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Raiya: Early Game pre-order trends – Day One

Russell Wilbinski
LitRPG, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer

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Raiya: Starter Zone
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Good day, friends!

I wanted to give you guys a sneak peek behind the scenes of my recent pre-order campaign for Raiya: Early Game. As you may (or may not) know, Book two is out for pre-order now, and book one of the Archon’s chosen series, Raiya: Starter Zone is free until September 6th. I did a lot of research about release schedules, dates, promotion methods and advertising to push this book toward moderate success.

Part 1 – Pre-order Pricing

During the pre-order week, I priced book two at 99 cents to make it attractive to new readers who may not have heard of my series. 99 cents is a good deal for a 600 page ebook, generally speaking. The goal was to provide maximum value to the reader and to create some early sales, thus boosting the rank for launch day. Hopefully, some of those readers will like the book, and leave a decent review. Let’s look at where it landed after the first twenty-four hours.

As far as pre-orders go, not terrible for a less than famous author such as myself. We broke into the top 100 in two separate categories which is wonderful. The real win for me has been on the free book promo.

Part 2 – Making Raiya: Starter Zone free during the pre-order week

The goal here was simple, get as many readers interested in book two by making it free to get up to speed and excited for book two. Fun fact: People love free stuff, especially LitRPG readers who often purchase books that don’t meet their rigorous standards or particular tastes. What better way to entice someone to read your works than giving them a free book? The results have been spectacular.

So far, I have had over 300 downloads in the first twenty-four hours!

Part 3 – Advertising

This is where I wanted to be very careful. When advertising free books, every penny you spend has Negative ROI, technically. If you dont make any money from sales, then ads are useless. The second caveat is that a 99 cent book is worth very little in sales revenue (35 cents) per copy, so the goal is to get a lot of visibility for as little money as possible.

Time for social media to come to the rescue. Facebook advertising is relatively cheap, and I want to get as many impressions as possible. Being able to filter my ad presentations to a very defined market allows me to hit as many screens as I can that are likely to be interested in free or cheap books, especially LitRPG fans. It takes time, research and tracking data to hit those drill downs, but once you have them, you can save them forever.

Twitter, Instagram and other free platforms allow you to engage with your audience at a personal level, growing your following and hitting a lot of eyes for no money at all. Do not neglect Twitter, there are some very nice people there.