Last June, I priced The Ebb (book 1 in The Lady of the Pier trilogy) at $0.99 and only changed the price back to $2.99 last week, i.e. just over four months later. This was an experiment I had planned very little but it yielded a host of wonderful surprises, which I decided to blog about in the hope that it may give fresh ideas and tips to any fellow authors.

Due to a very tight budget, I didn’t plan for any paid adverts. But, when I got the chance to enter a month-long giveaway hosted by Great Books Great Deals (GBGD), I jumped at the chance. This great site is run by author, Carmen De Sousa – a friend and co-member at eNovel Authors at Work.

Carmen runs these genius month-long giveaways every now and then. What she does is invite authors to price their books at 99c for a month and pay just $5 to participate. Then, Carmen invests all the money she receives from the authors into advertising for the giveaway. These expand the reach of her posts even further than her already awesome author platform. Other than the exposure gained though, authors who participate in the giveaway see a rise in their sales. Why? Because readers have to buy the books to gain entries at the giveaway for a better chance to win a series of wonderful prizes. Thanks to Carmen’s giveaway, without having to spend more than that minimal $5 fee, I suddenly had sales for The Ebb every day.

I highly recommend that you sign up for the newsletter at GBGD so you can be notified next time Carmen plans a giveaway. Give it a try and even if you don’t see much for it, at least it will have cost you only $5 and your book will have been put in front of thousands.

Anyway, the giveaway ran during July and I had a noticeable rise in my sales. Perhaps a couple of sales a day doesn’t sound like much to some of you, but for me, who up to then only sold 3-4 books max per month, that was progress!

At the end of the same month, I took my annual week’s holiday in Corfu, visiting my granny in my beloved village of Moraitika where I’ve set my trilogy. This time, I went there prepared. I talked to family and friends who run businesses on this popular holiday spot and got them all to mount A4 signs advertising my trilogy in all sorts of businesses, ranging from restaurants and rooms to let, and even in a supermarket. In return, I took photos of their businesses and, upon return to Athens, created a holiday guide to Moraitika which I posted on this site, advertising these businesses. Shortly, I realized this was a great idea. Even though Carmen’s giveaway at GBGD had ended, my romances set on Corfu continued to sell almost daily. This time, I knew it was because of the signs put up all over my Corfiot village!

Encouraged, I didn’t stop there. After all, now I had a holiday guide about the place and I had promised those friends and family members I was going to promote them online as to say thank you. Next thing I knew, I was on Facebook, joining a host of groups about Corfu. I connected with hundreds of people there who shared my love and passion for the island. Most of them are British; some call Corfu their second home, and others even live there all year round. Their response to my holiday guide to Moraitika and the nearby Messonghi were astounding. Not only did they open up to me, sending me photographs, telling me about their favorite people and places there, they also bought The Ebb and The Flow (books 1 and 2). Knowing that Facebook is mostly used on weekends, I tended to engage and post mostly during that time. On the first weekend I connected with British readers on Facebook groups, I got this incredible sales spike:

That was August 9 as you can see. Three days later, August 12, I discovered more Facebook groups and got another sales spike. From then on, these wonderful people began to talk to their friends and share the posts about the trilogy. As a result, the sales never stopped.

In September, Carmen ran another giveaway so I entered The Ebb again. This, combined with the Facebook groups that were still yielding results brought in even better sales numbers this time.

Early October, I began to post on the Facebook groups, this time to announce that the 99c offer on The Ebb was ending soon. I first did this on October 3rd and 4th (a weekend, of course!). The result? 22 and 12 sales on these days.

 

To help you gain an understanding of what a novelty this is to me, I’ll say, first, that since discovering these Facebook groups I never had any noticeable payments from Amazon. Now, for the first time, I find myself actually awaiting the payment, as finally, it’s a bit more than the usual dimes I used to get. Secondly, the sales rise has affected my borrows. Whereas before I hardly had 1-2 borrows per month, now with the new system, I get 400-500 KENP pages on most days, sometimes even 700 on a single day.

Two other benefits I reaped from having my book on 99c for a long time:

• Promo sites noticed and featured my book, some more than once! I found out thanks to Mention, a free service I’ve set up to notify me whenever my book titles and my name are posted on the Internet (highly recommended, by the way. It catches and reports way more than Google Alerts ever will. Subscribe to both, like I have, and see for yourself. Both are free. Isn’t that handy?)
  
• Amazon noticed my book! Before I knew it, in its periodic newsletters to customers, Amazon would feature The Ebb. I know this, because I also received these newsletters and so did many other author friends around the world, who made sure to tell me. It makes sense, if you think about it. Amazon, as we know, is all about pleasing the customer. So if, to them, it seems that a book is getting popular, it makes sense to put it in front of more people, right?

So, summing up, my benefits from having The Ebb on 99c for just over 4 months were:

• I was able to enter the giveaway of GBGD twice, putting the book in front of thousands for a total period of two months and for the measly cost of $10 total.

• Promo sites noticed the book has been discounted long-term and featured it.

• Amazon noticed the steady, daily sales and featured the book in the newsletter to customers, putting my book in front of even more readers.

• I experienced astounding sales spikes by joining Facebook groups related to the location in my book.

Regarding the last one, I hope it inspires you to do something similar. Think about it! People make snap decisions to buy when something is close to their hearts. How can you benefit in a similar fashion? Does your book feature a popular holiday spot? A certain hobby maybe? Start searching those Facebook groups. Readers are everywhere – not just in book-related groups. Think out of the box. Even if your book is set in space, there may be Facebook Groups for space enthusiasts. Be the first author to get there and reap the benefit. If you can’t find something suitable to pitch your existing book, then, at least you can use the information to plan ahead. How? Decide wisely about the location of your next book. Before you pick one, do a little research on Facebook, see which groups for what interests and places have the biggest and most active attendance and go for it! Remember though, you have to give something of value before pitching the book in a subtle way. As I said, GIVE before you receive. Remember, I offered a holiday guide and that led the people naturally to the books. I didn’t just go on the group to pitch a book. For a non book-related group this is most awkward and you could get banned. See the guide here to check out how I mention the books at the bottom of the page.

Also, I made sure to amend my Facebook banners so that when the readers received my friend request, they saw I was someone writing about a place they love.

Here’s the banner on my private Facebook page:

The hashtags on The Ebb speak for themselves, as you can see. By the way, the banner was made by a talented designer called Faith Mondigo. She charges $9 dollars an hour and I recommend her highly. Her email is  faytebuds03  at  gmail dot com. This banner cost me around $26 but I got a banner set for Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.

To give you some perspective of how much better this long-term 99c promo proved to be for me compared to the normal promo route, here’s what I got after my last KCD promo on the same book back in May 2015:

After weeks of preparation while I submitted the book to promotion sites, having to pay $150 in adverts, the result was just 70 downloads and 5 borrows. Sales after that were insignificant. So, the ROI was a disaster. I never even got the ad money back. I also owe some of these downloads to a bunch of Robert Pattinson fans who read about my affinity for the actor in an interview of mine at the time and rushed to buy my book (all details in this post). Yes, another case of snap decision when the heart speaks. I rest my case. As you realize, if it weren’t for this mention of Pattinson that attracted his fans, my downloads would have been even less.

Now, compare those awful KCD results with the last sales spike on October 3rd and 4rth as mentioned earlier. i.e. :

Five minutes of my time posting on just two Facebook groups, ZERO cost for advertising, which yielded 34 sales, just that weekend.

I don’t know about you, but this summer experiment has shown me mainly one thing: KCD, at least for me, is a waste of time and money. As I explained, if you decide to price down your book long-term, promo sites and Amazon even start to work for you! I’m definitely repeating this next summer, and will be thinking very hard from now on about the location of my next books!

Hope this has given you a fresh idea or two, and I’d love to know if this has helped in any way. This is the reason why I’m sharing this post, after all. You know, I always find it hard to decide about whether or not I should blog about these things, thinking people might perceive it as me blowing my own trumpet, which is far from the truth.

What about you? What works best for you? KCD’s or a long-term 99c promo? Have you tried both options? And what is your experience with Facebook groups?

One last tip for today: Do you write books set in Greece? Make sure to join this awesome Facebook group, frequented by many British readers who love to buy books of this kind, no matter the genre: A Good Greek Read.

 

Are you an author? Go here to see how we can help you spread the word about your books!

Have you enjoyed this post? Follow the blog (see right sidebar) and miss no more posts! Sign up to Effrosyni’s newsletter to keep up to date with her news and special offers (very sparse emails). Interested to read more? Head over to Effrosyni’s Blog, where you’ll find her earlier interviews, book reviews, author tips, travel articles and even Greek recipes!