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”?
Ana Spoke, author 