In May I posted a blog about using websites that help authors sell books. Essentially, these are websites that offer bargain book deals to people who sign up to their mailing lists – with the authors paying for their books to appear on the list.

The process is simple, discount your book on Amazon (or alternative retailer of choice) and pay a fee for your book to appear on the bargain book website as a book deal of the day. The website then includes your book (often along with a host of others) in their daily email, with a link to where to buy your book at a reduced rate.

If you’ve not already seen it, I suggest checking out my May blog post as there’s some more details there. If you can’t be bothered to do that, plough on because all the results from that post, and some more, are covered here.

TL;DR

More results from running book promotions and comparing promotion cost to number of sales. Top three sites:

• 1st – Robin Reads (August) – 21 sales for $85
• 2nd – Book Barbarian (May) – 9 sales for $40
• 3rd – Bargain Booksy (August) – 21 sales for $100

New KDP 90 day period, new promotion

Despite the last promotion being a bit of a dumpster fire, I decided to give it another go. This time I went for three bargain book websites:

• Bargain Booksy (fantasy book of the day) – $100
• The Fussy Librarian – $29.20
• Robin Reads (featured paid) – $85

The book – The Archivist

I have to mention my book, you know how this works! It’s a dark fantasy about death and a face-stealing demigod called the Archivist who can take and collect people’s souls. Once in possession of a soul, the Archivist can project the face of the dead over their own, allowing them to speak with the living. A jolly sort of read, as you can tell.

At the time of the promotion, the book had the following ratings:

• Amazon US: 4.3 (22 ratings)
• Goodreads: 4.14 (36 ratings)

Sales attribution

The reality is that I don’t have sufficient date to accurately attribute book sales to a promotion website. Each website promoted the book on a different day, so the most reasonable method of attributing sales is for all sales on the day of the promotion to be recorded against the website that promoted the book on that day. However, this is not a perfect system as most websites promote via email mailing lists. Therefore, it’s possibly for a website to email someone on Day 1 of the promotion, only for the recipient to open and buy the book on Day 3 of the promotion, resulting in me erroneously attributing the sale to the website who promoted the book on Day 3.

Ultimately, it’s just tougher on those who promote at the start of the discounted period. If I do more of these experiments, and gather more data, then I may consider promotion day as a factor and see how changing that effects sales.

For this promotion, I am recording all sales on the day of the promotion to the website that promoted the book on that day.

Results from this promotion

• 25 August – Fussy Librarian – 4 copies
• 26 August – Bargain Booksy – 21 copies
• 27 August – Robin Reads – 21 copies
• 28 August – no promotion – 5 copies
• 29 August – no promotion – 1 copy

Results from May and August promotions

Time to combine the results from this promotion and the last promotion and see how everything stacks up! I will present the results in two lists, firstly descending by books sold (for those who don’t care about the price and just want to see units shifted) and descending ranked against my value metric, which is:

(0.69 * sales on the day)/promotion cost.

The value of 0.69 represents the $0.69 I make for every sale when the price of the book is set to $0.99 and I take 70% of the cost. A value metric score of 1 means I broke even, more than one means I made profit on the promotion and less than one means I lost money on the promotion (though learnt a valuable lesson).

Ranked by sales

	Name	Copies sold	Promotion cost	Value metric
1	Bargain Booksy – August	21	$100	0.145
2	Robin Reads – August	21	$85	0.170
3	Book Barbarian – May	9	$40	0.155
4	Bargain Booksy – May	6 +/- 6	$45	0.015 to 0.184
5	Book Sends – May	6 +/- 6	$85	0.008 to 0.097
6	Fussy Librarian – August	5	$29.20	0.118
7	Fussy Librarian – May	3	$29.20	0.071

Ranked by value metric

	Name	Copies sold	Promotion cost	Value metric
1	Robin Reads – August	21	$85	0.170
2	Book Barbarian – May	9	$40	0.155
3	Bargain Booksy – August	21	$100	0.145
4	Fussy Librarian – August	5	$29.20	0.118
5	Bargain Booksy – May	6 +/- 6	$45	0.015 to 0.184
6	Fussy Librarian – May	3	$29.20	0.071
7	Book Sends – May	6 +/- 6	$85	0.008 to 0.097

Oh look, a graph!

Final thoughts

As you may be able to tell, I do think these websites are a bit of a con. The problem seems to be, there’s very little in the world of self publishing that isn’t a con. When you have people desperate to spend their money in the hope of selling a book for the masses to love, it’s all too easy to make false promises and exploit them.

Now, I’m not saying I like being exploited, but I think there’s little choice if you want to sell books. The game is not so much about not being exploited, but limiting the exploitation while also shifting a few copies.

There are also other factors at play here and variables I would like to alter. What if the discount price is $1.99 instead of $0.99? Sure, I may sell fewer copies, but the money I make for each sale ($1.39 instead of $0.69) may increase my value metric? Also, what if I raise the retail price of the book from $4.99 to $9.99 before dropping the price to $1.99? Will the apparent greater discount encourage more people to buy the book because they think they’re getting a deal? All things to try.

What I’d also like to say about my August promotion was that it was more successful than my May attempt. In May, I spent a total of $199.20 over four websites and sold 28 copies (value metric of 0.097) and in August, I spent a total of $225 over three websites and sold 52 copies (value metric of 0.159). Sure, I’m still a long way off achieving a value metric of one, but my hope is that as I keep running these promotions, I can hone in on the websites that actually deliver – and then share the results with all of you!