Hi everyone,
Last month I began promoting my wife’s books on Amazon. In this post, I’d like to summarize what I’m doing and the results to date.
My Wife’s Books
My wife, Melanie Jackson, is a prodigious writer. Over the last 30 years, she’s been writing and publishing. From 1991 to 2014, she published with Dorchester Publishing in New York. From 2014 through today, I have been self-publishing her books exclusively on Amazon. She now has approximately 123 books self-published on Amazon, as outlined in the following table:
“Moving Violation” KDP Select Promotion
I self-publish Melanie’s books exclusively on Amazon so that I can enter her Kindle eBooks into the KDP Select program. This program provides several benefits. One of these benefits is the ability to run free book promotions. I began such a promotion for the book “Moving Violation”, the first book in a 23 book series, hoping readers who get the book will buy the remainder of the series at full price. What I didn’t expect is that the book would rank in Amazon free categories, accelerating the giveaway.
In the above display, you can see that the book has reached number 61 in the free Cozy Animal Mystery category and 2,588 in all Amazon free. This results from giving away 110 books in three days. I’m interested to see whether this improvement in rank carries over to the paying categories when this promotion is over (I’ll post the results next week).
P.S. If you’d like to be part of the experiment, pick up a free copy of the book through 2/5.
Free Promotion
One thing I’ve done to accelerate this giveaway is promoting the sale on Facebook. After joining 50 book promotion groups, I posted my free promotion to each of the groups. This hasn’t produced the enormous rush of readers I was hoping for, but I believe that this action has increased my giveaways.
Amazon Kindle eBook Sales Funnel
Recently, I constructed a model for selling Amazon books I refer to as the Amazon Kindle eBook Sales Funnel. Check out this YouTube video for an overview of the model:
Before the “Moving Violation” free promotion, I configured the book using this model to optimize sales and giveaways. Look at the “Moving Violation” Amazon product page to see some of these elements applied to the book.
https://www.amazon.com/Moving-
Here are the components of the sales funnel I improved:
Search Keywords
Using a tool called Publisher Rocket, I identified relevant keywords for which readers searched that weren’t too competitive and stuffed them into the book subtitle and the seven KDP keyword fields. This action increases search traffic to my books.
Book Cover
I updated the book cover to be fun and cozy so that it would catch the reader’s eye.
Price
I priced the book at the sweet spot of $2.99 (not that that maters during a free promotion). This is the minimum price I can charge for a Kindle eBook and still receive 70% of the revenue.
Book Description
After reading several books on the topic, I rewrote the Amazon book description using various copywriting techniques. I believe that the current description will sell more books.
Remaining Books
I’m currently applying these sales funnel techniques (and more) to all 123 of Melanie’s books. The process will take approximately two months. As part of this process, I’ve scheduled free and $0.99 promotions for each of the books, resulting in four books per day going on sale for the next 70 days. Again, I’ll post the results when all the sales are over.
I hope that this post has been helpful,
—Brian
