But does anyone still do this Smashwords promo? How does it work for you?

I discounted all my Smashwords books. I saw zero sales this week on the platform. Best I've gotten was three permafree "sales" a couple weeks ago on Smashwords. For me, Smashwords is not doing great. And that's after I had a very large promo and sold many books on other platforms last month. Neither is Apple, for that matter.

But all my sales have been down this week during their sale. It's funny, I dislike across the sales like this, or those "grab your free kindle" sale blitzes, because they hurt my regular sales more than benefit me.

That's lots of yapping ^^ to basically say, yeah I participated, but I haven't seen much come of it this year. In prior years I sold 10-20 books with discounts. How much did you discount your books? I just set all books at 25% off. I also haven't bothered to advertise it much. Perhaps I didn't discount a low enough %?

The current scam is people contacting you to do 'trailers'.

The claim they help sales, but can't actually demonstrate it.

I looked at one. It was obviously a 2 minute AI job, and I could have done better myself.

The other people I'm getting at the moment are people asking if I need someone to market my book (singular) and making claims they can't then back up.

Most of them are on fiver, and a lot of them are in Nigeria.

I tell them if they can prove they can get a 500k ranked book in the US store to 1k in 2 days, then I'll look at it, otherwise they're just wasting my time.

Most of them have no idea about Amazon rank at all.

Okay. Giving it a shot myself. Here ya go.

I'm actually happy to see one of these scammer companies finally taken down. But in my inbox this week, I got an email from a guy named Adam Houge from FanBaseFormula with the email subject saying "Movie screenplay adaptation opportunity for your story". So, the trigger words to appeal to people's egos and manipulate them is just all through the email. If people really didn't know what to expect, it could work. But then, I'm guessing, that's why they come to this board. To learn about what does work in self-publishing.

Or of course, they can read a book on self-publishing. It can be overwhelming for some. There's always the saying, "Do your research before investing." But then, I can't say I didn't run into areas where I got taken for a few things learning the ropes of self-publishing. I think the most was $250 for someone to write a PR release for my book. Never got it in the end, the person disappeared, and I ended up just researching and writing it myself. But hopefully, people are able to realize it's a scam before they go to far in and give too much money.

You will get the best results by running the first book discounted. But you'll still see sales of the other book if you run the second one at a reduced price. That's been my experience. So 

I never run an advertisement on my blurb for fear that Amazon will consider this a violation. Way back when, I read that there are concerns with Amazon TOS regarding this. But I'm unsure.

Okay here's my latest thoughts. A string of 99 cent promos on the second book and have the first book priced at 99 cents too. Then after a month, run a Freebooksy/Fussy Written Word Media free thing on the first book. Then the next day, up the first book to $2.99 and make the second book $4.99.

I've been reading more and more of what you were saying about advertising the first book in a series. I know that's pretty conventional thinking, but I was hesitant to do that because it just worked well with my first book (making it free after the run of 99 cent promos) that it was hard to shift gears on the Book 2. But I figure, if I want, later, I could run a free day/promo on Book 2 as well.

And I'll run some sponsored product ads for Book 2. And maybe some keyword ads for Book 2 too, but sponsored product ads work better for me (despite having no idea how they work!).