The Free Ebook Experiment — Part 2 —Conclusion

Last week I said I would report on the results of my 2 “free days” on Ama­zon’s KDP Select: the total num­ber of free down­loads, as well as the num­ber of sales of A Real Piece of Work in the days after­wards. So, with­out fur­ther ado, here are the num­bers:

Free Down­loads (approx.):

Day 1 = 19,000

Day 2 = 8,430

TOTAL = 27,430

Once again, if you hap­pened to pick up A Real Piece of Work for free, I hope if you enjoy it you’ll do me the favor of a pos­i­tive review on Ama­zon. Thank you.

 

Top 100 Rank­ings:

Dur­ing the free pro­mo­tion, A Real Piece of Work rock­et­ed up the top 100 free ebooks charts and at its height reached the fol­low­ing rank­ings in four cat­e­gories: All Ebooks — #3, Fic­tion — #3, Mysteries/Thrillers — #2, and Lit­er­ary Fic­tion — #1. I must admit that, if only for one brief shin­ing moment, it was a thrill to be ranked at the top of these esteemed writers—writers includ­ing Dick­ens, Tol­stoy and Chekhov.

Dur­ing the sales days (Friday–Sunday), on the Ama­zon Top 100 list, A Real Piece of Work reached #100 on the over­all list, #13 in Mys­tery and #9 in Lit­er­ary Fic­tion.

 

Post-Pro­mo­tion Book *Sales*:

The rea­son I did this pro­mo­tion in the first place was to boost sales. Since I had read of oth­er writ­ers in the KDP Select pro­gram who had mag­nif­i­cent sales fol­low­ing their pro­mo­tions, I decid­ed to see whether, if I fol­lowed their actions exact­ly, I could dupli­cate their results.

My touch­stone was the woman men­tioned in Part 1 of this exper­i­ment, Karen Baney, who had a total of 29,500 down­loads over 2 days and 700 sales and 150 bor­rows in the days fol­low­ing the pro­mo­tion.

Here are my own num­bers:

Fri­day, 2/10:  300 sales, 75 bor­rows

Sat­ur­day, 2/11:  491 sales, 85 bor­rows

Sun­day, 2/12:  586 sales, 90 bor­rows

TOTAL SALES =  1,377

TOTAL BORROWS = 250

After Sun­day I stopped count­ing. Exhaust­ed with doing this kind of detailed account­ing for 5 days, I was ready to move on.

 

Con­clu­sions:

In my case, KDP Selec­t’s free pro­mo­tion obvi­ous­ly worked, and I think it will work for just about any­body. Pro­vid­ed you have a good qual­i­ty prod­uct that you’re giv­ing away, I believe if you stick to Karen Baney’s script for the free pro­mo­tion and the days fol­low­ing, while your results might not be insane, they will be pos­i­tive.

Ini­tial­ly I was­n’t keen on the idea of tens of thou­sands of peo­ple get­ting to read A Real Piece of Work for free, but the more I thought about it, the bet­ter the idea seemed. I now have over 25,000 read­ers out there who know me and my work, and I’ve already read com­ments from some of them that they will glad­ly pay for the next book in the series.

Ama­zon’s KDP Select pro­gram has worked for me, but it could stand some improve­ments, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the area of real-time report­ing. All you are giv­en on your sales “report” page is a read­out of Sales, Units Refund­ed and Units Bor­rowed, so in order to keep track of how you’re doing, you’re con­stant­ly mak­ing cal­cu­la­tions. You’re also left in the dark about the details: where the sales are com­ing from, the roy­al­ty rate (70% or 35%) and oth­er cru­cial infor­ma­tion.

There should be a fea­ture on the “reports” page that enables you to export Excel spread­sheets in real time, or at least dai­ly, and books that are giv­en away dur­ing a free pro­mo­tion should be seg­re­gat­ed from those that are actu­al­ly sold.

While I hope my nov­el con­tin­ues to sell gang­busters, I’m glad the pro­mo­tion­al exper­i­ment is com­ing to an end. You would­n’t think so, but con­stant­ly check­ing sales fig­ures and rank­ings is stress­ful. I’m a qui­et writer who likes writ­ing and giv­ing read­ers a great sto­ry; being an entre­pre­neur or self-pro­mot­er does­n’t come nat­u­ral­ly to me.

To oth­er KDP Select mem­bers who are con­sid­er­ing doing free pro­mo­tions of their own, I have one piece of advice: fol­low Karen Baney’s script—to…the…letter.

In my next entry I’ll be writ­ing direct­ly to read­ers, my “fans,” about when book #2 in the Dako­ta Stevens series, The Rich Are Dif­fer­ent, will be com­ing out.

 

By Chris Orcutt

CHRIS ORCUTT is an American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years' writing experience and more than a dozen books in his oeuvre. Since 2015, Chris been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.