So far it seems to be working
After the first day I started looking at the ebook sales and Kindle page reads for book 2. Over the three days of the giveaway book 2’s sales not only increased, but enough to cover the cost of being in the book giveaway. I also had an increase in subscribers to my newsletter.
Typically speaking, I have about a 50% read through rate from book 1 to book 2, and about a 95% read through rate from book 2 through the rest of the series. In a free giveaway it’s unlikely that you’ll get that high of a read through rate for the reasons described above. Calculating how many people read book 1 vs just downloaded it is difficult, since Amazon doesn’t differentiate between downloading and reading. That's why I’m paying particular attention to the increase in book 2’s sales. That is my best indicator of the success of this program.
Over the next few weeks, and even months, I will continue to track the increase in sales/reads of this series to see if or when it reverts back to pre giveaway numbers. That’s when I'll be able to get an estimate of total sales volume. But these early numbers are promising enough that I will be participating in the next giveaway.
A few tips for you
Only put book 1 of your series into the giveaway. I’m seeing authors put their whole series in. That is self defeating. If they like book 1, they will continue to book 2. So get paid for that. Putting all your books in might get you some more reviews or possibly newsletter sign ups, but you just gave away a lot of money.
If you have multiple series, still start with 1 book from 1 series. Don’t dump hundreds of dollars into this all at once. Like all other new forms of advertising, start small and verify that it’s working before going all in. Just like all marketing, not every strategy will work for every book, or even every author.
Make sure you know your sales numbers before the giveaway starts. You can’t track an increase if you don’t know your starting numbers.
If you don’t have the money to use a promo stacking company, like the one I mentioned, there are often authors who set up things like this for free, depending on your genre. There is a very famous free giveaway day hosted by an author who writes romance. It’s called ‘Stuff Your Kindle Day’. She gets other romance authors, of all genres, to put their books up for free on the same day and all authors participating share to their Newsletters, to their social media accounts, etc. It recently became huge and is now on a lot of romance readers’ radars because of Tiktok. A booktoker shared that it was happening and it went viral. There are usually huge amounts of free books being given away and it gets run 2-4 times a year. Readers go nuts for it. Other genres are likely to catch on soon.
If you don’t have anything like that in your genre of writing, be the one to start it! It takes a lot of work, considering how big the Stuff Your Kindle Day has become for the founding author, but she does it to try to help other authors get their books out there. And for the readers, too! There have now been at least 6-8 other smaller versions of Stuff Your Kindle that have been created also, since it’s becoming a very popular way to promote.
Perma-Free as a strategy
Many authors keep book 1 permanently free, or Perma-Free. Now that I’ve seen the success of promo stacking, I understand why. When your series is big enough, giving book 1 away for free all the time is an easy way to entice readers. The read through rate will likely be less than if you sell book 1, but you make up for it in sheer volume of first time readers. Maybe after I add a few more books to my series I’ll consider this strategy for myself.
Authors, what other promotions have you had success with?