The full Moon promo officially ended Sunday night at midnight, and the results are in. Overall, it was a stunning success. I gave away more books than I could have hoped, and Tendrils to the Moon peaked briefly at number 3 on Amazon's bestselling hard science fiction chart.
In my post on Friday, I noted that Amazon normally takes 2-3 business days to respond to a request to price match a book. For me, they did it in about 12 hours.
The "selling" started slowly, but picked up steam Friday afternoon. The pace dropped on Saturday but was steady throughout the day, ending just shy of Friday's sales mark. Sunday showed a steep dropoff in free "purchases." The book remained free through Monday morning, when I contacted Amazon and asked them to restore the normal Kindle book price of $0.99.
During the weekend, I tweeted the book page link three times and posted to Facebook once. I don't know how effective the Facebook post was, but my tweets got few clicks. I believe most of the "sales" came from people perusing Amazon's library of free books.
As I expected, including Amazon in the promo vastly increased the giveaway's effectiveness. I won't give raw numbers, but I distributed 28 times more books than the Apollo 11 anniversary promo, which ran on Smashwords only.
If I run a promo over a weekend again, I'll end it Saturday night, owing to the diminishing returns Tendrils experienced on Sunday. My guess is that most people load up on free books at the start of the weekend, and they're done looking by Sunday. Also, if my weekends reflect the average person's, most people have less discretionary time on Sundays than they have on Saturdays, what with church and getting ready for the workweek.
I'm going to target the full Moon on Wednesday, October 24, to run my next promo, to see how effectively I can give away books in the middle of the week. Until then, Tendrils to the Moon will be $.99.
Let me know what you think in the comment section below! I'll reply to you as soon as I can.
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