The First San Diego Writers Unite! Meeting and Amazon Free eBook Promotions!
The first part of the title of this blog is a bait and switch line. That was not my intent. However, as time progressed, I felt that this blog space would be better filled with more information about one of my publicity experiments than with extensive information about the Writers Unite! meeting.
There will be a Writers Unite! meeting in San Diego in early February. Tentative information:
Date: February 6, 2016
Time: 10:30AM-12:00PM
Location: Liberty Station Conference Center // 2600 Laning Road, San Diego, CA 92106
Agenda: The focus of this meeting will be how authors can support one another in using Amazon’s policies to our advantage.
The description of the event will be expanded in one of my January blog posts.
The focus of this blog now switches to a “things I think I learned by running an Amazon promotion for my books” modality.
When I received a Tweet asking if I would download a free eBook and review it in exchange for a review of my eBook, Idea Farming – A Science Guy’s Read on Writing, I agreed.
Then I realized I needed to get the potential reviewer a free copy of Idea Farming.
Ultimately, I decided to run a promotion on Kindle. NOTE: Your book must be enrolled in KDP Select to do this! Starting from the home page after signing into Kindle Direct, I selected Promotion and Merchandising from the left menu.
Then I clicked on Free Promotions in the list that appeared.
The page that opens contains clear instructions for setting up your promotion.
You go to your Bookshelf. NOTE: Depending on how you login, you might be able to start here. If you can see Bookshelf in the top menu when you sign in, you can start here.
Click on the Promote and advertise button.
Select Free Book Promotion
Unfortunately, I got the idea for this blog entry after I did the promotion and my books are not eligible to sign up for another Free Book Promotion or Kindle Countdown Deal until the next Kindle Direct Enrollment Period for my book. Your books are enrolled in Kindle Direct for three-month periods beginning on your first enrollment date. You can do one promotion per enrollment period. As far as I can tell, if you don’t cancel the Kindle Direct enrollment the enrollment automatically rolls over to the next quarter. At least, I’ve not had to re-enroll any of my books.
Once you have the menu for setting your promotion, you follow the steps to select a start and end date for your promotion. Your promotions can run up to a total of five days during any enrollment period.
Results of My Free eBook Promotion
I advertised my promotion on Twitter and Facebook. I scheduled ten tweets/day, two per book, for each of the days of the promotion through Hootsuite. I posted on my FB page, my Author FB page and on five groups to which I belong. I did a total of fourteen posts on Facebook.
I promoted five of my books for five consecutive days of Free Downloads. You can see by the graph above that there was a low point on the third day. I will break my future Free Promotions into a three-day segment and a four-day segment the following week to try and avoid that.
During that period, there were 436 total downloads. I was pleased with those numbers.
Next blog (in two weeks): More on the results of Free eBook Promotion
Follow me on Twitter: @CRDowningAuthor
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