A book Promotion: What worked, What didn't and Who cashed in.

*This is a couple of days early, but since I had it ready, I decided to announce it today along with the winners*

The quick and dirty version of how the promotion was laid out was this.--> Four books pushed over two days to get their Amazon rankings hopefully high enough that they would catch fire and keep going. What we were hoping for was a snowball effect. If you want the long version of the contest, click here.

How the promo got set up.--> We put a call out for bloggers, asking them to put up a post for us that we would prep ahead of time. All the bloggers had to do was cut and paste. For doing that, the blogger with the most comments on their blog got a $20 Amazon gift card.
There were great prizes and overall it went pretty well.

Here are the numbers.

• 75 bloggers participated

• The top selling book sold 45 books, 22 on day one, 23 on day two- Best Ranking was 4800 overall

• The next best selling book sold 35 books, 20 on day one, 15 on day two- Best ranking was 5700 overall

• The next best selling book sold 26 books, 14 on day one 12 on day two- Best ranking was 7500 overall and this book also ended up #49 in their category of top 100

• The last book sold 23 books, 11 on day one, 12 on day two – Best ranking was 8500 overall

• Total book sales between the four books was 129.

What worked--- Offering Amazon Gift cards as a prize
                         
Getting other bloggers on board

Having multiple authors

How we had the participants enter

What didn’t work --We had almost a 20% drop out rate of bloggers, people who signed up to help and didn’t follow through. Apparently this is common and asking around, we actually had a very low drop out rate. It is usually closer to 50%.

Never use anything except blind carbon copy when conversing with all the bloggers (BCC) I mistakenly put the group into the “to” section and then people hit reply all and then the poop hit the fan. It was my mistake, but it pissed people off and I think it’s where I lost a few bloggers.

The sales were good, but not fantastic. When other groups have done this, they are hitting closer to 80 sales per day which gives them the snowball effect which we didn’t quite manage. This I think was in part to the two day spread.

Would I do this again/was it worth it? Yes and yes. Sales are sales and readers are readers, even if there was only 5 per book, that is still 5 readers we didn’t have before.

I would change how many days we did this, condensing it to a single day, lots more advertising of the contest well before the day it happens, I would start planning it more than a week and a half in advance and I would try to get at least 300 bloggers signed up. If I’m going to assume that half of them won’t follow through, you have to go big. We were lucky by all accounts to have fabulous bloggers who stuck to their word!! :D I would have the promo on the weekend, when sales already tend to be high and I would find a way to encourage people to go to the participating blogs. Lots to think about.

Now, on to the good stuff. The winners!!

The blog with the most comments belongs to Reena Jacobs!

The first $5 Amazon Gift Card goes to Lynn Hallbrooks and her comment on The Beauty Brat

The Second $5 Amazon Gift Card goes to Stina Lindenblatt and her comment on Heather McCorkle’s Blog

And the grand prize of $100 goes to Crystal Fulcher AND because she bought all 4 books she gets a bonus of $25.

Thank you everyone for participating, the event could not have happened without all the support from the bloggers, readers and tweeters!