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« Last post by alhawke on Today at 12:21:19 PM »
Amazon doesn't really do any heavy lifting anymore. This is why you want to only use free promos to sell the next books in series. Otherwise, you're throwing your book to the wind and the free book ranking is going to do nothing but pad your ego (which is sometimes very nice too).
I'm still banging my head against the wall and regretting my biggest free promo. I gave away 6k books. Great. But what of it? Because the prequel wasn't listed in succession on Amazon's series page, so I got barely any co-sales.
Use free (or $0.99 which is also free, really) only to move other books (the exception is newbie writers who are just trying to grab any visibility at all starting out).
Latest example. I just ran a BookBub last week on Tuesday for a boxed set at $2.99 (reg price $9.99). I have a permafree book that's a prequel short story for the series. So, I also promoted the premafree at the end of the week. I didn't really care how many of the free books were given away, from a marketing pov. What happened? The boxed set sales doubled on the day of my greatest push for the free book. In other words, the free book moved more boxed set sales and helped carry more momentum. So it's all about moving the sales in tandem when you have a series. Otherwise, don't bother doing any promotion.
Audiobook-wise, if I get a Chirp deal, I advertise more than the Chirp deal in my sale at the same time. If other audiobooks are under $4.99 on Chirp, Chirp will often bundle multiple audios for a three-in one or two-in-one, whatever, for your series. It's the same principle and it can lead to more sales than the Chirp featured audio itself. You can only do these multiple promos if you have a lot of books but it helps move sales.
After all that yapping, ^^, in your particular case, I'd probably go with $0.99 with the initial book set at the time of your new book launch. Make certain before the promo starts that Amazon has the books linked in series. You also could drop down the 2nd book and launch it at something like $2.99 instead of $4.99 or whatever your usual price is. BTW, by doing $0.99 like this, you have the option of then running yet another promo the next month and giving the 1st book away free. Just don't go backwards and up your pricing in any close sale.