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A Foray into Novel Promotions, Final Results (Day 3)

9/3/2012

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The Day Eight Series - Technothriller
Today was the final day of a 3 day promotion where The Reborn – the first part of my technothriller novel series – was free on Amazon. After fantastic results on Day 1, then declining (yet still pleasing) results on Day 2, I expected Day 3 to continue the waning trend. But that’s not what happened.

Here are final numbers from the end of each day, with some sales and rank comparisons to just before The Reborn went free. Note that none of the books were ranked in any lists before the promo, aside from the all-inclusive “Kindle Store” rank.

Totals:
The Reborn (Part 1) - free 
Total Sales .................................. 
Free Kindle Rank ..........................
Free Kindle Technothriller Rank ......
Free Kindle Action & Adventure Rank


Of Mice and Hitmen (Part 2) - $0.99
Total Sales ..................................
Kindle Rank .................................
Kindle Technothriller Rank .............
Books Technothriller Rank ..............


The Spiritual Singularity (Part 3) $2.99
Total Sales ..................................
Kindle Rank .................................
Kindle Technothriller Rank .............
Books Technothriller Rank  .............

Before

10/Month
n/a

n/a
n/a


10/Month
246,805

n/a
n/a 



7/Month
254,517

n/a
n/a
Day 1

4161
49
2
1



39
4,683
19
23


19
12,204
71
76
Day 2

2005
63
2
2



32
5,089
22
24


10
13,386
70
72
Day 3 (Last Day)

2387
68
2
2



43
3,866
16
17


23
8,215
39
41
*Green numbers mean they are significantly better stats than the previous day.

Total Copies Purchased During 3-Day Promo

The Reborn: 8,553 (free)
Of Mice and Hitmen: 114 (includes 3 lending library borrows)
The Spiritual Singularity: 52

Day 3 Was an Uptick

Rather than slowing down, Day 3 was a minor uptick. Day 2 and 3 combined did slightly better than Day 1 by itself. And since Day 1 went great, I see Days 2 and 3 as a success. I’m glad to have chosen a 3-day promo rather than cutting it off after Day 2.

So what changed? Why did Day 3 go better than expected? Here’s my speculation:
  • It was Sunday. More people buy books on Sundays. Saturdays are actually the worst day for selling books, and Mondays are the best. (See this post on novelrank.com.)

  • New Free List Visibility. The Reborn finally got posted on Free Kindle Books and Tips, which has a curated list of free Kindle books and boasts 350,000+ readers. (A small % of whom may have seen The Reborn in the listings.)

Key Points about the Promotion Stats

  1. 8,553 people downloaded The Reborn. (I’d had less than 100 sales previous to this giveaway.) That’s an incredible number with tons of potential for reviews, word of mouth, and the possibility of getting hooked into the series.

  2. The promo significantly affected Of Mice and Hitmen (Part 2 of the series) and The Spiritual Singularity (Part 3 of the series). I sold more over the promo period than in the 5 months following publication on Amazon.

  3. During the promo, Part 2 sold at a rate 105x higher than before. Part 3 sold 64x higher. This is despite raising the price of Part 3 from $0.99 to $2.99 during the first promo day (I felt this was a better price).

  4. The overall rank in the Kindle store for Part 2 & 3 jumped dramatically.

  5. Parts 2 & 3 got into the Top 50 Best Seller lists for 2 versions of the Technothriller category (Kindle and Books), where previously neither had been ranked in those lists at all. Part 2 finished with ranks 16 & 17 in those lists.

Takeaways

  1. Amazon’s free promotional days are definitely worth using. (And preparation helps – see my Day 1 post.)

  2. I’m glad I stuck with 3 days rather than just doing 2 days, since sales increased on day 3. Also, having the promo over both week days and weekend days was ideal, and reached both weekend and weekday readers.

  3. What made this promo even more worthwhile and effective is that I already had other books available. It was especially effective that these other two books were part of the series that The Reborn kicked off.

Looking Ahead

I’m writing this at 11:00 PM the night after the promotion ended, so I’ve been able to observe its short term after-effects, which have been good. Rather than fading back to obscurity, sales and discovery remained solid.

Here are the numbers:
Totals:
The Reborn (Part 1) - $0.99
Total Sales ..................................
Kindle Rank .................................
Kindle Technothriller Rank .............
Books Technothriller Rank ..............
 


Of Mice and Hitmen (Part 2) - $0.99
Total Sales ..................................
Kindle Rank .................................
Kindle Technothriller Rank .............
Books Technothriller Rank ..............


The Spiritual Singularity (Part 3) $2.99
Total Sales ..................................
Kindle Rank .................................
Kindle Technothriller Rank .............
Books Technothriller Rank  .............
 

First Day After Promo

38
6,785
32
34


16
6,992
33
35


10
16,423
81
87 



The Reborn sold more copies in a single post-promo day than it had sold in the past two months combined, it gained spots in the regular best seller lists for technothrillers (as opposed to the free best seller lists), and borrows from the lending library rose. Also, sales of the sequels remained bolstered.

All in all, these free book days have been fantastic. I'm supremely happy with the results.

Looking forward, there’s clearly plenty of room for growth. When will I be (more) satisfied? I’m not sure, but it involves a lot more people reading and enjoying The Day Eight Series. (And maybe an, “I told you so,” when the story in the books comes true ; )
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A Foray into Novel Promotions, Day 2 Results

9/1/2012

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I’m wrapping up Day 2 of a 3 day promotion where The Reborn – the first part of my technothriller novel series – is free on Amazon. Today, I’ll compare the results of Day 1 with Day 2.
The Reborn of The Day Eight Series #1 Best Seller Technothriller and Action & Adventure
Overall, Day 1 was roughly 2x as successful as Day 2, but Day 2 started with a bang (see the brag-sheet I made above... sorry, I got excited, you'll have to forgive me). Let’s look at some numbers. 

Day 1 Totals (Friday)

Total Sales of The Reborn: 4161
Free Kindle Rank: 49
Free Kindle Technothriller Rank: 2
Free Kindle Action & Adventure Rank: 1


Day 1 exceeded all my expectations, with over 4000 downloads, plus a #1 and #2 ranking on two Best Seller lists, and a detectable ripple effect to books 2 & 3. (For the full details about Day 1 and running the promotion, see my previous post.)

Day 2 Totals (Saturday)

Total Sales of The Reborn: 2005
Free Kindle Rank: 34 - 63
Free Kindle Technothriller Rank: 1 & 2
Free Kindle Action & Adventure Rank: 1 & 2

I first checked Day 2 stats at 9:00 am, and it was the strongest position yet:

Day 2 @ 9:00 AM
Total Sales of The Reborn: 705
Free Kindle Rank: 34
(significantly higher than at the end of Day 1 when it was 49)
Free Kindle Technothriller Rank: 1
(it had moved up from #2)
Free Kindle Action & Adventure Rank: 1


In the late hours between Midnight and 9:00 am Pacific Time, The Reborn had jumped from #49 to #34 on the Kindle free Best Seller list, and hit the #1 slot for free Kindle Technothrillers. Yet it did this with slower sales – roughly 78 sales/hour early on Day 2 versus an average of 173 sales/hour across Day 1. This points to a momentum that Amazon calculates behind the scenes to slow movement in these lists. That’s a good thing – so books take many hours to traverse the lists rather than bouncing all over due to hourly whims of the market, which would create an unintelligible mess (a 7-year-old’s Christmas list comes to mind, where it happens to be composed of everything he saw a commercial for in the past 200 seconds).

The ranks of Of Mice and Hitmen (book 2) and The Spiritual Singularity (book 3) had similarly continued to climb in their paid categories of Technothriller.

After 9:00 am, the momentum began reflecting the slower sales rate. Here are the numbers from the end of Day 2:
Day 2 @ Midnight
Total Sales of The Reborn: 2005
Free Kindle Rank: 63
Free Kindle Technothriller Rank: 2
Free Kindle Action & Adventure Rank: 2


In total over 2 days, The Reborn has been downloaded nearly 6200 times. I’m incredibly pleased with these numbers, though I’d be happier if the sales numbers were swapped between Day 1 and Day 2. It’s funny how the mind works – the results would be exactly the same, but who wouldn’t prefer to be on an upward trend rather than downward?

I question the slowdown because tribal wisdom has said “2-3 days works best,” usually because Day 1 is a ramp-up to faster sales on subsequent days. Here are my speculations why Day 2 was slower in this case:

  1. Weekday vs. Weekend. Day 1 was a Friday, Day 2 was a Saturday. Perhaps more people are on their devices and computers on Friday, browsing for books from work or taking the day off to prepare for a long Labor Day weekend trip. (Side note: In Facebook Gaming, we see more players during the week than on the weekend – often because people play from work.)
    (EDIT: I later confirmed this – Saturday is a lousy day for selling books.)

  2. Free Book Lists Exhausted. Perhaps most of the frequenters to the free book lists which I got The Reborn added to (see previous post) saw it on Day 1.

  3. Best Seller Lists Exhausted. Anyone who sees an interesting book near the top of the free list has no reason not to grab it. They don’t need to deliberate about spending money. And so maybe most people get it out of the way and the high ranks on a free list loses its meaning quickly to newcomers that don’t have other strong promotions or awareness behind them.

It’s probably a combination. Let’s see how tomorrow, the final day, goes.

What I’m most curious to see is how the trends for Of Mice and Hitmen and The Spiritual Singularity move. How many of the 6200+ downloaders will read The Reborn? How many will even open it? And then how many will finish it and like it enough to get Of Mice and Hitmen? How long will that take? How long will the next books feel the influence of this giveaway? I had 42 combined purchases of Of Mice and Hitmen and The Spiritual Singularity today, and I can’t help thinking that a handful of those purchases were from readers who had already finished The Reborn from yesterday.

But most importantly… how many readers will smile, be excited, or wonder about the world and the universe because they’ve read these books?

Time will tell.

Read about Day 3 here.
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A Foray into Amazon Promotions & Best Seller Lists

8/31/2012

2 Comments

 
The Reborn Day Eight Series Best Selling Technothriller Novel
The Reborn hit #2 in free Kindle Technothrillers!
Today – Friday, August 31st – is the first day of a 3-day free promotion for The Reborn, the first novel in my technothriller series about raising super-intelligent simulated humans in computers. (You can get it here.)

This is the first time I’ve used Amazon’s free promotional days, and I’ve gotten some great results. I’d like to share what I’ve learned along with some numbers.

(Quick history: In April, I published a 3-part novel series which I had been working on for a handful of years. It’s called The Day Eight Series. Read about it here.) 

Using Amazon "Free Days" Promotions

I had no idea these free day promotions existed until recently, because they’re a bit hidden. For any book enrolled in KDP Select, you get 5 free promotion days every 90 days.

In your bookshelf, you need to check the box next to your book, then click on Actions:

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The Promise: An Author's Statement of Purpose

6/23/2012

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The Promise: An Author's Statement of Purpose
Most great novels have a message – some feeling or idea for the reader to take away. Great novels perform inception, changing the reader by the turn of the final page.

Setting goals for your novel helps you explore your novel’s message. And I believe that sharing these with your readers will help you find your audience more quickly.

Writing Goals Helps you Focus
I design video games for a living. When I write a game design, the first thing I do is list out my goals by answering these questions: What am I trying to accomplish with this design? What problems does it solve? How do I want the player to feel?

Because I was used to this, and because it works well, listing my goals was the first thing I did when I gathered all my brainstorm notes for The Day Eight Series and sat down to start outlining.


Goals for The Day Eight Series
Here were my first goals:
  1. To introduce the incredible concept of the Technological Singularity to the mass market in an exciting and approachable way. (Currently, the topic is relegated to Sci-Fi.)
  2. To make readers reflect on their place in the universe and what it means to “exist.”
  3. To explore the conflicts between science and spirituality.
  4. To keep the pages turning with fast pacing and quickly-escalating stakes.
You need goals because without the constant reminder of what you’re setting out to achieve, you will meander and write a story with less meaning. (I also recommend learning about Controlling Ideas, a concept Robert McKee explores in his incredible book, Story.)

Goals Evolve
My list of goals grew and evolved as I wrote, because I would find new, stronger purpose as I drove toward the existing ones. I also began writing goals for each chapter. Inevitably, they became more specific, taking the form of discrete realizations and feelings I wanted readers to have. For example, a chapter with Nicole, the hitwoman, had this as one of its goals: 
Give the reader a vivid understanding of what it 
would be like to think one thousand times faster.

Choosing Books to Read
Sometimes, when I’m browsing novels, I’m just looking for a fun or exciting story. But there are other times when I want more than that. I want a deeper experience from a great novel.  The problem is, when I want a deeper experience, there is little indication of such promise when grabbing a book from the shelf.

To get even a hint of a sense about it, I need to dive in and read for twenty minutes. But there are well over 100,000 books published every year in the US alone. That’s a lot of twenty-minute trials.

To help, authors could share their goals just like they share a description of their novel. Non-fiction books do this all the time! For example, my favorite game design book, The Art of Game Design, says in its description: …this book gives the reader… one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better.


A Promise: The Author’s Statement of Purpose
Sharing your goals is like making a promise to the reader. “I promise that if you grant me your valuable time, I will change you in this way…”

This promise can be made easily digestible by condensing your list of goals down into a summary sentence. I’m calling this the Author’s Statement of Purpose. For The Day Eight Series, it would be:
To explain The Singularity to non-sci-fi readers and to propose a theory of God, 
existence, and the origin of the universe, and to do this all in an exciting story. 

The Risk
My fear is that telling this to the reader outright may remove some of the meaning because they don’t have to do as much work to figure it out on their own. It dampens the great feelings surrounding epiphanies from the story. But the tradeoff is that you will get readers who wouldn’t have given your book a shot in the first place, and these readers are more likely to be in-tune with your writing.

So my proposal is this: authors should share their statement of purpose in a way that those who care can find it, but is otherwise hidden to those who don’t. A perfect spot would be under the “About the Author” section on a book’s rear flap.

I am considering adding this next time I update my novels and Amazon description.

I’m curious to hear what you think. Is this useful? Does it give too much away to the reader, or would they appreciate it?

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5 Ways to Improve Kindle for Authors

2/19/2012

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Improve Amazon Kindle
The Writer-Reader Relationship
The Amazon Kindle has done so much, but it has only realized a small portion of its massive potential for interaction.

I’m a designer by profession, and I’d like to tell you how I would design a better Kindle experience for authors.
Sometimes, you don’t want feedback. You want to write for yourself, and yourself only, because you have a story trapped within you inhabiting a portion of your soul and you won’t be a complete person until you can expel it onto paper. Writing it down is cathartic, and anyone who has anything to say about it can go to hell, unless they see its genius.
On the other hand, often you write not only for yourself, but for your readers. Or you write solely for them, especially after you grow a loyal following. You want to tell the story that they want to read, the one that will surprise and delight them, and make them swear at you between chapters when you leave them hanging with an event that couldn’t possibly have just happened (oh, but it did – you made sure of that!).
Part of writing for your readers is having a dialog with them so you can improve your craft. It shouldn’t be a one-way street. Blogs are great for this, but you’re not capturing some of the most valuable feedback: feedback about how your readers are reading, and exactly how they’re reacting to your book as they read it. 
Here are 5 ways the Amazon Kindle can give authors insight into how readers are experiencing their books:

  1. See which pages have the most friction.
    Kindle could record the pages where readers put your book down (the reader turns the Kindle off or switches to a new book). And the longer it takes for the reader to return and move on, the higher the friction. Then authors could see what points in the book are giving readers the most trouble.

  2. See where readers stop permanently.
    Likewise, Kindle could make note of the furthest each reader has reached in your book and provide data on these stopping points. Has 18% of your readership dropped your novel on that page where your main character denies the love of her life? Or do they quit in the middle of a long flashback you thought was great? That’s worth knowing about.

  3. Let readers mark typos.
    No books are immune from typos. But now it should be fast and simple to eradicate them. Kindle should let readers mark a word or phrase as a typo, then provide the author with these segments. Then the author should be able to correct them on the spot and push those corrections seamlessly to readers without needing to republish the entire book or require the reader to go out of their way to download an update. It could be so easy! After a few weeks, your novel would be typo-free.

  4. Let readers send the author notes about specific passages.
    If a reader highlights one of my passages, I want to know why. I’d love to peek inside their head at that moment. Why not let us enable a feature which allows readers to type a note to the author about passages they highlight and then have those sent to us by Amazon? And how amazing would it be to then be able to write back to the reader and have that show up with their highlighted passage under their comment? Of course, you’d want an option to not let the reader see your comment until after they’d finished your novel (so they don’t get wrapped up in what you say, and to encourage them to finish!).

  5. See how many times people have read your book!
    Amazon: please show us a total tally, plus data on the most times it’s been read by single readers! Wouldn’t you love to know that 20K unique readers have read your novel a total of 23K times, with the top readers having re-read your book 6 times?

And as a bonus:
  • Author’s Commentary.
    Let us speak directly to our readers as they read. Let us add comments to our novel for our readership to enjoy if they decide to turn them on – exactly like a director’s commentary on films.
If I want to do any of this right now, I need to get a hard copy of one of my novels, give it to a reader, ask them to make notes in it and mark if & where they stop reading, and then take it back later on. Or I need to borrow their Kindle so I can download their notes file. This doesn't scale!

YouTube, on the other hand, gives content creators amazing tools to understand how people consume their media.

The Kindle should be able to do this stuff.

Amazon: it is time for Kindle Analytics. Bring us to the future. Empower us. Again.

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Great Beginnings

2/5/2012

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Picture
For my first post, I figured it would be elegant to write about great openings to stories. The best ones capture your entire attention, often in a single line. And those lines sometimes tell an entire story themselves.

Some accomplish greatness with an exquisite description and delivery of emotion that cradles the entire novel:
"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." 
- Neuromancer, by William Gibson.  

Some catch your attention with juxtaposition of matter-of-fact statement with a shocking visual or a striking absurdity: 

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    The Reborn: Day Eight Series Book 1 by Ray Mazza
    Of Mice and Hitmen: Day Eight Series Book 2 by Ray Mazza
    The Spiritual Singularity - The Day Eight Series Book 3 by Ray Mazza