New Post: Promo Insights from E-Book Week

by Louis Bertrand Shalako

c2010

All Rights Reserved


The nice thing about Smashwords is that the author gets some data, which is easily understandable and accessible from your dashboard.

Over the course of E-Book Week Shalako Publishing gave free e-books to anyone who was willing to sign up for Smashwords. This is comparable to sign-up at any other electronic bookseller; and for the purposes of promotion even simpler because customers didn't have to provide credit or debit data.

Early on, I was promoting on Twitter to some degree, but over the last two days I let that rest, although naturally I still monitored the stream. Every day I put out at least one or two links to my pages on LinkedIn and Stumbleupon, and that sort of thing.

For the last couple of days it was mostly reminders; bearing in mind that Facebook is my biggest 'audience' or group of friends. On Goodreads, I gave a general update once a day in the morning.

Here are the peak numbers: Heaven Is Too Far Away, up to 80 hits a day.
Paranoid Cat and other tales,about 70/day.
Core Values (up to) 50/day.
Case of the Curious Killers, a nice 125/day.
The Handbag's Tale, about 100 a day.

Over the course of the promotion we gave away 130 e-books, with Handbag's Tale taking the checkered flag, followed by Heaven, Case, Paranoid Cat and then Core Values. The first three had over thirty each, Paranoid a couple of dozen and Core Values was the one that brought in a small donation. We also gave away six copies.

One thing I would like to know is the formats of each download--it would be nice to know exactly how many people took what format.

While this is a small sampling, it is at least as accurate as inteviewing rich people as they come out of Nieman-Marcus and asking them if they are hopeful about the economy.

By five o'clock on the last day I was getting incredibly tired, and perhaps a little slap-happy with the buttons. It is really something to put out a link and then watch page views climb...then the number changes up with another couple of book-freebies.

With little or no marketing experience, the week provided experience, and some new questions, which is always good.

A big thumbs-up to all of our new friends.