I ran my first-ever Kindle Countdown Deal last week for The Infernal Lands. The promotion ran for seven days, with a price that incremented from 0.99¢ up to the book’s regular price of $4.99. In hindsight, I should’ve left the price at 0.99¢ for the duration of the promo. Thanks in large part to a helpful Facebook post made by my wife, the first day’s sales were the highest by far. I also paid $15.00 to advertise with Ereader News Today, timing their ad to be released on the first day of the promotion.
By the end of the Deal, I’d sold 57 copies and had 2 borrows on KU/KOLL. That was enough to bump the book into the Top 100 Paid lists for the Cyberpunk and Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi categories for a brief few days. I also experimented with the book’s blurb text during the promotion, but I’m still tweaking it to isolate the most effective sales pitch.
The downside is that Amazon doesn’t allow you to change the regular price for 14 days after the book’s Countdown Deal ends. As I’m sure many other authors have done, I set my book’s original price high, at $4.99, to ensure that the Countdown Deal would offer a huge discount. It’s a long book to begin with, but I feel that $4.99 is still too high a price to ask readers to invest in an author they’ve never heard of before. So, as soon as Amazon allows, I’ll be lowering the book’s price to $2.99. Granted, I’m also waiting for the end of the 90-day KDP period for the series prelude novella, The Shepherd, so I can make it free.
It’s hard to stand out, but I also don’t have many reviews yet – and I still have a ways to go when it comes to experimenting with my covers and blurbs. At the time the promotion started, there were nearly 2,000 other books also in the midst of Countdown Deals, and mine was instantly buried below pages upon pages of other books. Overall, I’m less enthused with the results than I’d hoped, but I’m happy I got some new readers.
I’ve been more focused on writing lately than on promotional efforts, but that’s part of self-managing an enterprise. I want to create first and market my work second. The writing is what matters most; the rest comes later.