As I mentioned Sunday, I purchased a Kindle Nation sponsorship for The Emperor’s Edge, a full-length fantasy novel priced at $2.99.
Kindle Nation has several advertising options, and I went with #1: “free book alert sponsorship.” To qualify, your book must be a bargain compared to traditionally published ebooks (which are often $7.99 and up). The cost of the ad is currently $80, and this gets your ebook listed on the KN site with picture, blurb, reviews, etc. It also goes out to the subscribers that follow the blog on their kindles.
I didn’t sell enough books to earn back the cost of the ad (Sunday royalties will pay for about 75% of it), but it was easily my best sales day ever. My ebook climbed to 3,600ish in the bestseller rankings (read my post explaining Amazon Sales Rank if you’re curious how that all works) and briefly appeared in the Top 100 for epic fantasy (my novel isn’t really epic fantasy, but Amazon’s categories for fantasy are lacking… a rant for another time!).
Unfortunately, Amazon’s DTP page only shows you the number of books you’re selling, not where buyers are coming from, so it’s hard for me to tell which sales on later days may have been the result of the advertisement. I know I download samples of ebooks before buying and often go back days or weeks later for the rest. My sales have been a little better than the two weeks before this week, and I believe some of that is from the KN ad.
Beyond direct sales, it’s likely there are less tangible benefits of a sponsorship. For example, more people have found my blog this week by searching for my name (people know my name, wow!). Also, just having more people read the book means more chance for reviews online and recommendations to friends.
Some things which may have hindered my sales:
- Cover and blurb — maybe not to everyone’s tastes?
- It’s fantasy, heh. SF is worse, but traditional fantasy is definitely a niche genre.
- Sunday of a holiday weekend — I have no basis for comparison yet, but blog traffic is always higher for me during the week (yes, everyone surfs during work hours), so it’s possible more people shop for ebooks M-F too.
- Price point — while $2.99 is a bargain next to a $9.99 ebook, there are a lot of $0.99 ebooks posted at Kindle Nation.
Other People’s Kindle Nation Results:
Curious how other people do with their books? Here’s a spreadsheet of the site’s results for January sponsorships thus far. And the December 2010 results are up too.
The $0.99 ebooks are the biggest hits (surprise!). I remember seeing someone who had sold 150+ books as a result of the KN sponsorship, and I was quite envious until I realized they’d actually made less than I had with my 30-odd sales. (Thanks to the quirkiness of the Amazon pricing system, you get a 35% royalty at $0.99 and a 70% royalty at anything from $2.99 to $9.99. Essentially, you have to sell six times as many copies at $0.99 to make what you do at $2.99.)
That said, I may try initially releasing Encrypted at $0.99 and seeing if the cheaper price encourages significantly more purchases. That could make it easier to get onto the various Top 100 fantasy charts at Amazon, which is the way to be seen over there. It’s easy to raise the price later. Or maybe leaving it low could act as a gateway into my other novels. The fun thing about being an indie author is you have all the control and can experiment at will with these things!
All in all, I’m happy with the results of my sponsorship, and I am planning to sign up again for future ebooks.
Great report, Lindsay. Good of you to share you results. I’ve got a sponsorship going later this month, the ebook of the day option. Kindle Nation sponsorships are back logged for several months – into July in some cases – so they must be doing something right.
Sometimes all it takes is a little boost to get your name out there. Congrats on moving up the rank. As far as your cover, I love it. I’m not the greatest judge of them of course. I do think it has a young adult kind of look to it though. Not sure what age your protagonist is. I haven’t gotten around to reading the sample, but I definitely plan to do so once I get a few things off my plate.
Still good you earned back 75% of your cost in one sitting. I’ll have to talk to my husband about that.
Thanks for sharing your story.
Out of the blue… I couldn’t find a subscribe button.
Mark, I could see your books doing well with the KN group! Which one are you running the sponsorship for?
Reena, thanks for the comments. Someone else mentioned YA in regards to the cover, and it’s not, but those do seem to be all the rage, so maybe I should leave it. 😛 I figure I can always have them redone when I start making some money!
The RSS feed is up in the right corner, but I do need to add a mailing list and social media plug ins and all that jazz to make it easy for people to follow, tweet, etc. It’s on my to-do list. Like everything else. 😛
Congrats on your sponsorship doing really well. I had some of the same concerns as you did.
I had mine on January 1st for The Usurper, so I was worried about the holiday and it being Bowl Games all over TV. I managed to make back what I spent on the sponsorship, plus the money I spent on that eBook of the Day that I had zero sales on back in November. All told, I sold 50 copies. Along with about 13 more the rest of the week, where it completely dropped off on Wednesday. I’ve already sold more in a week than I sold in all of last month for all three of my novels, so if I don’t sell anything else this month, I’m happy.
Unfortunately, the Amazon sales ranking decided to go screwy on Saturday, so my ASR was never accurate, even Metric Junkie and the others weren’t reporting accurately. The highest I managed to get was to #37 in political fiction in ebooks, but I’m sure it would have been higher if the rankings had been working accurately.
Anyway, I would do this again sometime in the future, and would recommend it to everyone.
Cliff
Thanks for commenting, Cliff!
That’s great that you decided to try again and it turned out so well for you. Just shows that you can’t predict what people will be drawn to (or I can’t anyway!).
Great post. I was scheduled for the 6th of January but there was a scheduling mix-up on KN’s end. He generously offered to post my book to his free static page that usually lists his book, plus do an e-book of the day sponsorship and finally feature me when his calendar is clear again on March 6th and he refunded my money.
As you were, I was curious as to how this would affect sales but now I’ll have a little more data to look through – which is nice.
So far, my sales have been fairly steady but my featured book is listed at 99¢. (The Math-I would have to sell approximately 230 books at 99¢ to cover the cost).
I do have two more in the series that I sell at $2.99 each. (The Math-I would have to sell about 40 copies to cover the cost). When I signed up these were my thoughts. Now, everything is profit.
Though I didn’t get my regular scheduled day, Steve did his best to make it up to me. I’m disappointed in the mistake but because he cares about his business and cares about his customers, I’ve gotten a better deal (I will list again).
JC
The Kindle Nation Daily Sponsorship price has gone up since this post. They’ve changed their website and increased prices across the board. I didn’t find it came close to earning itself back on my science fiction novel even though my ebook has good reviews.
I think the people who have good results have books with a very broad appeal or honestly aren’t that good at math. They’re deliriously happy they sell 200 copies of a 99 cent ebook even though they only made 60 bucks out of that and the ad was 100 bucks.
First thiing, I don’t know crap, so take this for what it is worth. 😉
“Cover and blurb — maybe not to everyone’s tastes?” You mention this in your post and I have to say I read Flash Gold, loved it and then checked your other offerings on Amazon (via the author name hyperlink) to see what else you had written. When I first saw The Emperor’s Edge and the cover, I thought of a grand epic historic novel on something like the emperor’s of India.
Now that I have spent half my Sunday reading the first half (thanks a bunch! I was supposed to go into work!), while I really do like the cover, I am not sure it fits the book. The cover currently, for me anyway, conveys an intelligent historical drama (read: dry, dull, and slow) and none of those fit your book at all.
That said, I am not sure what I would put on the cover. Once again, not that I know better, just thought I would let you know.
Thanks Lindsay. I’m just getting started with e-books and was looking for ways to get the word out.
Lindsay, thanks for sharing your efforts. I just put out (3 weeks ago today) my first book on Amazon. Ive sold about 35. It is high Fantasy like yours, an illlustrated short story called Awakening Evarun. I am looking for vehicles to promote realising at some point its just a numbers game, which is actually kind of encouraging. You touched on something I have wondered. What is internet prime time?
The fact I’m replying to this blog entry in particular is random in a way, in that this is the fifth or sixth entry of yours that I have read top to bottom, with lots of pauses and rereads and link follows along the way.
I am about to push the button on my first book and I can’t tell you how completely and totally useful your site has been in the process (and will be as I get going on Goodreads and the Kindle Nation along the way, etc.).
I’ve already shared your site with a writer friend (we both write fantasy, so you are helping your own competition, which not only shows your confidence in your work–which by the way I have seen and you write beautifully or I would not bothered taking your advice), and all I can say is “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” What a totally kick-ass collection of really, really useful, wonderfully articulated advice, and it’s good advice because I work for a marketing company and a lot of what you talk about I know for a fact is spot on from a pure marketing standpoint.
That you pin down the where’s and hows for writers in particular, sorting out the options, really saves a lot of legwork and flopping around in the dark. So kudos to you and I hope you sell nine-zillion copies. Rock on.
Hi John,
Thanks for the nice comment. I’m glad you’re finding my posts useful! There are lots of voracious fantasy readers out there, so a little competition is okay. 🙂
Just an FYI, the KND sponsorships have gone up in price a lot since I did this post, and I’ve heard from authors who have run ads recently that they might not be as effective these days. Pixel of Ink is the big one right now (they’re also expensive, but they seem to have a large readership). I ran an ad at EreaderNewsToday a few months ago, just for kicks, and that sold a lot of books for me, so they might be worth checking out too (their ads are fairly reasonable right now).
I will look at both. Thanks again for what you are doing. You are an inspiration and seem a very kind heart.
any advice for advertising book/ebook of autobiographical fiction? its the first of 6 that will intertwine and be based on my life, just offered on amazon 2 weeks ago, under “last days of consciousness” , im having trouble finding places to advertise? blogs? do you recommend a very low temporary ebook price?, its at 7.95 right now
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