Monday, January 9, 2012

Keepin’ it real!

As my five dollar blog ads end I can reliably say that they resulted in maybe a dozen sales. Since I only get like thirty-five cents a book the result wasn’t worth the expense in monetary terms. But it’s all about exposure. This brings me to the next level of my experiments in marketing. After reading forums on the pros and cons of making your ebook free to the public, I decided to do just that. Kindle Direct offers a program where you can offer your book free for up to five days. I’m doing my two books, DROP OUT and INSECTLAND for three days starting this morning until Wednesday afternoon, so get your copy while you can. Now, you may ask why this approach? Well, there’s several obvious reasons. If people like the book they may buy another of mine. If they like the book they may write a nice review. If they like the book they may recommend it to their friends. Of course, I hope no one dislikes my books.
So, I checked my stats as of six hours running and I’ve already sold four hundred books! That’s right, four hundred books in six hours! If this continues I’ll probably have given away three thousand books or more by the end of the campaign. That’s HUGE exposure even if only a small percentage actually read the book. And since I have multiple books for sale I’m hoping to attract a few new fans. So far, this appears to be the most promising marketing gimmick to date. It’s going to be exciting seeing the counter go up and knowing so many people have my books in their hands. My other ongoing campaign, the Goodreads pay-per-click ads aren’t doing anything, so I may just set the level to the highest exposure rate and use up my balance. Another plus today, this blog is now over 30,000 hits and my Facebook fan page in up over 5,500 “likes”. http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Facebook-Page-of-Author-Neil-D-Ostroff/124794694205967

I thank all who have helped me achieve these kinds of numbers.




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