The art of promotion.
I am getting used to promotion for my books and running a free book promotion can be quite daunting. I published my first book at the end of 2013 and have just published my third at the start of 2016. During this time I have learnt about different forms of connecting with readers, but the Amazon free book days do still seem to be popular.
With my first novel Babe Driven, I ran a free book promotion before realising that it was a good idea to have another book ready for print, so that your new customers could buy the next book, if they enjoyed the first! My second free book promotion was successful and sales of Love’s Child grew.
For Love’s Child, I decided to try a paid free book promotion and this was amazing. My book shot up to #1 in the free book download chart in it’s category and I had thousands and thousands of downloads. This did result in additional sales of Babe Driven too.
While I’m planning a book promotion for my third book, Finding Gina, I came a cross some sites that show many places to list your upcoming free book promotion and thought I would share them with you. A few on the first list are no longer available, but many are very low cost or are free to place your book on their site. It does take a lot of work to list them, but if you have one sheet prepared for your books, which has all of the book details on it, then it is fairly easy to cut and paste them each time. I have listed below the details I write for each book on a promotion plan. Many book site Facebook pages like you to list your book only on the day of your promotion, so check out their policies first. The author Marketing Club does have some paid sites listed that will submit your book to up to 45 free book sites for you for a small fee. If you are to busy to register with the individual sites yourself, then this might be a time saving option.
My promotion for Finding Gina begins on the 20th of this month, so I will let you know how this goes. I will also tweet about the promotion from my own Twitter page @Lizzie_Chantree and my Facebook page Lizzie Chantree
Another idea I had was for having merchandise printed for competitions, but I will let you know more about this on a different blog when I have some samples to show you.
If you have any great free book promotional ideas to share, please let me know:)
110+websites to submit your KDP select free days, article via Andrew Butcher’s blog.
120 places to promote your free ebook.
My free book promo sheet for each book includes:
This may seem time consuming, but saves time when listing your book on hundreds of sites.
Book title.
Book sub-title.
One sentence description.
Three sentence description.
Book blurb.
1 chapter.
Amazon or other store book ASIN number.
Book links.
Social media links.
Website links.
Author page links.
Be the first to know when my next book is available! Follow me on social media for updates.
What you have done is such a great marketing/advertising creation. Congratulations. I know a little more than before because of you!!😳
Hi Lizzie – I did a similar post when I promoted my book as free for the first time. I have a book that is perma free and I think that has helped drive sales of my second book. Not massive sales I have to say. The next thing I will try is reducing the price to 99p, that’s supposed to make your book more visible than if it’s free or at least that’s what I read :). Worth a try though I’ll be doing another free promo in August and I wish you luck with yours! Great post btw.
Thanks Rosa. I haven’t looked into the perma free option, but it’s interesting to see that it has helped sales of your second book. Good luck with your free promo too. Pop back and let us know how it went.
Thanks Jan! #RRBC are always a fabulous support for my work and I can’t thank them all enough. I’m looking forward to the next blog party as the last one was brilliant fun.
I will take a look at Ask David as I haven’t heard of that for tweet blasts. Thank you for the top tip! The book promo is from 07/20/2016-07/24/2016 so I will let you know if it was a success.
This is a very timely post for me as I have a free book promotion kicking in on Friday. I haven’t really done anything with this one because it’s with a large group of authors so there’s already a good deal of promo happening.
I have run free book promos before with varying degrees of success. I really appreciate the links you shared, as many of the sites are not ones I’ve used in the past.
I also really like your idea of having a promo sheet prepared for each book. A little work up front, but a huge time saver later on.
Wishing you much success with your promotion, Lizzie. I’ll be looking forward to news on how everything works out!
Thanks Mae.
The promo sheet does take a little work to start with, but it can be used time and time again. Good luck with your promo too! The idea of other authors promoting your free days is a really good one, as they will have readers who might be looking for a new book in their audience. Send me a tweet on your free days and I will promote it for you on Twitter @Lizzie_Chantree if you need any further shout outs.
Thank you kindly. I’m going to be on vacation during your free promo and am not sure how much I will be online, but I will gladly tweet for you as well!
Thanks Mae:) Much appreciated!
Good luck with your free promotion, Lizzie. I have used some of these same sites and to be honest haven’t really seen great results, although my books are a different genre that is not as popular. Ask David is a great one for tweet blasts. He really promotes heavily through Twitter. Then of course, you have the support of your fellow #RRBC members who will share your tweet blasts. I look forward to hearing the results of your venture!