This is a general monthly update alongside an advertising update. I know it’s not the end of the month yet, but I’ve got enough data to do a quick post and give you a general idea of where I’m headed.
I used two ad services this month to coincide with the release of the third book in my Driftmetal series. Both ads were for the free book that’s first in the series.
I paid $8 for an ad on Book Barbarian, which is a newer niche service focusing on the science-fiction and fantasy genres. Then I paid another $20 for an ad on Ereader News Today. I staggered the ads so they appeared on July 2nd and 3rd, respectively – the day of the Book Three release, and the day after. Thus, I can’t speak to the efficacy of one service over the other, but they appeared to work well in tandem; I hit a spike of 999 downloads (yes, it was literally that close to 1,000) on July 3rd.
Let’s go back and talk about how I was doing at the end of last month.
For the month of June, Driftmetal was downloaded (free) 320 times. The second book in the series was purchased 19 times, for a read-through rate of just under 6%. I’ve seen a lot of authors advocate for the first-in-series free method, but I haven’t seen too many specifics on read-through rates. I feel like 6% is decent, but since I have nothing to compare it to, who knows…
For July, thanks to the two ads I ran, Driftmetal is on pace to end the month with about 2,900 downloads. These freebies have led to sales of 51 copies of Book Two and 45 copies of Book Three. Those Book Three sales numbers do not include pre-orders, of which there were around 20. By those numbers, I can assume that either the vast majority of people who buy Book Two move on to buy the third book, or that a ton of people who had read Book Two in the months previous came back to buy the third book sometime shortly after it came out.
Looking at only the sales of Book Two for the month, we can calculate a read-through rate of 1.75% – quite a fall from the previous month. What I gather from this is that while these ad services are helpful overall in terms of sales and rankings, they also result in a lot of this:
*shrug*
“Hey, it’s free. Might as well…”
*click*
To be honest, I’m okay with the fact that there are thousands of copies of my books sitting on peoples’ Kindles, destined to persist through the ages unread. Book hoarders are a thing. I’ll never complain about my work getting out there. If nothing else, each download is one more time someone’s seen my name and found my stuff interesting enough to collect, if not read. And overall, things are moving in the right direction. I keep seeing the truth in what everyone seems to be saying: write more books. With each new book, sales snowball. I finished Book Four in the Driftmetal series just three days after Book Three came out, and Book Five should wrap up the series by the end of the year. Then it’ll be a matter of which idea to pursue next. As always, thanks for reading!