I ran my second free promotion on my novel, Reckless Rescue, last week on Amazon. Compared to my last free promotion (in March), it was a resounding success! As you can see from the graph on the left, my first day’s downloads topped out at around 400 the first time around, this time they’d hit around 1200!

And they didn’t stop there. In four days, my book was downloaded over 7000 times, and made it to the #1 place in two of my categories. Overall, I climbed to #31 in the Amazon Top 100 Free list.

Most of the books above me were running paid promotions, but I didn’t pay a cent, nor did I get mentioned (that I’m aware of) by any of the big free promo sites (like Pixel of Ink) so I’m pretty pleased with my success.

So what did I do differently this time, to make my promotion so successful?

Write a good book

This goes without saying. Writing a good book is essential to a successful free promotion, and many of the following suggestions aren’t going to work unless your book holds up to the bargain once it’s downloaded. I’ve also had my book professionally edited, which I think is well worthwhile. (Thought it hasn’t paid for itself yet!)

Get as many reviews as possible

When I ran my first promotion, I had one, maybe two reviews. This time I had five, and when you have five reviews, Amazon starts putting up quotes from reviewers next to your ratings graph. So I’d say five was the minimum number to really boost your free sales.

Make friends

This time I had far more friends on Twitter, and many people retweeted the links to my free books. I’m sure this contributed to more people hearing about my promotion, and thus more sales.

Be aware though, that followers aren’t the same thing as friends. Friends are people you interact with, who’s links YOU tweet, and who you really get to know. Building a huge following just isn’t the same thing.

In my case, I used twitter extensively, but I’m sure Facebook, Google+, or any other social networking site would work the same, so long as you had genuine friends, not just followers.

Plan ahead

Unlike my last promotion, where I made the decision with only a couple of days notice, this one I had nearly two weeks. I submitted my link to as many sites as I could find, and collected a list of places (links to Goodreads threads, forums, facebook pages/groups, blogs and accounts that retweeted free book links) to post in on the day. If I had had a full 2 weeks notice, there are more sites I could have submitted it to, so the more planning time, the better.

I also send messages to people who ran Facebook pages about free ebooks, letting them know my book would be free, and asking if they would mention it. Many of them agreed, and asked me to remind them on the day, so I added them to my list so I didn’t forget!

Get the word out

This is one of the advantages to being in Australia! My book promotion goes live between 5 and 6 in the afternoon/evening, so I’m ready to go with all my links, and start posting as soon as I see the price change. DON’T schedule in advance, as you can’t know the exact moment the promotion will go live, and there’s nothing worse than having a tweet go out, and the book not be free yet!

Once you know your book is free though, schedule some tweets! Especially important for me, as I’m asleep for some of the biggest download times. I avoided doing this last time, as I was new to twitter, and didn’t want to bug anyone. This time I still kept them spaced apart (no more than one ever 3-4 hours), and made sure they were varied. Many were retweeted.

Don’t stop!

My first day was great, and the temptation is to leave it run it’s course after that. But instead, I kept looking for new places to mention my book, mentioned it again on pages where the updates were moving quickly, or there were new free posts each day (like Literary Cafe), and kept tweeting.

Run the promotion for longer than a single day.

As you can see from this graph, though my downloads were steady, they didn’t really take off until day 3 of my promotion, where I had over a thousand downloads in about 4 hours!

I have no idea if this was because of the day (it was Friday), because it was mentioned somewhere I missed, or simply because it had gained momentum, but if I’d run the promotion for one or two days, I would have missed it!

I had set my promo for three days, but when it did so well on day 3, and I made it into the Top 100, I wanted to see if this would keep momentum up by itself. The results are clear in the graph. I kept getting downloads, but nowhere near as many as that third day. Again, this could be due to Saturday over Friday, or it could be due to my stopping actively promoting. (I ended up with a cold, so was too miserable to do anything other than check stats that day, making it a really good experiment.)

Pick your days

This is easier said than done. My last promo was on a Thursday, so I ran this one from Wednesday to Friday (then added Saturday). Logic tells me that some days are going to be better for downloads than others, and from my experience I’d pick a Friday, but one experiment isn’t enough to say for sure at this stage. I’ve also heard that mid month is better.

Don’t run your promo’s too close together

I ran mine about 2 months apart. Running one promo on top of the other will lead to people ignoring your promo because they’ve seen it before. It also won’t help with follow up sales, as people will figure it will be free again soon, so they’ll get it then.

What do you think? Do you have any great tips for running a successful promo? Do you agree/disagree with any of my points?

I’ll be writing another post on how well I did on sales AFTER the promo was over too, but I want a bit longer to collect data for this one. Check for it next week some time.