I recently waatched a video of Tim Grahl talking about the difficulties of book marketing. Here’s a link to the video on Youtube. Short version: the #1 best strategy to get visibility for your books is giving them away. For my experience, so far, read on.
I decided to give this strategy of giving away my book a try. I set my first-in-series free on Amazon for five days. It’s not a series such as 20 books all following the same thriller character or romance frame. Mine is a duology, soon to be a trilogy, of women’s fiction stories, following the same characters. They’ve sold modestly well from my constant advertising on Facebook at a very small budget. But these books never broke through to a bestselling status in any category.
Enter the FREE WEEK, Promoted
I promoted the fact that my book was free for a limited time with stacked promotions. I used Freebooksy, Ereadernews, and Bookdoggy. My newsletter dropped at the start of the free week. I also posted on my Facebook pages. It cost me a total of $136. That’s less than what I usually spend per month on Facebook ads.
My results exceeded expections:
- More than 3,000 books downloaded.
- Sales of all my other books.
- Book in the top five in three categories (for free books).
My hope is for these results longterm:
- Some of the 3,000 people will read and like it.
- Some will like it so much they’ll buy my other books.
- Some will leave reviews, tell others.
- Some will sign up for my newsletter.
- If I retain 10% of these readers to follow my books — well, you do the math.
None of my Facebook or Amazon ads have achieved anything like this kind of visibility, not even during their launch months.
Planning Ahead
I can do a giveaway week for each of my six novels! If I do this once a quarter and have imilarly good results, I may reduce my advertising budget. And write as fast as I can, which is so far only one book a year. Because one book marketing principle that evergreen is that the more books you’ve written, the easier and more profitable it is to market them all.
A new book marketing strategy that’s very low cost and really works is making my indie author heart beat faster.
