bargain booksy | Ana Spoke, author

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by Ana Spoke | November 13, 2015 · 3:29 am

Don’t hate me cause I’m marketing!

My previous post on pricing a first self-published book at $0.99 generated quite a discussion! Once again it shows just how many opinions are out there – some support my strategy, other authors are unhappy with having to give the work away practically for free. My personal view is “this is just what it is” – a free market, where prices are set by the laws of supply and demand. I do think my 2.5 years of hard work are worth more than $0.99, but I will just concentrate on promoting it so hard that before you know, it will be a series and a movie, and I will buy a pair of Manolos, just to see what all the fuss is about. My goal is to get the book into hands of as many readers as possible, with the hope that one of them knows Coen brothers. Seriously, does anyone here know even one of those guys?

Back to the argument of $0.99 vs $X.99. My limited research of two or so months shows that you will get not only better sales, but also better royalties with the $0.99 pricing. How can I prove it? With the power of screenshots and basic math.

Here is the snapshot of my sales and pages read for the last month:

For simplicity, let’s concentrate on sales alone (it looks like “pages read” was pretty even over time). During the first half of the month, my price was at $2.99, and it was $0.99 in the second half. I sold 1 copy at $2.99 and 27 copies at $0.99. The royalties were $2.04 and $0.35, respectively. The math, ladies and gentlemen!

1 x $2.04 = $2.04

27 x $0.35 = 9.45

During the second half of the month I did run a disappointing BargainBooksy promo, which resulted in 10 sales. Let’s take them out of equation:

17 x $0.35 = $5.95

I’m depressed now, because the numbers are so dismally small, but that’s besides the point. The point is that I had 17-27 times more sales and about 3-5 times more royalties when I’d dropped the price. The hope is that some of those people will talk about it to their friends. The goal is to get a snowball rolling, so that I (eventually) get a million of these tiny sales.

I guess the time will show if this is overall a winning strategy. The only concern is the inability to advertise with some of the websites that require the book to be discounted by at least 50%, but I hope that by zig-zagging the price, I will comply with that requirement.

Oh, and I have a very exciting update about Bargain Booksy! I’ve emailed them, asking if 10 copies is what I should expect from a promo, and they responded! Not only that, they apologized, said it was too low for the quality of my novel, and offered a $25 credit towards another promo! I was speechless and promptly scheduled a promo for 5 December with a different audience, this time with Chick lit/Romance readers, at a cost of $70. I’ve updated my post on The Most Super-Duper, Exhaustive, Comprehensive, and Current Listing of Free and Paid Book Advertising Websites and Ideas accordingly.

Once again, only time will tell if that was a good decision 🙂

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Tagged as author, bargain booksy, Book, marketing, novel, promo, promotion, sale, self-published, writing

by Ana Spoke | November 3, 2015 · 2:04 pm

Bargain Booksy ain’t no bargain

Happy Melbourne Cup Day! And if you’re anywhere else in the world – sorry for rubbing in that here we have a public holiday in honor of a horse race. Only in Australia can everything stop in the middle of the week, so that everyone can get wasted and bet on horses without taking a sickie. Not only that – this year Australian government introduced another public holiday – Grand Final Day, so that everyone can get wasted and watch football without…you get the idea.

I’m however, completely sober. I’m actually at work, trying to put finishing touches on a presentation, which is proving extremely hard. Not only that my heart is no longer in systems, data, and risk management – I’m really disappointed with the results of the latest promo and just can’t get excited about presenting to a room full of senior bureaucrats.

As you may recall, I’m going through my Most Super-Duper, Exhaustive, Comprehensive, and Current Listing of Free and Paid Book Advertising Websites and Ideas. This past weekend I’ve run just one promo, to test how well Bargain Booksy performs on its own. This is because previously I’ve made a mistake to run two promos on the same day and can’t be perfectly sure whether eReader News Today was responsible for the 63 sales, or if some of it was due to Awesome Gang.

I had big, delicious hopes for this promo – after all Free Booksy and Bargain Booksy seem to be very popular and have a great reputation. They got crushed, big time. How many sales did I get?

12.

Yep, that’s all. Not only that, two of them appear to be due to social media marketing, so the grand total made from the promo is about $3. I’ve paid $25, so I’m $22 in the hole. Not that it’s a lot of money, but I guess my expectations were not met, and it seems that all the unhappiness in the whole entire world stems from crushed expectations.

Anywho, I’m not giving up – still huge hopes for the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend, with multiple promos over four days. I guess this latest experiment did exactly what I’d set out to do – separate the “worth it” promo sites from “nah” ones. I have to say that the audience may have been wrong – I chose the YA sub-group. I may still try Romance/Chicklit one, at a separate date, to really test this service. It’s $70, though – more than Book Gorilla.

So there you go – Bargain Booksy for now goes to the “nah” pile. Of course, the results may have been different with a different novel or even on a different day – I don’t yet know if a major weekend is a good or a bad idea. I’m here to share my very personal experience – you get to make your own decision. Now I have to go work on this presentation. Anyone knows how to make risk mitigation “sexy”?