Climb Amazon’s Sales Ranking with E-Newsletter Promos
The good thing about self-publishing is that the launch of your book is not your only chance to create a sales frenzy or other blast of excitement. E-newsletter promotions can provide various levels of this at an affordable cost.
I didn’t pay for advertising during my launch. I concentrated on social media posts and getting reviews from my street team and other people in my inner circle, and I’m glad I did. But after several weeks passed without too much happening in the sales department, it was time to do some paid promo.
If you’ve gone exclusive with Kindle—meaning you’re on Kindle Unlimited and therefore allowed only to sell e-books via Amazon—you are awarded with either one Kindle Countdown promotion or one Free Book Promotion, your choice, per ninety-day period. I opted for the Kindle Countdown Deal. That’s where you discount your book for one week. The idea is that the pressure of not much time to buy the book at the discounted price inspires shoppers to make the purchase.
If this is your debut book, and you’re basically an unknown author like I am, I can tell you that your Kindle Countdown will not amount to much without some outside help to drive traffic to your book. One way to do this is via e-newsletter promos.
What Are E-Newsletter Promos?
These are websites like BargainBooksy, The Fussy Librarian, and Bookbub that have an enormous number of subscribers who want to learn which books in their favorite genres go on sale every day. Bookbub by far has the most subscribers and their promos also cost by far the most money (hundreds to thousands). Others charge anywhere from zero to a few hundred dollars.
Authors can buy a promo in their book’s genre and reach thousands of readers in one day. The return, however, is not as much as you’d hope, as I’ll explain later in this article.
For my Kindle Countdown week, I dropped my price to 99 cents, which meant it was not going to make me a bunch of money. When you drop your price to 99 cents on Amazon, you’ll only make a 35 percent royalty; in other words, about 35 cents per digital download.
Why would you want to do that?
For the same reasons you might give your book away for free. One of your main goals as a debut self-publisher is simply to get your name out there. In this case, you’re trying to entice readers to purchase the book. You’re removing the obstacle of price in the hope that they’ll download it and read it. If they read it, they may love it and decide to leave a review, and you know how important reviews are.
Watch Your Amazon Rank Rise
If enough people buy during your deal, the book’s sales rank on Amazon will improve and the Amazon algorithm should start to recommend it to other readers. In this way, your title could gain some traction, at least for a few days. The more people buy it, the more new people will see it and (maybe) decide to buy it as well. In this way, the cycle hopefully continues.
For They Will Be Coming for Us, I signed up for three e-newsletter promos (sci-fi and thriller categories) to take place on different days during the week of my Kindle Countdown. I used The Fussy Librarian (87,000+ sci-fi subscribers), BookSends (120,000 sci-fi subscribers), and Bargain Booksy (100,000 sci-fi subscribers). Sounds like a lot of shoppers, doesn’t it?
The Results Are In
Before I tell you the results, please keep in mind that BookLife (Publishers Weekly’s Indie Author Reviewers) gave me an A+ on my cover and an A on my sales description, so I have to assume the following numbers do not reflect negatively on those things.
Okay, here are the results: The Fussy promo sold 12 copies, the BookSends sold 38 copies, and the Bargain Booksy sold 25 copies. Page reads in Kindle Unlimited also went up; I had a few more readers than usual for a few days.
So … I definitely spent more than I made (around $40 average per promo). But my Amazon sales rank went as low as 11,894 (remember, the lower the ranking, the better) and, in the category of Genetic Engineering Science Fiction Ebooks, I nearly claimed a place on the top 100 list (103!), which would have been an exciting plus worthy of a screenshot.
What’s Next?
Maybe I’ll do an Amazon Free Book Promotion in the next ninety days, just to see how it goes. I’ve heard the free book deals move a lot of books, but people don’t necessarily read them. Again, even if only a small percentage of those “buyers” get around to reading the book and reviewing it, it’s a win at this point in the game.
Baby steps, as they say.
The truth is, your book needs exposure. If your platform isn’t doing it, you’ve got to find another way, and e-newsletters can help make it happen.
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Kim Catanzarite is a writer, editor, and instructor for Writer’s Digest University. She has worked as a developmental and copy editor since 1994. Her thriller, They Will Be Coming for Us, published June of this year to strong positive reviews. She is currently masterminding her next e-book promotion.
Buy my book from Amazon HERE or from your favorite local bookshop HERE.
