Help wanted with my 99-cent sale!
Last week I started a summer sale on my four Amazon novels, Yesterday Road, Occasional Soulmates, Town Father, and Fascination—each available now for just 99 cents in Kindle format.
Guess how many copies have flown off the shelves: 0.
This demonstrates the limits of Twitter marketing, since that’s basically where I’m pushing the titles, but clearly people are inundated with book ads there and pretty much block them out of their minds. I know I do. Especially books with shirtless men on the covers, of which there are myriad. Remember this classic?
But because I don’t think my books are already in the hands of all the people who would enjoy them, I’m going to keep the price at 99 cents a while longer and hope that YOU—my faithful What The Hell minions—can let the readers in your life know that they can own four fab books for less than four dollars.
It looks like tweeting and retweeting won’t do the trick however. If you have a spare thirty seconds or so, text or email someone with the link to my Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Kevin-Brennan/e/B001HPPU2K. If you know them well, recommend one or two of the books you think they’d like best. And emphasize that each one is only 99 cents.
Here’s the kicker. When I end the sale, I’m going to price all four books at $9.99. Because I’d rather have no one buy them at that price than no one buy them at 99 cents. It’s a self-esteem thing.
Work your magic, Word Pressers! I’ll owe you one.
15 comments on “Help wanted with my 99-cent sale!”
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WHAT THE HELL 
Will do 🙂
I’ve wondered what kind of luck people have with tweeting about their books. There are a couple of authors over there who have tweets … every … single … day … about books that have been published for months and years. I can’t imagine that those tweets are still pulling readers in, but there they are … every … single … day … forever. What it does to me is turn me off to those authors and I end up ignoring all of their tweets.
Good luck to you … you know what I think about your books.
I do try to be reasonable about tweeting my books, but frankly I don’t think it helped even when they were brand new. Still, there aren’t too many ways to tell people about them. I also think it’s fine to advertise older books, since ideally books don’t have a “read by” date.
My Twitter feed, though, is caked with indie books, and they’re looking sleazier and sleazier these days. Maybe people see all these ads and go “more indie crap for sale.”
And by the way, you’ve done much more than your fair share for my books, Mark. I’ll always appreciate it!
You are nowhere close to the worst when it comes to tweeting about books. My complaint was definitely not about you.
I agree with you about what seems to be the dominant themes in the indie book crowd these days — either fantasy based YA or romance/erotica/smut. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, but it aint what I’m doing.
As for my support of your books, I don’t support indie authors unless I like what they’re doing. You’re at the top of that heap.
One other thing. I think the biggest problem for many of us writers is that our social media following is, for the most part, just other writers. We’re somewhat cannibalizing each other. That’s not the best word for it, but we’re basically talking to each other instead of to readers.
Yes, I’ve been saying that for years now, as you know. And I still haven’t figured out how to find the readers. Oh well …
I don’t use Twitter, but I’ve observed that July isn’t a great month for book sales. People are too busy doing summer stuff. August tends to be better; maybe everyone’s getting a bit bored and needs something to entertain the old brain. Maybe. Anyway, I’m reblogging this post (and I’ve made some purchases too!)
You’re probably right about July! Doh! I was thinking in terms of “summer reading,” but there are so many distractions now.
Thanks so much for the reblog!
You’re welcome, Kevin! My impression re July comes from results for my books at the Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale (a tiny slice of the market) and my all-time author rank graph at Amazon. On the latter, July is usually a dud — for me. But who really knows…
Reblogged this on Audrey Driscoll's Blog and commented:
Kevin Brennan is giving readers a great opportunity to discover his top-notch literary fiction. Read the reviews and buy some books! I did.
I wonder how many people really do sell books via social media, if it’s really as a successful medium as it’s cracked up to be. I’ve maybe bought two books from a Twitter post, and both times I already knew the author and both times they were promotional sales. Mostly I buy books because of reviews or word-of-mouth or just because they look interesting, and I never buy without first reading a sample. I’m starting to wonder if social media is mostly a way to prevent authors from concentrating on what they do best: write. P.S. I think blogs and Goodreads and such are still good sites for writers, and I also think that public appearances such as readings/talks, presenting at conferences, etc., is another way to go. But still, so time consuming, and a lot of effort for sometimes very little result. It’s all quite depressing some days, isn’t it?
I do wish there were other ways to bring our books to readers’ attention. Like Mark says, most of us are actually pitching to other writers on social media, so it’s kind of a circular firing squad in a way. We do seem to buy one another’s books though … 😉
I never had very good luck with readings and talks, unfortunately. I guess it boils down to competition for readers’ eyeballs, and that’s always tough these days. Yep, a little depressing, but what else are we gonna do?
Reblogged this on Loleta Abi Author & Book Blogger.
For me, Twitter has been the number one source of my sales. That number may not be high in absolute terms, but it’s like 90% of my sales and readers.
I blogged for years, and that netted me a grand total of one reader when I published my first book. Then I got on Twitter and sales ramped up. (Well, relatively speaking, I mean.) But based on the other comments, my experience is unusual in that regard.
That said, I will share the news on my blog. And on Twitter again 😉
Thanks, Berthold! Looks like you’ve been able to tap into an actual lode of readers via Twitter, which might have to do with your genre, I’m guessing. Mark and I have been moaning about how hard it is to find readers as opposed to other writers on the T.
You’re right about blogging too. It’s garnered me a nice community of writers to commiserate with, but it never yielded too many sales (aside from some of those writers). Still, I like it as a place to dump ideas now and then.