I’ve only just discovered the ‘view stats’ feature on Smashwords. (I’m not very tech savvy I’m afraid.) And I’m glad I have because it’s providing some useful info.
Now, I launched Oh Auntie for the princely sum of 99 cents on the world via Smashwords on 30 July. I Tweeted and blogged about it a lot and got a good initial response. Then on 14 August I joined Bookbuzzr and Oh Auntie’s cover and a hangman game I made up using words from the book was included in their Freado book games. And then, again belatedly, I found that I could use Bookbuzzr to issue a daily Tweet about Oh Auntie, so I signed up for this on 11th August. As you can see from the stats chart below, Oh Auntie is getting plenty of regular hits.
Now let’s look at Oh Gran, which I put up for free on Smashwords on 11th September. Again I Tweeted and blogged at lot the first couple of days. That gave rise to the initial surge. I’m still Tweeting about it, but not regularly.
Now here’s Beat the Hackers that I admit I have rather neglected.
Again, an initial surge of people viewing the book, but it’s dwindled away, quite a contrast to Oh Auntie and Oh Gran, and this book is very temptingly priced at 99 cents.
Now, I appreciate that there isn’t such a demand for children’s books on ereaders yet, and that my Oh series books don’t include illustrations. The printed copies did, but since I don’t have the copyright for the illustrations, I can’t use them. I’ve had new covers done but it would be a prohibitive task to get new pictures for inside the book. So that’s a disadvantage to them. I’m putting them up at a very low price, or free, mainly to establish an e presence.
However, it would appear that Tweeting gets people to at least look at your books and download a sample. I’ve still yet to sell a single copy via Smashwords. People are getting samples of all the books, and helping themselves to the freebies, but reluctant to shell out for the 99 cent stories. And also it seems that Bookbuzzr has been useful in getting people to my books too. So, for what it’s worth, perhaps that’s a fairly good course of action to follow.
Good follow up with marketing efforts, Steph. Way to use the stats and try and make sense of what’s working. Also note that many Smashwords users purchase books from Amazon and elsewhere, so just because a book may have no Smashwords sales–that doesn’t mean a sale hasn’t occurred due to a Smashwords listing.
I’m slowly starting to see how the various strands of marketing fit together. It’s taken time and effort, but I can see how it’s beginning to pay off. And that’s interesting about Smashwords leading to sales on other sites. I hope that’s happening for me!