My experience with Amazon Free Day Book Promo’s

Here’s my experience so far with Amazon Free Day Book Promo’s

 1st Amazon Free Day book promo

All In: The Globe Trot Shuffle, published March 2016. Promo was in late March 2016

I ran a free day book promo when I first published All In: The Globe Trot Shuffle. I did this one on the weekend, starting Friday. I gave away less than 200 books. It didn’t lead to a spike in sales afterwards or a spike in Kindle Unlimited Pages read. I used a lot of pay sites, and free sites for their email newsletter and twitter blast abilities. I paid around 300 dollars. I may have received reviews on the book from people who downloaded the free books, but all reviews were removed for a vague reason. I also had a bad cover for the book, one of those generic ones you get when you have to make your own cover when you’re publishing on KDP.

 2nd Amazon Free Book promo

All In: The Globe Trot Shuffle, published March 2016.  Promo was on May 18, 2016

 I updated the cover for the book before I ran this free day promo. I ran this promo on a Wednesday for one day only.  I used nothing but free sites, although I may have paid for one at the most. I can’t recall if I did, but it wouldn’t have been over 25 dollars. I gave away over 2000 ebooks. It lead to a spike in sales for the next week, and a spike in Kindle Unlimited pages read. I also got 3 reviews that stuck this time on Amazon. This was when I only had one book published

3rd Amazon Free Book promo

Cash Me Out:  Life and Death in Paradise, published May 2016. Promo was on June 22, 2016

I did this one for my 2nd book, Cash Me out: Life and Death in Paradise. I used nothing but the free websites that I used before. I ran this promo during the weekend. It was downloaded less than 100 times. A review popped up, but I think it was from someone who got the book when it first came out because the review mentioned book 1’s events as well. It didn’t lead to a spike in anything, or even a spike in book 1’s stats.

 4th Amazon Free Book Promo

Cash Me Out:  Life and Death in Paradise, published May 2016.  Promo was on July 6, 2016

I ran this promo on a Wednesday two weeks after the last promo. It probably didn’t help that it was two days after the 4th of July holiday when so many other people gave away books (I set the promo up before I knew others would be giving away free books over the holiday weekend). I used a few pay sites, but paid less than 100 dollars. I used a bunch of free sites as well.  Most of the free sites didn’t run the promo.  Probably because I tried to use them 2 weeks before. It led to 500 books being downloaded. No spike in sales afterwards, but a spike in Kindle Unlimited Pages Read for the book (surprisingly not book 1). It led to a spike in sales for book 1 during the actual promo. Book 1 also rose in the paid store ranks, breaking into the top 100 bestseller categories for a few subcategories. I assume people were adding it to their Kindle Unlimited libraries. I will have to wait a few weeks if it leads to other sales, pages read, and reviews.

I don’t know if this will be helpful of not. You may have been more successful doing something else.  Free sites work at times, paid sites work at times. Best free day promos for me have been on Wednesdays. People may not have wanted to download book 2 in a series either.  I did run the 3rd and 4th promos for the same books with the same sites almost 2 weeks apart.  I have to assume that some sites didn’t run the promo for the bad 3rd promo.  Some sites may have ran the 3rd promo, but may not have run the 4th promo.  I made sure that sites ran the promo by paying for them to run it

 I’ll run another free day promo for book 1 after I publish book 3. I’ll see if the promo for book 1 is as successful as the last time when I gave away 2000 ebooks. I’ll see if it also leads to spikes in the other 2 books’ numbers. After the 30 day period of being a new release, I’ll run a promo on book 3 to see what that does.

Here’s the sites I used for all of the promo’s.  I may have used more in the past, but I didn’t write them down.  I also paid for some sites from the 1st promo, but don’t know if I listed them here or not:

Ran the promo

choosybookworm $25 (they did one a promo for free once, 2nd promo if I’m not mistaken)

awesomegang $10

ebookasaurus $10

bookbongo $20

lovelybookpromotions

readwriteclub

buchfans (a book blog in Germany)

thriftythursday (can only do this on Thursday)

Didn’t run the promo

bookgoodies $10 (they said there was an error, so they refunded the 10 dollars)

readfree.ly

theereadercafe

thedailybookworm

bookhippo uk

newfreekindlebooks

bookzio

Choosybookworm seemed to work the best. They sent their email out to subscribers around noon EST. That’s when I saw a huge jump in downloads for the two best free day promos (2nd and 4th promo’s)

For all of the promo’s, I tweeted that the books were free with hashtags.  That may have led to a dozen books being downloaded for all 4 promos combined.

 For the 4th promo, I tweeted to handles that were recommended on websites.  The only one that retweeted my tweet to them was @4FreeKindleBook (theindiespotlight).  I had my message in a notepad, and just copy/pasted it with each new twitter handle.

Here is a list of sites I tweeted to:

@freebookclub1 @ibdbookoftheday @Booksontheknob @bookbub @kindle_free @freeebooksdaily @zilchebooks @freedailybooks

@digitalinktoday @fkbt @kindlestuff @Bookyrnextread @CheapKindleDly @DigitalBkToday @free @freebookdude @4FreeKindleBook

@IndAuthorSucess @KindleFreeBook @Kindle_promo @KindleDaily @FreeKindleStuff @FreeReadFeed @free_kindle @freebookpromos @freebooksy @KindleBlaze @KindleBookBlast @KindleBookKing @Kindlbookreview @digitalBKtoday
@KindleFireDept @KindleEbooksUK @KindleFreeBooks @KindleFreeStuff @KindleKing
@KindleSurprise @KindleUS @KindleUK @KindleDE @KindleES @Kindle_Max @kindle_mojo @Kindlefreebies @Kindlestuff

I even tried to tweet in local languages for the different Amazon stores.  I used google translator to promote the free book giveway in Portugese with my book link on Amazon Brazil.  Japanese, Hindi, French, Dutch, German, etc with the book’s product page on those countries Amazon sites.

 Example:

 Freie englische Sprache Buchförderung JULI 07 #Liebe #Mord #Rache #amazonDE #Spannung #Gewalt #Deutschland

I did see a book or two from some of those countries I tweeted to in their local languages.  I also tweeted in English about the book with the product page from the country’s Amazon page.  Something like,

Get this free ebook, amazon.de/cash-me ……

Here are the different country’s that have Amazon websites

UK, DE, FR, ES, IT, NL, JP, IN, CA, BR, MX, AU

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