Who sold the most books?

And the winner is ...

The last time I blogged, I wrote about my decision to promote No Stranger to Death at 99p/99c as a Kindle Countdown Deal for a week in late July. I also mentioned that my friend Peter Flannery was doing the same with his already successful thriller First and Only. To make things really interesting, we wagered a bottle of champagne on which book would sell the most. We stayed in touch while the promotion was on, swapping emails and captured images of Kindle chart rankings, and met up recently to discuss what happened and share sales figures. Peter plans to blog about what he learnt from the exercise, and here are some of my observations.

So, who won?

Cutting to the chase, Peter sold the most ebooks overall. In fact, his unit sales were more than twice mine. However, I sold more in the UK while the majority of Peter’s sales were on Amazon.com, and although his daily sales peaked on Day 2 of his promotion, mine kept on rising until my book went back up to £1.99.  I can’t help wondering what would have happened if I could have held the price at 99p for, say, a further week.

What about Amazon rankings?

I checked No Stranger to Death’s Kindle store rankings twice daily (well, possibly more often than that – it did get addictive!).  Here are some of the book’s rankings landmarks on Amazon UK:

	21st July (day 1)	24/7	27/7 (final day)	28/7 (promo ended)
Kindle store (paid)	17,392	2,157	902	1285
Noir crime	23	6	2	3
Scottish crime	97	15	5	8
British crime	-	36	7	10

The changes in No Stranger to Death’s rankings on Amazon.com were pleasing too, despite the lower sales rate. From starting off just outside the top 100,000 Kindle books, on 25^th July it peaked at an overall ranking of 9,298 and was at no. 5 in Noir crime, no. 57 in British crime and no. 50 in Murder. 

Other observations

During and immediately after the promotion I had a few Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (KOLL) borrowings, so my book’s profile had been raised enough to generate these.  In addition, I notched up more sales in Germany, Canada and Australia than I ever had before (even though the Countdown Deal was only on the UK and USA sites).

What does all this mean?

This was a learning exercise for both Peter and me. Because it’s impossible to track every book sale back to what motivated the buyer (I wish!) we can only make educated guesses at what the data we’ve collected is telling us. Alas, as someone once said, ‘Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half’.  However, here’s how I have interpreted the results of my Countdown Deal.

BOOK PROMOTION SITES

Peter invested in a BookBub promotion which took place on Day 2. As this was the day his sales peaked, it seems like the market leader in book promotions does deliver increased sales, although with a heavy bias towards the US market. My book is still hampered by a lack of reviews on Amazon.com. It was hard to get many promotional sites to even consider listing it (I didn’t try BookBub for this reason) and this has probably put off potential buyers too. 

I spent far less than BookBub would have cost on free/cheap ($10) book promotion sites like The Daily Bookworm, 99 Cent Mysteries and Awesome Gang, and more than made back my money. Although most of them carried through on their promises, I’m not convinced they generated a lot of sales for all the effort it took to register with them. However, given Peter’s experience, if I could get my book accepted, I would give BookBub a go in the future.

TWITTER

I value the friends I’ve made on Twitter and have such a fear of becoming an annoying ‘Buy my book!’ person there that instead of blitzing social media I paced myself with just a couple of promotional tweets each day. This seems to have paid off as friends on Twitter helped tremendously in spreading the word in the UK. (My thanks to everyone who retweeted on my behalf.) 

Even though I scheduled promotional tweets during the UK night in order to catch some Americans while they were online, I don’t have sufficient USA followers to make this work for me.

FACEBOOK

Despite my Facebook author page having 143 likes (not a lot, I know, but I’ve put little effort into promoting it), none of my promotional posts reached anything like that number of people, even when I liked and shared them with friends on my personal FB page. I didn’t pay to increase their reach because I’ve tried that once before and it was a total waste of money. However, all was not lost on the FB front, as I also posted details of my Countdown Deal on several crime/mystery fiction FB groups which allow promotional postings. I know these garnered at least a few sales, because I got comments from people who liked the sound of my book and bought it. That is one of the strengths of FB: it enables immediate feedback.

AMAZON SITES

I’m not convinced that promoting my book as a Countdown Deal gave it much visibility on either of the Amazon websites. You have to go searching for the page featuring these books, unlike Daily Deals, books in the Summer Sale, etc which are boldly presented to everyone visiting the Kindle store and included in targeted emails. Does the counting-down element (‘Price goes up to £x in 5 days’) really motivate readers to buy? That said, books in Countdown retain the higher 70% royalty rate. If I promoted outside this, my royalty rate would halve.

What next?

Running the first price promotion for No Stranger to Death was informative and fun, although it involved a lot of work to maximise its effect. I’ve benefited financially, but not to a huge degree, and I’m hopeful that as people who downloaded my book get round to reading it, the number of Amazon reviews it has will steadily increase. I can now refer to its Kindle chart success, e.g. ‘A Kindle top 5 Scottish crime novel’, in other marketing I do.

Here are some plans I have for the future:

• No Stranger to Death’s lack of reviews by American readers is holding it back, and I need to address this. Ideas I have include contacting US book bloggers (although many refuse to review self-published books) and using GoodReads to distribute review copies. I may even look at doing a short ‘free’ promotion solely on Amazon.com. If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.
• The temptation to throw everything at a promotion is huge, but maybe next time I’ll experiment with fewer marketing components to help identify what really works.
• I must weigh up the pros and cons of simply reducing the price of No Stranger to Death rather than making it a Countdown Deal. I could then decide when to put the book’s price back up. If it was doing well at the lower price, I could hold it there for longer.
• I have now gone way beyond the sales threshold required of self-published authors to join the Society of Authors. My application is going in this week.
• By far the best thing I can do to sell more books is write more! So in tandem with my ongoing promotion of No Stranger to Death, I’m hard at work on its sequel, working title Too Soon a Death.

By the way, Peter declared our competition a draw (because of my UK sales success) and told me I don’t need to buy him a bottle of champagne. But of course I will. 

Throwing down the gauntlet

“Let’s see who can sell the most books.”

As soon as those words were out of my mouth, I couldn’t believe I’d said them. Least of all to my mate Peter Flannery, whose first novel, First and Only, has had over 60,000 downloads since 2011, received ecstatic reviews worldwide and is now in the process of being turned into a film. But when I discovered we were both planning a Kindle Countdown Deal at the same time, a bit of healthy competition – as if there isn’t enough from all the other books out there – seemed like a good idea. And so, from 21^st to 27^th July, Peter’s novel and No Stranger to Death will be slugging it out to see which can sell the most copies at 99c on Amazon USA and 99p on Amazon UK. The loser will buy the winner a decent bottle of champagne.

Why are we doing this? Peter has nothing to prove with First and Only, but he’s just given it a lovely new cover and there are still plenty of people out there who haven’t read his novel, although it did hold the Number 1 position in Kindle Psychological Thrillers for nearly two months during 2012. I’m very pleased with how well No Stranger to Death has been received in the UK, but it has yet to get off the ground in the USA. I’m also curious to test the theory which is now being bandied about that “99p is the new free”.

Unlike most of my writer friends, Peter lives in the Scottish Borders as I do, so we regularly meet up in real life. He was very generous with his time and advice when I decided to self-publish, and we have pooled our knowledge when planning our Countdown Deals. However, our starting points and approaches are very different, and this is where the results will be interesting. Will Peter’s investment in book promotion sites like BookBub trump my heavy reliance on Twitter and Facebook to publicise my book’s temporary reduction in price? Will more readers be willing to risk 99c or 99p on a relatively new and unproven novel which is clearly in the mystery genre than on one that has lots of reviews yet is harder to classify?

Like the entire self-publishing experience, the next week is going to be exciting and a bit scary as Peter and I try not to look at our sales and Amazon rankings too often. We’ll let you know how we get on. Peter is blogging about the experience over on his website too. You'll notice that the bubbly he's pictured there is Bollinger*. I look forward to holding him to that!

In the meantime, if you’d like to find out more about our books, here are the links.

No Stranger to Death: Amazon UK or Amazon USA 

First and Only: Amazon UK or Amazon USA 

*My champagne photo is courtesy of www.freedigitalphotos.net