Let's Talk Numbers: The Nice Dragons MEGA Fall promotion!

Hi folks, Travis here with another look at numbers!

After much talking about the benefits of The Kindle Big Deal vs BookBub, we finally lucked into a BookBub promotion for Nice Dragons Finish Last! Do you want to know what happened?

TL;DR - BookBub is awesome! (But you all knew that already.)

We also might have promoted it in a few other places as well. Ok, like 9 other places. Literally over a million emails were sent out and millions of web/social impressions were gathered. If you subscribe to a bargain book mailing list, you probably saw Nice Dragons up there at some point.

And how did all this promo work out? Splendidly!

Let's Talk Numbers: The Nice Dragons MEGA Fall promotion!

What did we do exactly?

1. Nice Dragons was on sale for $0.99 via a countdown deal from Sept 27th to Oct 3rd... plus or minus some hours here and there.
2. Sept 28th was the BIG DAY and we advertised the sale on the following places,
1. BookBub
2. FKBT.com
3. Booksends.com
4. Read Cheaply
5. ManyBooks.net
6. Genre Pulse
7. eBookSoda
8. BargainBooksy
9. Reading Deals
10. Choosy Bookworm
3. Total cost was about $500 total.

Once we'd locked in the BookBub promotion dates, I carpeted the town for marketers. Most indie book advertising services only accept books that are on sale and require at least 60 days of normal price prior to application, so I wanted as many as possible for this $0.99 'cause it'll be 2-3 months before we could do another one.

Why hit up so many sites at once? Well, as Derek mentioned in his guest post, A Salesman Is You, it often takes multiple interactions to get someone to buy. I figured that since many of these book sale email lists have overlap, that that overlap might work in our favor.

Anyway, I'll stop teasing you all and get to the fun stuff. Results!

How Did We Do?

I'm not gonna beat ya'll to death with graphs this time. Here's the raw numbers in a nutshell,

What you see here are average books per day for Nice Dragons before, during, and after the $0.99 countdown deal and all its promotions. As well as the same for average KENP read during that time.

On the right is my analysis of how many extra books we sold, which is the real measure of what we bought. All in all it was about 1600 books, almost entirely Nice Dragons, and a very happy number indeed. 

This is fantastic performance. BookBub listed the average performance for a $0.99 Teen and Young Adult sale at 730 copies sold. Again, we did more than just BookBub, but I'm still happy to have beaten that number. Lemme tell how sad I'd be if we hadn't. (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

KU sales weren't really affected, which was a little surprising. I was hoping the high sales rank we hit (#85!) would have also affected KU, but the blue line didn't even budge.

You can see a slight rise in overall Rachel Aaron KU borrows around the time of the promotion, but TBH, it doesn't show up when I apply my usual methods of baseline extraction and comparison. Statistically speaking, this bump could be entirely coincidence.

Even stranger was that my initial analysis showed no increase in sales of One Good Dragon. At first, I thought that this was because I was just analyzing things too soon. It takes time for people to open and read Nice Dragons, after all. A few days later, though, it hit me that I'd just done things wrong.

What about One Good Dragon?

Unfortunately, the numbers above aren't really fair. This is only month 3 for One Good Dragon, which means we're not in the long tail yet. Sales are still dropping very quickly on a month by month basis. To account for this, I used a smaller window for determining what the 'standard' day was like,

See how OGDDA 'before' has dropped to 18 per day?

So, we tentatively sold 95 copies of One Good Dragon so far as a result of the promotion. This is still pretty shaky stuff, though, so I don't put too much stock in this number.

Anyway, given how much time it'll take for people to read their 99c Nice Dragons and then possibly move on to One Good Dragon, I don't think I'll be able to find out more than this in terms of carry-through. Still, its good to see. 

(Update: I redid these numbers for Books Sold from 9/27 to 10/26 and OGDDA was up by about +100 copies. Looks like the follow through really will take months to play out)

Those are the results, but the real question is, "what did we learn from this?"

What We Learned

In total, our deal was emailed out to 1.7 million subscribers and racked up something like 5 million impressions. Of that number, 1.2 million of those came from BookBub, showing it is still the titan of book selling and the principle driver of all the numbers seen here today. Email lists sell books, and BookBub is king of that right now. But since that's kind of common knowledge already, I don't think we can count it as a lesson learned!

What I feel is important for you all to take away here is how big these numbers had to be. Over all, we sold ~1600 extra books over this #0.99 promotion. Don't get me wrong, 1600 is a lot, but the conversion rate is roughly 900:1 emails to sales and 3000:1 for impressions to sales (or 0.1% and 0.032% if you will). Given how well groomed and well targeted these emails were (and how well NDFL did according to the listed Bookbub average sellthrough for the YA list) I'd say that these are good conversion rates, which should tell you something about the numbers game we're playing.

This conversion rate is why I'm not impressed when marketers say things like, "We have 50,000 Facebook likes" or "Over 100,000 email subs!" Those are much bigger numbers than we've got, but in this sort of situation, those are small potatoes. As the numbers clearly show, it takes a lot of zeros to create a valuable, measurable effect in sales. BookBub is king because it has millions in its email lists and that's what it takes.

To put all of these services into a financial perspective, I refuse to pay more than $0.20 per 1000 impressions. Even that is kinda crappy and we're not doing it regularly. They have to be high quality impressions, too. Not something scattershot like, say, a newspaper ad or something. Anything less is simply not worth the money.

(Note: Emails have a higher conversion rate, so we'll pay more per 1000 emails.)

Now, of course, these are just our numbers and YMMV, but I hope our experiences help you make a good decisions the next time you're looking to purchase ad space or a promotion. Ebooks can sell well via traditional advertising like ads and emails, but it still takes BIG numbers to make these forms of advertising work. Don't get suckered into paying for a list that's too small!

Which promotion services are best for you?

Obviously, if you can get a BookBub, then great! You'll probably have a good time and sell a lot of books. What about these other people, though?

Long story short, they are effective, but they are 10x smaller than BookBub in most cases. However, they are also easier to get and they are less expensive ($10-20 vs $200-500). If you are just starting out, you have to fight for every single reader. Ten here, twenty there. That's how most careers get going.

Rachel achieves impressive numbers, but it took 8 years of relentless writing and promotion to get there. (Does anyone remember us standing in the DragonCon badge line handing out samples of The Spirit Thief?) She isn't entitled to continued great numbers, either. Each and every book she writes has to fight the battle for the hearts of its readers, both returning and new. There are a lot of authors out there who take their readers for granted, which makes me sad (and enrages Rachel). This is why we refuse to put out a book that we aren't proud of. Its not that authors deserve readers, its that readers deserve good books for their time and money. That is the service the author provides: quality reading entertainment. If we ever fail to achieve that for our readership, then we don't deserve to be in business.

In Conclusion: A++++ Would Buy Again

Would I do things this way again? Absolutely. We aren't picky and we don't take our sales for granted. It took me a full week of work to line up all these promotions, and it was totally worth it. I'm proud that I was able to help get Rachel more readers!

With our mega-NDFL promotion, we did things about as well as they can possibly be done I feel. We had an amazing book (500+ reviews! 4.6 stars!), with a deep discount (4.99 down to 0.99), and we had overlapping lists (repeated customer pings). So I feel that this is a really solid look at the potential provided by these kinds of book promotion services.

I hope that today our numbers have helped you out some as well. To BookBub or not to BookBub isn't really important (its always "YES BOOKBUB"). What's important is the perspective on these kinds of book promotion services so that you can figure out how best to use them to sell your books.

Good Luck!

-Travis