Just a quick one: as I mentioned in my post on marketing a while ago, for the release of Causal Nexus I decided to come up with an actual, honest-to-God Launch Plan™. Namely:
- Delist Ascension Point and Venus Rising from the non-Amazon stores.
- Enroll both in KDP Select.
- Finish Causal Nexus, upload it to Amazon at a discounted launch price of $2.99 and enroll it in KDP Select.
- On launch day, make Ascension Point free for 5 days, run a concurrent 99¢ Countdown deal on Venus Rising, and advertise both on Ereader News Today.
- See how it goes!
- At some point, revert all three to the usual price of $4.99.
- …
- Profit?
Excitingly, we’re currently in the midst of step 5, ‘seeing how it goes’, and the signs are very promising! So far I’ve had about 650 downloads of Ascension Point via my Ereader News Today promo, and that’s been good enough to launch the book to the upper reaches of the Alien Invasion and Space Opera charts on the Kindle Store:
I expect the downloads to begin to tail off later today, at which point Ascension Point will start its slow descent back down the rankings. It’s the pace of that descent that’ll be interesting: the more successful the promo, the ‘stickier’ in the charts the book will be, hence more eyeballs, more sales, more follow-through to Venus Rising and Causal Nexus. I’ve been delighted with how the promo is going so far, so fingers crossed for an extended chart-topping stay!
In other promo news, I’ve also recently started experimenting with advertising, both through Amazon’s own AMS platform and through BookBub ads. More to follow on those once I’ve let them bed in for a few weeks, and had time to draw some conclusions.
Onward and upward–to book four! Cheers.
DAN HARRIS: 10% SCI, 90% FI 