I purchased a Freebooksy.com series promotion for the Infinite Vampire series on Sep. 14, 2018, and I made the first book, BLOOD 4LIFE free for that day. I had 2,179 downloads of the free book! Now, people that download a ton of books for free, rarely read them all, and they rarely read them soon after downloading. Finally, few readers actually review books. That said, I may not get much from this promotion other than an increase in exposure and reach, but that’s ok.
I still had hopes:
- I hoped readers would buy the other books in the series after seeing the quality and awesomeness of Book 1. They haven’t (yet). Could still happen. Instead, I did get a ton of page reads from the other books in the series, and the books in the series were in the top 100 in their categories again!
- I had hoped that the 2k downloads would result in some reviews. For example, if 10% reviewed the book, I’d have over 200 reviews! But no, this didn’t happen. I did get a neutral review though; someone said they were confused but only 22% into the book! I would have liked a bunch of new 5 star reviews, but so far I’ve only gotten that one review.
- One of the reasons I was reluctant to give the books away for free was because I didn’t want to collect reviews from casual readers who happened to get the book: I wanted reviews from people that were dying to get the book!
- I hoped that the book’s presence on the Freebooksy.com’s series discovery page would continue to drive sales. It doesn’t seem to have had that affect.
- I hoped that the high cost of the promotion($200) would be paid for by new royalties (this was a really super lofty hope,I admit). Well, yeah, that didn’t happen.
So, overall, I’m happy even though my hopes haven’t really materialized. Why? Because over 2k people looked at my first book’s blurb and cover and said, ‘yeah, I’ll give that a shot.’
That’s all I can really do, isn’t it?