How Authors Can Create a Book Sale Curve Using a Free Book Promotion
When authors plan accordingly and promote the sale they can see a sales curve
The concept of book sales feels foreign to many authors because it’s a competitive market.
To climb into the eyes of readers on a dominant platform such as Amazon requires not only advertisements but continuous sales mainly because thousands of books are published daily which reconfigures the hierarchy of the titles in each genre.
So, one may ask the question, how can I get my book in the spotlight for just a little while to kickstart my sales and hopefully nab me some reviews?
Truthfully, I have been a published author since 2014, having published my first book via CreateSpace, which is now owned by Amazon’s KDP.
But what is wild is the fact that after all this time, I still feel as if I am figuring out how to market my books. How to grab my target audience’s attention in a crowded market. And how to get my books the attention they deserve.
Thankfully, I have been able to acquire some successes along the way:
Got my books into libraries and schools
Had some free promotion sale days for my book The Backup Superhero where 750 copies went out
Grew my following on X (Twitter) to 31.6k followers
But when it comes down to it, I thought I’d be further by this point.
Now, my main platform for publishing books has been Amazon. I decided to stick with this so far as I’ve heard from lots of people that the benefits for Indie Authors having their books on Kindle Unlimited go a long way. But this doesn’t mean I haven’t tried making some of my other books available on other platforms such as Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play Books, and more.
But, back to using the KDP promotion features.
In the past, when I had a free promotion deal or countdown deal on KDP, I would try to span out my five days over the time I had them. Sometimes I would do well, and sometimes only one copy went out. And when it came down to it, I figured out a few things about what I was doing.
I wasn’t marketing the promotions enough so the reason they weren’t doing well was because of me
I wasn’t doing the promotions long enough
I needed to be implementing more of a strategy when these promotions were happening
Now the question was, what was my next step? I needed some guidance.
That was when I pulled out this book that had been sitting in my library for a while, but I hadn’t put in the time to read it.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Market-Book-Overperform-Marketing-ebook/dp/B08TZJQ1FB
This was hands down the best decision I’d made because I felt like it provided such a clear ARC from the time you finished your book until the time you published it.
However, the main points I learned from this book were:
How to properly use KDP’s promotion deals
How to gather reviews from reputable websites, bloggers, and news outlets
How to experiment with advertisements on Amazon, Facebook, BookBub and more
After reading the whole book, I felt super inspired to try my hand again at the KDP free promotion deal.
Looking through my books, I connected the dots in what this book said to what I already had available to me. And that was that I had a great strategy already with my book series The Backup Superhero. All I needed to do was set it up correctly.
Here is what I did:
I set the first book in the series, The Backup Superhero for free for one week
I then set countdown deals for the next books in the series so if they wanted to continue, I would still get sales and the reader would be more willing to follow through the series
I planned marketing content out for social media to promote the sale and get readers interested
Here are some examples of my social media marketing:
Along with these photos
Now something that How to Market Your Book explained is that platforms like Amazon reward sales curves.
What do I mean by this?
Well, if I set my book to use a sale promotion for one day and it sells 300 copies, but then the next day it’s not free and no sales occur, this is considered a sales spike. These platforms don’t necessarily register this and reward your book by putting it in front of readers.
What you want to happen is a sales curve.
For example, when I ran my sale for five days for The Backup Superhero, on the first day nearly 75 copies went out. On the second day, nearly 30 copies went out. And then on the third day nearly 15 and so on.
A screenshot of my free promotion sales curve
By having this free promotion deal run for five days combined with my marketing, my book was able to stay in the top ten in its categories for all five days that the sale was live. Thus creating this sales curve.
Now that you have the full picture of what I did and what happened, I’m guessing you’re wondering what I got out of this.
By being more intentional in how I set up my books for a read-through rate accompanied by the sale promotion, I ended up selling twenty additional books in the series. By this, I mean people purchased either books 2, 3, or 4 after reading the free book. (The book series is a novella series of six books, so quick read.)
What did I learn from this experience?
This may have only worked so well because I did it for a series. I’m not sure how it would go for one of my stand-alone books
When I brainstormed and implemented different marketing techniques on social media such as talking about how I came up with the idea, I believe it helped create more reader interest
I would like to try to do a free promotion for one of my books and run a paid advertisement at the same time to see how it would do
Navigating the world of book marketing can feel like taming a wild beast. Yet, transforming your marketing efforts into tangible book sales poses an even greater challenge.
One of the scariest things about marketing your books is worrying about what could go wrong.
If you’re scared to try paid advertisements, there are tons of books out there willing to teach you. But be sure to read reviews of previous customers to see if the book’s advice worked because there is so much information out there.
Or perhaps talk to other seasoned writers because you never know who will be willing to teach you the ropes.