I've been talking to some fellow authors about their marketing strategies. One in particular had good numbers of reviews across most of their books, and I wondered how she'd done it. That is, I didn't want to insinuate that her books don't deserve the reviews - because they totally do - but how on earth did she get the book in front of so many people, so quickly? She told me she'd done a lot of work in getting sign ups to her newsletter and she'd taken part in a lot of giveaways. She pointed me in the direction of the Self Publishing Round Table.

At the end of September, I decided to take part in a cross author promotion. The idea being that 150 authors of all genres of romance novels club together to promote their books. The $20 fee went towards a prize fund which would attract new readers to the promotion - win either a Kindle Fire, or Amazon gift vouchers. Competitors could get extra entries into the draw by signing up to author's mailing lists. It also paid for boosted posts and adverts via Facebook.
The book the author wanted to promote also had to be free for the weekend, drawing in huge numbers of interested readers who could get 150 books for free, enter a prize draw, and discover some new authors.
At first, I was a little reticent about giving my book away for free. Let's face it we'd all love it everyone just discovered the book, bought it, and left 5 star reviews all the time. Back here in the real world, especially with a debut novel from a self published author, things are a little more tricky than that.
Visibility. That's the key.
So, I paid my $20, sent off all my information, set my freebie via KDP, and waited for the 3 day promotion to begin. After all, I'd done some research and heard good things about previous promotions Self Publishing Round Table had run - not just from my friend, but other authors too. Fingers crossed I hadn't just wasted my money.
When promo day came along, I posted a few links on social media, as well as my blog and newsletters to existing subscribers.

So what happened?

The results were pretty amazing to be honest. 
The promo ran from September 28th - September 29th. I actually started my freebie through KDP on the 27th and ran it until the 30th because time zones ALWAYS catch me out.
Here are the download results for the 4 days. That's a total of 2634 downloads. Free or not, 2634 people have a copy of my book who wouldn't have otherwise

But they got it for free! What good is that?

True. They did get it for free. BUT I did this promotion in the hope of raising some awareness and getting some more all-important-reviews. Good or bad, reviews are good for the Amazon algorithmic voodoo and boosting the book's visibility. 
In the month since the promotion, Bound to Blackwood has scored 10 new reviews. Nearly all of them are 4 and 5 stars and most of them go down as "verfied purchases" to please the Amazon gods.

The downloads also helped boost my rankings. In the weeks since the promotion, I've climbed from complete obscurity, to just plain old obscurity! Seriously though, I have gained a whopping 297506 places according my Author Central account, and that's not to be sniffed at.

Bound to Blackwood's best seller's rank is much better than it ever has been too, and has even broken the top 200 in one of its categories.

What else did I get?

270 lovely new people to interact with via sign up to my mailing list. Yes, some of them are going to be people who are only interested in getting free stuff, and competitions etc. But, I host plenty of offers from other authors and talk about new releases and so forth via my blog. Hopefully most of them will stay.
I emailed everyone about ten days after the promotion, welcoming them to the list and telling them what they could expect from future mailings. I also offered further free copies of Bound to Blackwood to anyone who had somehow managed to sign up, but missed out on snagging their free copy. I gave everyone five days to get back to me.
I repeated the process again a few days later, but only included people who hadn't opened the message and told them they had just a few days left to claim their copy. 
I sent another one, excluding people who had replied or opened the previous mails, telling them they had just twenty-four hours left to claim their copy.
Sixteen people wrote to me asking for their free copy and thanking me for letting them know.
In total, eight people unsubscribed - which is to be expected, and is actually a good thing. I want to be communicating with people who actually want to hear from me.

The other fantastic thing for me? KENP reads. 

There's been some controversy over the last six weeks or so about changes Amazon have made, and how a certain feature called "page flip" is effecting how page reads are registered. For me, the last four weeks have been my best EVER for page reads. My figures normally languish at a couple of hundred page reads a month, if I'm lucky. 
Since the beginning of October, I've averaged nearly 2000 page reads A DAY, with a total of 35,035 page reads, month-to-date. 

When I sent those emails to my new subscribers, I included links to the book on my website. My stats tell me quite a number of people went from there to various Amazon sites. According to the statistics I got from Self Publishing Round Table after the initial promotion, 2,898 people accessed the smart link to my book via the promo page. Perhaps those extra 534 people chose to read Bound to Blackwood through Kindle Unlimited instead of "purchasing" a copy. Perhaps my attempt to claw my way up the Amazon rankings has resulted in the extra visibility I'd hoped for and readers have found Bound to Blackwood that way. It is difficult to tell since Amazon don't provide any statistics as to where these page reads are coming from. Either way, I'm looking at a mahoosive increase in readership this month so I'll take that, thank you very much!

So there you have it. $20 very well spent, I think. I'd definitely recommend Self Publishing Round Table for help with promotion and mailing list sign-ups.

Remember, Bound to Blackwood is my debut novel. It's a standalone but designed to be the first in a series. I need to be realistic about it. I think it's always going to be a loss leader, and I'm okay with that. 
Want to know more about Self Publishing Round Table? Visit the website here.

Don't forget to let me know your thoughts in the comment section!

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