Is There Such a Thing as a Best Day to Promote Your Ebooks

I've been fortunate to meet some really cool people in the ebook industry in the last year or so. Many have been extremely generous, helpful, motivating, and all around kind. One of those folks is Anthony Wessel from digitalbooktoday.com 

Anthony spent several years working in the book industry, overseeing multiple book stores. Part of his job was to study sales trends. He's been an invaluable resource and friend. Today I'm going to serve up some information he shared with me in a phone conversation, and in a comment on my previous post. 

A question we often hear is, "When is the best time to promote?" The easy answer is ALWAYS. The sarcastic answer is, "When you feel like it." But in Anthony's experience, there are basic sales trends that can indicate peak selling days and seasons. The most obvious time to expect a greater return on your marketing efforts is Christmas. But is that the only holiday to consider? No way. There is a year full of opportunity for indie authors.

Look at your Calender. Watch for every holiday. Have you noticed how every few weeks your local grocery and retail stores switch from one holiday to the next? Well, as marketers, authors should take these peak "promotional days" into consideration. It's worked for retail, so it should work for book sales, right? The way Anthony puts it is, there is always a promotion gong on. And isn't the the concept behind KDP Select; offering a "free" promotion, or "price leader" on a regular basis.

So how do you target your promotions? In my opinion, you have a window of oportunity that varies with each holiday.

Personally, I think there's a lag time for ebook sales; "lag" being the day(s) following a holiday. This lag, I believe is the time period between the actual holiday and the days and week that follow when new Kindle owners begin playing with their gadgets and actually start buying books. I saw this after my first KDP free day on Dec 24th. My sales increased on Christmas Day and continued to rise for the next few days, not slowing down after the first of the year.

For a rundown of the holidays that remain in 2012, look at the list below. Mark your calender and plan your promotions accordingly. You should also consider how your book is unique to the holiday. For example, if you write books that take place in Mexico, you might throw some extra promotion the first week of May in celebration of Cinco de Mayo. Olay!

April:

April 15 ~ Tax Day

April 22 ~ Earth Day

May:

May 5    ~ Cinco de Mayo

May 13  ~ Mother's Day

May 28  ~ Memorial Day

June:

June 14 ~ Flag Day

June 17 ~ Father's Day

July:

Independence Day

August:

Back to School Deals

September:

Sept. 3   ~ Labor Day

Sept. 11 ~ Patriot Day

October:

Oct. 8   ~ Columbus Day

Oct. 31 ~ Halloween

November:

Nov. 6   ~ Election Day

Nov. 11 ~ Veteran's Day

Nov. 22 ~ Thanksgiving

December:

Dec. 24 ~ Christmas Eve

Dec 25  ~ Christmas

Dec. 31 ~ New Year's Eve

Jan. 1    ~ New Year's Day

Obviously there are other holidays between January and April. Planning ahead for these events takes some serious forethought because many promotional sites like The Kindle Book Review, KindleNationDaily.com, digitalbooktoday.com, WorldLiteraryCafe.com fill up a month in advance so you can't promote effectively if you wait until the last minute.

Hopefully, looking at the big picture might help you navigate your marketing plan. What's that? You do have a plan right? Anyway, Happy promoting. And welcome to the new world of today's author, where we do it all, writing, selling, accounting, analyzing, and marketing.

Speaking of promotion, if you'd like to enter your book in The Kindle Book Review's Best Indie Books of 2012 Contest, go here ~> CONTEST. We are awarding cash, promotion packages, and giving away a Kindle Fire loaded with tons of the best Indie Books! Everyone wins; authors and readers.

Jeff Bennington is the best-selling author of Reunion, Twisted Vengeance, and The Indie Author's Guide to the Universe.

A Book Marketing Experiment That's Actually Working

So far my marketing experiment is working. 

I mentioned in my last post that I had worked with Soren Petrek, author of Cold Lonely Courage, helping to send his book into Amazon’s top 100 a few weeks ago. He reached #76, and is currently holding around #2,200. He is still ranked in a category list, and was previously in the six digits.

My next client, Laura Rizio, just went through a coaching session a couple weeks ago. When she approached me, she was ranked over #100,000. After evaluating her platform, book page, cover, etc, I saw a few things she had going for her and a few things that she needed to change. She is now ranked #120. She hit #96 over the weekend and has held her ground on the strength of her excellent reviews.

As you can imagine, Laura was ecstatic. Here’s what she had to say:

"Jeff Bennington of the Kindle Book Review is the BOMB. I was fortunate to stumble on the Kindle Book Review site looking for a way to promote my book, Blood Money. I knew that the book was good and had promise but no one was seeing it.

I was lost, literally. 

A few books sold here and there but this was not where I knew I should be. I needed to advertise the book but found no good way to do this. The other venues, which I won't mention, were a waste of time and money. I needed a road map to break through to Amazon Kindle readers—to let them know that I existed.

Jeff was there for me all the way, from creating a dynamic book cover to a road map which brought Blood Money from 12 sales in January to over 25,000 downloads as of this writing.

Here are a few things that we did:

• Re-designed my cover
• Re-designed my product description page and fixed a few typos.
• Re-designed my print cover to match the new ebook cover.
• Enrolled in the KDP Select program.
• Changed my price to make my KDP Select promotion more successful.
• Layered my marketing as I rolled back into Amazon's paid store when my promo ended

I couldn’t have found a more professional service or a better mentor. Lucky me." ~ Laura Rizio

And that, my friends, is what I'm hoping to accomplish with my next three(3) author apprentices. Yes, I said three. When I posted the previous blog entry, I had already decided to help Bert Carson, author of Fourth and Forever.  I've also made a decision with the final two authors who dared to sign up last weekend. 

And the winners, based on the quality and quantity of reviews are….drum roll please…
Deborah Hughes, author of Be still my Love, and Robbi Bryant, author of The Beautiful Evil. 

Both books have received rave reviews but their sales have much room for improvement, which makes the task ahead even more of a challenge. I chose these books to demonstrate that the best thing you can do to sell is to have a great story and good editing. Those two items will always come first. The rest is where many authors fail: packaging and promotion. After reading through the Amazon samples, I believe these two books have what it takes to excel.

A Beautiful Evil is currently ranked #381,778 has 14 reviews and a 4.9-star rating.
Be Still, My Love is ranked #120,546 and has 17 reviews and a 5.0 star rating.

My goal is to give each of these authors over 20,000 new readers two to three weeks and help them to sustain a better sales rank by simply changing a few things that I think can make a big difference. Everything that I do with these authors is in my book, The Indie Authors Guide to the Universe.

If I did not pick you, it was not because I didn't think your book has potential. All of you have excellent reviews and if you tweak just a few things, I think you could see an increase in sales and readership. But since you took a chance on me, I want to give each one of you a FREE copy of The Indie Author's Guide to the Universe. When you read it, I hope you are motivated to stay in the game, encouraged to meet the challenges that indie publishing brings, and learn how you can effectively price and promote your books. If you posted your book in my contest, go to my "Contact" page and send me an email. 

Jeff Bennington
Author of Reunion, Creepy, and Twisted Vengeance
Founder of The Kindle Book Review

Wanted: Two Indie Authors Who Want to Become Bestsellers.

If you're an independent author, and published on Amazon, I want to Talk to you.

I am going to experiment with two authors who've published no more than three titles, received rave reviews, but are still having trouble selling. If you fit that description, I want to teach you the principles in my forthcoming book, The Indie Author's Guide to the Universe, and help turn your ship around.

The book has 229 pages of motivation, encouragement, marketing, pricing, platform building strategies, and advice from over 20 bestselling independent authors like Blake Crouch, Scott Nicholson, Robert Bidinotto, Bob Mayer, Joanna Penn, and more. The principles I use in this book have helped me and a few other authors rise to Amazon's top 100 and I think they can help you, too.

I'm accepting two motivated authors who have published a book on Amazon in the last three to six months, and have ten to twenty reviews with no less than a 4-star rating. I will choose the authors with the highest ratings.

Here's what I am offering:

1. A free book cover makeover if needed. 
2. A free copy of my book, The Indie Author's Guide to the Universe.
3. A free over the phone training session after the participant reads the book.
4. Coaching through my marketing and pricing strategy.
5. We will enroll your book into KDP Select (if not already a member) and schedule a two to three day promotion that will utilize all of my marketing strategies.
6. I will give you a free "Twitterlicious" promotion through The Kindle Book Review, and participating book sites like digitalbooktoday.com, worldliterarycafe.com and pixel of ink.
7. I will take you through the same steps I suggest to get your book as close as possible to Amazon's Top 100.

Here's what you must do in return:

1. Agree to the above terms.
2. Follow ALL of my instructions to the "T".
3. Blog about your experience, journaling every step you take on your path to becoming a bestseller.
4. Link to my book when writing your blog posts.
5. Invest in one paid promotion ($139 to Kindle Nation Daily).
6. Write about the success of this experiment on your blog.

If this sounds like something you'd like to try, simply comment below. Leave your name, book title and link to your Amazon page. I am that confident that if your book is excellent, we can overcome the other obstacles and make you a bestseller. May the best author win!!! 

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Jeff Bennington is the author of Reunion, Creepy & Twisted Vengeance