Last Wednesday I ran a promotion for Branch Off. OK, technically speaking, it was not a promotion because the ebook is always priced 99c, but anyway.
For $35, I purchased a feature on bargainbooksy.com in the category Science Fiction. They give you a 1-day placement on their site, but more importantly your feature is sent to their email subscribers, which are 68,000 for scifi – or so they say, I have no way to verify or confute that number.
All in all, both the site and the email look good and well-curated – much more so than other competing services that I worked with in the past. But because this was the first time that I paid money to promote a non-free book, I didn’t know what to expect.
The total number of copies sold on Amazon Kindle is 18±2. That’s a conversion rate of 0.026%.
To be honest, I’m not sure what to make of this number. Is it horrible? Is it good? No idea. What I do know, however, is that the last time I ran a free weekend, 30 or so people downloaded the same ebook without any kind of advertising except a couple of tweets. I didn’t earn anything (we’re not in for the money, are we?), but I also didn’t spend a cent.