Free on Amazon

I'm running another book promotion on the 1st and 2nd of August. After day one, I'm a very happy bunny indeed. #8 in the general humor section on Amazon.com and the copies downloaded are almost double from the last give away:

So what is making the difference?
I would like to say the new book cover. I also joined a few more Facebook groups and have now a following on twitter of 784. I'm also part of an author retweet group on Facebook. The only advert I placed this time was on the choosy book worm site.
Free book ad link
and they have featured my book on the first line, which must help. So a lot of hard work and 15$ got me up to #8. Not bad I think, but time will tell if people buy book 2 and leave reviews. One depressing statistic someone mentioned the other day is that only one in a thousand books given away generates a review.
Here is the link again to Amazon and the graphic I use for tweets:
Free copy of Language in the Blood

Facebook/Twitter versus Advertising

My recent flurry of activity is paying off. I know have over a 100 followers to my Language in the blood page and about 350 Twitter followers. The blog itself had over 5000 hits. Although this has raised my public profile, sales are still a bit thin on the ground. I decided to spend a little more on advertising. Not much, just about 14Euro's but I had heard good things about the two sites I'm using. Especially choosybookworm.com got rave reviews.
Tomorrow the 27th I'm giving my book Language in the Blood away FREE.
The giveaway is very low key and I won't tweet it and just mention this blogpost on Facebook, as I want to get a clear picture of how well advertising works. Advertising has a 199 free copies to beat!

Advertising

So far I've only spend money on paying my editor (who gave me a better than friends rate.) The rest I did my self. One day I will probably have to pay someone to redesign my covers as I'll be the first to admit that they are not great. I've just been of the opinion that, why waste money on something that nobody wants to buy. Since I published my first book in 2013 I've been steadily growing in confidence. I had some good responses and reviews. I'm now waiting for my 4th experience in indie publishing. On the 11th of July the Anthology 'You're not alone' will be out. I contributed a short story to this book.

 

  

So having grown in confidence over the last 2 years I thought I do another book promotion and actually pay for some advertising. I used Facebook post boost and I'm pleased with the results:

4,212 People reached.

61 Page engagements of which 50 website hits.

12 New Page like, but this is not all due to the post boost.

Twitter:

I've now started to build on my twitter network. I've not spend any money on this and it is very time consuming. It is still a dark art to me, but I now have a 164 followers and I use @roundteam so I find that my posts with #PDF1 #IARTG and #ASMSG get retweeted about 9 times. I'm still not convinced there is any usefulness to Twitter, but it is something I want to use and understand better.

Facebook

Twitter and Facebook were the only means I used this time to run my book promotion. I wanted to see how it did with putting a fair bit of effort in. I posted my promotion twice a day on Twitter and on 6 Facebook groups. Plus the boosted post that ran for 2 days before and 2 days during the promotion. 

The results

I managed to give 199 copies of Language in the Blood away. Of course I'm hoping this will lift the sales of the other books, but only time will tell. It is hard to say if my first foray into advertising can be called a succes, but it certainly provided more results than I had so far with promotion. I'll try a few more things with sites other authors have recommended and see how that goes. But for the moment I want to concentrate a bit more on actual writing!