So the six day promotion has come and gone and the results are in. As posted earlier, this was all a bit of an experiment to try out Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and also Facebook’s ads.
The method was to give away “Being Hamish” for free for 5 days as part of the KDP program. Besides this blog and twitter, I decided to run a small facebook advertisement to celebrate the fact. The aim was to drive people to give the book a go and to hopefully enjoy it.
Here is the result of the campaign:
As you can see, a tick under 50k impressions resulting in 56 clicks. In total, I had 59 people take advantage of the promo to grab the book. It is worth sharing that this facebook advertising cost me about $19 for the run of the campaign. It isn’t nothing, but it was certainly low enough cost not to worry about the result at all.
Is 59 downloads a success? Well it is all relative. I had hoped for more, but I’m ultimately satisfied with the result and the lessons learnt. More importantly will any of those people read and enjoy the book? I most certainly hope so but it is impossible to tell. How does it compare to other ebooks on the market? Well of note this broke Being Hamish into the top 100 for “Coming of Age” novels. In fact it peaked around position 57 on the charts, which isn’t too bad at all.
Look out..umm Charles Dickens. I’m coming for you.
Would I do it again? I doubt it at this stage. Whilst the method used above has been proven as somewhat viable, I don’t believe it is necessarily worth it. A better test would be to see how many people would have “paid” after being presented with the advertisement and I suspect not a lot. Additionally the way the ads work is you compete for positioning based on how much you will “pay” when somebody finally clicks it. You can control this process well, but it does mean you could be spending a large sum on something that just isn’t going to earn a return.
Still, it was a fun exercise and I enjoyed seeing the clicks come in and spreading the good word a little. It was all relatively painless and quick to set up via paypal (with easy to set spending limits etc) so if you ever wondered if you should try it as well? I’d say give it a go.
The Toddhunter Report 