My Kindle Countdown Results are in!

Here's the wrap-up on my campaign: Dec. 8-14, 2016.

I spent $258.50 on promotions to augment the Kindle Countdown. Along with these promos I ran AMS (Amazon Marketing Services) ads and posted notifications on Twitter, my Facebook personal account and author page, and sent out a few emails and PMs. 

The promo sites I used with amounts spent are:

EBooksHabit - $10
EBook Betty - $18
EReaderIQ - $10
MyBookCave - $15
Reading Deals - $29
ENT - $30
SweetFreeBooks - $7
Book Pebble - Free
Booktastic - $10
ManyBooks - $19
eBookChristian - $5.50 
Bookoftheday.org - Free 
BookRaid - cost per click- inexpensive 
Bookzio - $19
FreeDiscountedBooks - $8 
BookLoversHeaven- $5
Just Kindle Books - $15
Choosy Bookworm - $25
People Reads - $9
BargaineBookHunter - $24 (two days)

My results: I sold 118 eBooks, 7 paperbacks, and had KENP reads (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) totaling 2,678. Prior to this promotion I'd had very little KENP.  

My results weren't stellar, but my sales rank improved from 220,992 to 2902, new readers and KindleUnlimited borrowers discovered my book, and I hope to get more word-of-mouth reader referrals and written reviews.

Many authors launch books at a steep discount, simultaneously running promo ads, hoping to achieve a more favorable sales rank and heightened visibility. As a new author with no prior books to testify to my competence, I took a different approach. I priced my 414-page fantasy novel at $3.99 and did a soft launch, only notifying Advance Reader Copy reviewers that the book was "live." A few days later, when I a had a handful of reviews, I asked Amazon to send the "now available" email to people who had nominated my book for Kindle Scout, and I posted notifications on Facebook and Twitter. My theory was that readers would be more likely to take a chance on an unknown author's work if they could read a few positive reviews. During my first thirty days I accumulated additional reviews, and at the end of the month I scheduled a Kindle Countdown deal and booked a number of promos. 

It's impossible to know whether this approach generated more sales and reviews than some other launch strategy, but I'm satisfied with the results. Before the Countdown deal I had very few also-boughts and minimal KENP. Now I have nineteen pages of also-boughts and I'm getting daily KENP. Hopefully, the boost in sales rank will produce ongoing benefits and my book will find a wider readership. In the meantime, I'm editing the second book in this series, Shadowglade, which should be available in Spring 2017.