A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article talking about my first experience with BargainBooksy, a feature I did for Dana's Duo. You can read the article here.
This week I want to analyse BargainBooksy's sister site, Freebooksy.
Once again, I didn't do any additional marketing for the promotion. I didn't talk about it on Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr; I just let the promo run without any interference from me.
On Freebooksy, your book must be at least temporarily free. Since all my books are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, I am able to make them free for up to 5 days in each 90-day enrollment period.
I chose to make First Submission free for 2 days, the 20th and 21st September. As the first in a trilogy, I figured this was the most likely to give me 'best bang for my buck', because although I had to give the book away for free, it was worth the gamble hoping that some of the readers might enjoy it enough to order one or both of the sequels. That way, I'd actually get some money back as well as the exposure I was aiming for.
Submitting the book to Freebooksy was easy; they have a very simple submission form to fill out. You select your genre from the price list and choose Purchase. Submitting First Submission in Erotic Romance cost US$100 and guaranteed exposure to a mailing list of 77,400 readers.
They do state that the book must be a minimum 50 pages in length, but I missed that and I don't think anyone noticed that First Submission is only 29 pages :P
Now, the results. The green line represents 'free' sales, the red is 'paid' sales (of all my books).
That's a BIG spike, right? Over 2,000 copies downloaded on the day of the promotion, dropping to about 350 the day after, when it was still free - I'm guessing that's due to timezones and people not necessarily opening their emails on receipt. I totaled about 2,500 downloads, which means 2,500 people who'd never read my work before found out about it. That's excellent exposure, especially since this is targeted marketing; the people on that list are regular erotica readers. If they see my name come up in the future, they'll remember getting a free book from me.
Now, here are the sales graphs for Second Surrender and Third Thrills, for the week following the promo. The red line is sales, the blue line is KENP, which basically is the number of times a page was read by Kindle Unlimited subscribers. Those figured don't show in the royalties, unfortunately, but what you should know is that Amazon pay about $0.004 for every page read. Yes, you read that right. Less than half a cent per page.
A bit of quick-and-dirty math gave me a rough total of about $6.25 from the Kindle Unlimited page reads, plus the paid figures, works out to be approximately $27.05 return from sales of the follow-up books in the trilogy over that week.
Hot For Heather and Dana's Duo, my other available books, picked up a few sales and page reads each, probably adding another $10 to the total.
Still nowhere near the $100 I expended, though. First Submission hit a high of #292 in the Free Kindle store, which I found disappointing. I'd hoped to crack the top 100.
All in all, I'm pretty disappointed, especially after doing so well with the BargainBooksy promo about two weeks ago. I reckon that one just about broke even with making back costs, PLUS gave me added exposure to a wider audience. This promo hasn't even made back half the cost.
Not recommended unless you have a much larger booklist for 'new' readers finding out about you to explore.