ahpellett
Full Member
Read "Sleeping in Snow with Bears"
Posts: 117
Joined: Mar 28, 2012 14:04:26 GMT -8
|
Post by ahpellett on Aug 1, 2012 9:12:08 GMT -8
I'll start. I basically was starting from near zero and I got a 600 percent jump in "sales" on "Sleeping in Snow with Bears" so I can say it was great for me. I used the FREE approach and tweeted about the promo using key word hashtags which I think brought in the majority of hits as the dates of the hits corresponded well with the better tweets. While I got no revenue out of the deal, I am hoping to get some return in terms of positive reviews (waiting now and the journey continues).
|
|
anita
Full Member
Posts: 134
Joined: Jun 6, 2012 8:57:42 GMT -8
|
Post by anita on Aug 1, 2012 12:55:56 GMT -8
I don't generally tweet my erotica... I'm not against it but I only recently got a twitter account for my erotica pseudonym!
I noticed a drop in sales with some titles and switched them out of the promotion before serious damage was done. I blamed it on the fact that I usually give away the first book in a series for free. I had actually increased the prices of the 1st installment of each series and then enrolled them in the promotion at 100% off. However, this meant that I no longer had the same visibility in the regular free erotica section of Smashwords. The free erotica section seems to be a more profitable place for my 1st installments then the Smashwords promo section. I did leave the rest of my titles in the promotion and that seemed to work alright.
|
|
|
Post by Ted on Aug 2, 2012 12:09:36 GMT -8
Today, Mark had this to say on the Site Updates page: Here's some fun data. Fun in a truly fun way, not fun in the IRS sarcasm sense. Can you guess which coupon codes yielded Smashwords authors the greatest downloads during the just-completed Summer/Winter promotion? Drum roll please... 77% of coupon redemptions went to the code SSWIN, which allowed the reader to download a priced book for free. 12.5% went to SSW50, the 50%-off coupon. 5.8% went to SSW25, the 25%-off coupon, and 5% went to SSW75, the 75%-off coupon. People in the SSW50 category brought in the most dollars, but on a dollars-per-download basis, the 25%-off people outperformed. For platform-building (which authors exposed their brand to the most readers), SSWIN took the prize, though the SSW50 group did reasonably well too. The promotion increased overall Smashwords store sales by almost 20% for the month, which is very cool, and increased transaction counts by 37%. This means the sale brought in more dollars to our authors, and the increased transaction counts reflect the greater platform-building and brand-building exposure. As I mentioned in my recent blog post ( How a Traditional Publisher Can Harm an Author's Career) about the interplay between unit volume and dollar sales, as an author/publisher, you want to maximize both. Dollars give you immediate benefit to pay bills or whatever, yet the unit volume provides the longer term benefit of greater exposure to more readers (remember, the author is the brand!) who then become future customers of your other works. I'd argue that s/he who builds the biggest platform the fastest will become tomorrow's best-selling author.
|
|