There has been a lot of talk lately about how Amazon has removed the benifits of free promotions by weighting free downloads less than paid downloads. Some people say this makes free promotions useless, others say that they still work if you get enough downloads. I figured the only way to find out was to try it for myself.

So a few days ago, on the 14th of March, I scheduled a free promotion for Reckless Rescue. I didn’t do it right really. I scheduled it with only two days notice (I made a last minute decision to do it for my birthday), not enough time to get onto any of the big free promotion sites. Given that Amazon has recently changed it’s affiliate policy to only allow a certain number of free affiliate downloads, they’re all reconsidering the numbers they will promote anyway. And seeing as I only have two reviews on Amazon, I didn’t have a great chance of getting on anyway.

How I promoted

This meant the only promotion I did was to mention it on Facebook and Twitter, post on a few groups on Goodreads, and post a few times on various forums. Of these, I had very few clicks on my Facebook/Twitter links. I had a few more hits on the Facebook links friends shared for me. I also had a retweet from @FreeEbooksDaily, but I have no way of knowing how many clicks that gave me. I had 240 views on my post on the MobileRead forums, but only 22 views on Kindleboards.

How it went

Despite the lack of promoting, the free downloads started adding up almost immediately. In fact, by the time I saw that the promotion went live, I already had a download. (Promotions don’t seem to start on the dot of midnight, and can take quite a while to go live.) I had hopes of getting 50 downloads over the 24 hours. Within 4 and a half hours, I’d hit that goal. And the numbers kept climbing at a steady rate.

I was really interested to see that the sales increased steadily. Very little that I did seemed to increase them in any dramatic way. Even the time of day didn’t seem to have a very big effect. I’m not sure if people were finding my book on the automatically updated free sites, or what, but I had expected the downloads to be more random.

Despite the fact that I wasn’t earning any money, watching the downloads mount was so much fun. The thought that my book was making it into readers hands at such a great rate really was exciting.

Even more exciting was watching my rank on the free lists climb. I hit #1,071 on the free list, and even more exciting, #3 in the Sci-Fi Space Opera category 16 hours into the promotion. By the time it finished, I was #778 free, #1 in space opera, and #73 in Sci-Fi and Fantasy. That was a huge jump!

In the last hour, I watched as the numbers neared 400. I was one short! The promotion ended with 399 downloads! I was stoked.

What effect did it have?

What I was really waiting for though, was to see what happened to my Amazon rank. Would it go up?

Right before the promotion started, I had a single download that pushed me from the 300,000′s, to 79,789. When the rank finally came back on after the promotion, I was disappointed to discover that I’d actually fallen to 218,000.

So if there is a tipping point for free downloads pushing you up the paid ranks, it’s higher than 399 downloads.

Would I do it again?

Probably. Going up on the Amazon ranks is only one benifit to the free promotion. I’m already seeing more hits on my webpage, particularly on the extras I’ve put up from Reckless Rescue, which means that people are reading the book and coming to check out the rest of my page. Hopefully this will translate into a few sales once the second book comes out. (One thing I really should have done was set up a mailing list, still working on that due to the cost of PO boxes here in Australia.)

The number of people who’ve added my book to their to-read shelf on Goodreads doubled the day after the promotion. And I’m hoping that over the next few weeks, I’ll see a few more reviews. Best of all though, I’ve had two downloads since, when they’d been almost non-existant (except for friends and family) up until now. Were they due to the promotion? I don’t know, but I like to think so.

What would I do differently next time?

The next time I do a free promotion, I’ll be running it for longer. I only made it into the top of the free lists right near the end of the promotion, so I’m not sure if I would have seen downloads increase a lot more as I made it up the lists.

I’d also plan it further ahead, and try harder to get onto some of the big lists.

 Have you run a free promotion on Amazon recently? How’d it go for you? Any tips to share?

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