For the past few months I have been following a lot of authors on KBoards that have been stacking their book promotions across a few days and in some cases over a week.
The theory is that Amazon will see your steady sales across a longer time period and adjust their algorithm and place your book higher in their store. Since you are having more frequent sales over the course of a few days you may experience a longer higher ranking for when your book comes off the promo price.
Some authors are in Amazon’s Kindle Select program and use Kindle Countdown deals and some use their 5 days they get every 90 days to promo their book for free, I have seen it work both ways very well. Especially if you have a series of books.
Stacking Book Promotions For A Series
Let’s just say you have a 3 book series. You can make the first version free while the others are at their regular price. You can get new readers to the free book and odds are they will buy the other two, once they are done reading the first book. I have also seen where they place the 3rd book free and hope the reader wants to go back and see how the story started. Some people will mix it up and the next month they make the 2nd book free.
After a month or so authors started to get smarter and book a 3-5 promo sites for each day. This would guarantee if a site decided to not run the book or they had a glitch they would still have a promo running that day. There is also authors that have seen Amazon’s sales rankings change every hour. Using a few sites that place the book live at different times of the day and send out their newsletters at different times eliminates a sales spike and makes a much steadier flow.
Using BookBub and Stacking Book Promotions
Some authors either start their promo with BookBub or finish it with BookBub. They are the largest promotion site around and although they are expensive they get results. Let’s just say your books ranking is 100,000 or so. If you stack a few promos a few days leading up to your BookBub ad you may be starting the day at 10,000. Then BookBub kicks in and gives you a big boost and when your promo is over you will be around 1000 in the Amazon store. This is just an example. I have seen this done where the author has got their book into the top 10. Most of the time they are not starting at 100,000 though.
This site was born because after authors submitted a featured listing to Awesomegang.com they would email me and ask if I could also place a book listing on Pretty-Hot.com for the next day and BookReaderMagazine.com the day after that and then DiscountBookMan.com the day after that one. Needless to say it was taking a lot of time to do this. I wanted to make it easier.
Save Time With Social Media By Stacking
Another benefit of stacking book promotions with us is that our sites post your book to our social media accounts. We have them go at random times of the day so it isn’t all at once. Amazon likes to see a steady flow of traffic as opposed to all at once. This has been debated like crazy over on KBoards and other writing forums over the years and most authors agree with this.
Without going into too much detail let’s just take one of our sites. Awesomegang.com. The book is usually published on the site around 3-4 am (all times mentioned on this page are EST). Reason for this time is that is when Amazon changes the prices on the books. If you notice most of the promo sites publish their book post at this time.
The first social media post goes out to Twitter around 7-10 am.
The email newsletter goes out to our email list at 11-11:59am. We have done so much A/B testing on this that we have chosen this time carefully. When the newsletters were sent earlier in the day sometimes Amazon didn’t change the price on free books yet. If you get a newsletter from a book promotion site that is early in the morning they haven’t done quality testing on their newsletter for maximum benefit of the authors.
Most of the free sites send their newsletters at 3am. Just something we noticed. If Amazon has a glitch changing prices the promotion becomes a failure before it got started.
Our Facebook post usually goes out around 12:30- 3 pm. We have years of analytics showing that this is the time most users are on our Facebook page. West coast is checking in and the East coast is done with their work and checking out social media to kill time before the work day is done.
Instagram follows that around 4-6 pm. Instagram doesn’t really have a best time yet so we are filling the gap of stacking using these times.
Pinterest is our night time place to post our book promos. Pinterest will tell you that a good percentage of users are on at night browsing for things after checking out from the daily grind. We post from 7-11pm. Our free book section there is very popular at these times.
The added benefit of book stacking is you get to save more time for writing and less time posting to social media. We have authors that use our services over and over just so they get social media exposure and don’t have to spend time wasting going to each site and posting.
Add More Book Promotion Sites
There are plenty of places to submit your free book or discounted book to. I always say to submit to 3 a day especially if you are doing a free run or an exclusive discount like a Kindle countdown deal. Sometimes a site will have a glitch and you don’t want all your eggs in one basket. If you are doing a free run or discounted book for a time you want to make sure you get the most while you are in your promotional period.
There are many free book promo sites but if you want results you should do the paid option. We offer free promos on some of our sites for authors that have no budget but the paid versions always get more eyeballs.
Our friend Dave Chesson over on Kindlepreneur has a great list. Here is their list of Top Free Book Promotion Sites. This list is always up to date with the best book promo sites out there. Readers are looking for book deals and they are on more than one newsletter list. They say it takes 7 touch points on the internet before the user buys something. It is always better to be seen in more places. Walt Disney used 257 touch points when they released the movie Frozen 2. Unless you live under a rock you saw a promo for it.
We try to make it easy on the author and have only one form. With our site we allow you to choose to run your promo all on the same day or our 5 sites and have the promo start on different days.