If you remember, I paid to advertise Beverly during a promotion back in May and promised to share the results. It turns out the results are not that exciting. In the previous freebie week, Beverly was downloaded 1,100 times. In the week I paid for advertising, she was downloaded 2,700 times. Over twice as many hits. Pretty good. But I was not impressed.
I thought the cheap options were okay. These sites advertised my book during the freebie period and contacted other sites to do the same. This is something I could have done myself if I had put the time into it. The expensive sites have a large amount of email subscribers whom they email at the start of the promotional period. This, I believe, is what doubled my numbers.
BooksGoSocial interviewed me (via Your Book Promoter) and the link was heavily retweeted. Looking at the accounts that did the retweeting, I noticed they all had something like 50k followers, 100k followers, etc. They were following around that many too. And I thought: if everyone retweeting the interview is putting it into a stream following about 100k accounts then it's still only reaching a flooded market - which was the problem I had when I wasn't paying for advertising. No one commented on the interview and I notice, with a quick check, there are not many comments on other BooksGoSocial interviews.
On a side note, when I'm followed by someone who has about 100k followers and is following the same, I don't follow back anymore because I don't feel the authenticity. It's different for a celebrity account following about 100 people while thousands or millions follow it. But if a non-celeb can amount that many followers, I wonder how they spend their time - is it spent building connections? If not, the numbers must be somehow contrived.
Having said all that, the fact that every few months, 1,000 people or so read Beverly or Orla's Code is fantastic. And I appreciate being able to reach people through Free Kindle. It got me thinking about that audience. Who are the people checking out the Free Kindle bookstore? What kind of books do they read? I guess they're avid readers across a broad cultural spectrum, with varying tastes - was my first thought. But then I realised that I just had to look at the top 100 free books to answer the question. Ahem, it's all porn. Sorry, erotica. Ok, there's paranormal porn there too. This is what you see when Beverly or Orla's Code makes it into the top 100: Columns of semi-naked men and buxom women, and in the middle, Beverly or Orla looking very dressed. There's a little bit of sex in Orla's Code and Beverly. More in Beverly, if you want to know.
I need to rethink how to reach my market. I'll report on progress...
