Sale and Marketing Wrap-up

The sale for Accidental Death ended at midnight the 26th (which is the first minute of the day, not the last - a point which confuses me to this day).  It was a Kindle Countdown Deal with only one price point - 99c.  After which, it returned to its regular low price of $2.99.

The sale started at midnight on the 19th.  On the 19th and the 20th, the only advertising I did was through FB, Twitter, and this blog.  I sold one book on the 19th and one book on the 20th.

On the 21st, I had an ad go out through Bargain Booksy.  Ad cost $55.  The ad hit their site at 7am CST and their newsletter reached me at 11am.  I saw one sale before 11am, and that was in Australia (at full price because Amazon doesn't allow KCDs in AU).  Once the newsletter hit inboxes, my sales began to climb.  I saw 53 sales for AD on the 21st and 3 for Natural Causes.

Over the next few days, I had some sales every day with little additional advertising.  I did put out a couple of things to FB groups on Friday, but whether they caused sales or not is hard to tell.  I did a full-on blast Sunday afternoon across all my usual FB groups - a sort of 'time's running out, buy now' thing - but I didn't have an extra sales as far as I can tell.

Pages reads started on Thursday and have been chugging along since.

The ad paid for itself on Saturday, which is the primary goal of paid advertising for me.  Everything after that is gravy.

November was shaping up to be one of my worst sales months ever.  I'd only sold 1.29 books before the sale.  Since the sale, I've sold over 75 books, saving this month from the pits.

I've also seen some pages reads for books not in the Dennis Haggarty series, which certainly helps.  Someone read all of Early Grave, someone else started In Deep Wish and then, I assume, went over to read Wish in One Hand. 

As for the rankings I was tracking...  AD started out the sale at 943,000 in all books  and reached a high of 6401.  In its genre category, it went from somewhere in the 2100s to a high of 28th in Hard-boiled Mystery and #36 in Noir.  That was Thursday morning.  It's been steadily falling since, but with additional sales trickling in, the fall isn't as fast as it could be.

Here's the graph (because I'm a nerd):

Rank in Thousands

Natural Causes also got a boost in rank.  But I didn't start tracking it until it had already risen in the ranks, so there's not really a baseline.  It did reach 68443 in all books and 281 in HB/Noir.

All in all, I'm pleased with the results.  The rest of this month is gravy.  Not a lot of gravy, but better than it had been.  So, it's all good.

Thanks for reading along.  I hope following this helps you in some way.  Now, I've got to start planning my next marketing ventures for December before I get left out.  Wish me luck.  ;o)