Will 99 cent ads followed by a free ad work for a sequel?

[Gregg Bell]

What I did with my first legal thriller was make it 99 cents for my newsletter and then run a bunch of 99 cent promos followed by a FreeBooksy promo. Sales really improved after the FreeBooksy promo. Now I have the sequel to that legal thriller, and I'm wondering if the same strategy will work or if there's a better way of approaching it? (I heard a while back that when publishing sequels it's best to make the first book, not the sequel, free and run a promo for the first book.) Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

[Bill Hiatt]

I usually promote the first book when introducing subsequent books in the series. Advertising geared to the second book or later may be lost on people who haven't read the first yet.

BTW, AMS ads can be used to promote multiple books if you are content not to write a tagline as part of the ad. That means you could have an ad showing your first three books, which I've had some luck with. I haven't had luck with sponsored brand ads, which allow to show three books and then point to your author page.

[alhawke]

You can always run multiple promos within a month apart, or so, as long as they go reduced in price. I've had success pricing $2.99 and then $0.99. Can't see why $0.99 to, later, free wouldn't work. You just don't want to go backwards and try sales at increased prices only a month apart.

[Gregg Bell]

I usually promote the first book when introducing subsequent books in the series. Advertising geared to the second book or later may be lost on people who haven't read the first yet.

BTW, AMS ads can be used to promote multiple books if you are content not to write a tagline as part of the ad. That means you could have an ad showing your first three books, which I've had some luck with. I haven't had luck with sponsored brand ads, which allow to show three books and then point to your author page.

Thanks Bill. I'll check out that promoting multiple books (with no tagline, which is fine with me). Still, I think I would have to advertise book two (I only have two). Otherwise I'd be waiting (or at least I'd think I'd be waiting) for them to read book one in order to buy book two.

[Gregg Bell]

You can always run multiple promos within a month apart, or so, as long as they go reduced in price. I've had success pricing $2.99 and then $0.99. Can't see why $0.99 to, later, free wouldn't work. You just don't want to go backwards and try sales at increased prices only a month apart.

Thanks A.L. Someone said, regarding ads, 'you just have to do what you have to do to get to the point where Amazon does the heavy lifting.' A friend had a lot of success just running only free promos. I'm leery of that because I like the idea of the 99 cent promos (before running free promos) to get some rank. I don't know. Kind of on the fence as to which way to go.

I wonder: does anybody run free promos exclusively and if so, what kind of results do they get?

[alhawke]

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.

[Gregg Bell]

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.

Thanks a lot, A.L. You've really got me thinking now. I never even considered doing promos for the first book at 99 cents. A lot of good logic in your thoughts. I'm still kind of balancing what you said, though, with the notion of ultimately getting more sales with a free promo. Like there are millions of readers out there. Run a promo for the first book at 99 cents. Eventually people will get around to buying the second book. Seems like that would be a very slow process.

And then there's comparing just free vs 99 cents. Yes, 99 cents gets you ranking. So a 99cent promo gets 30 sales. But run a free promo and you get no rank, but you do get a lot of downloads and then the next day you get the "tail" effect and sell however many books at full price. I see, maybe wrongly I admit, the free promo, again ultimately, giving the book a better push than the 99 cent promo.

[alhawke]

It totally depends, imo. One writer will get success by 99c where another will get it from free. Free can certainly get you volume and lead to co-sales (I've run 99c /$2.99 promos but I have yet to run a free promo through BookBub/ always wondered about its success). But 99c can just as easily lead to co-sales too. You might want to drop down the 2nd book as part of the sale too.

I'll give another example over the current power of series in Amazon. I sold a lot of boxed sets thanks to my promo this past week. I sold only ONE Alondra prequel. Just ONE. Alondra is the only prequel book outside of the series but, because it's not a part of my boxed set series, nobody bought it during the promotion. This is also why I gave away 6k books of this novel a couple years back and had, like, zero co-sales.  Some will go back and get excited realizing there's another whole novel, but that's where your wait-thing you mentioned occurs. It could be a month, maybe two, or never.

My point is, make sure you hook your two books into a series. Numbered series for Amazon (related series also will run invisible).

[Bill Hiatt]

Fixing the series system was one of the best things Amazon ever did.

[Gregg Bell]

It totally depends, imo. One writer will get success by 99c where another will get it from free. Free can certainly get you volume and lead to co-sales (I've run 99c /$2.99 promos but I have yet to run a free promo through BookBub/ always wondered about its success). But 99c can just as easily lead to co-sales too. You might want to drop down the 2nd book as part of the sale too.

I'll give another example over the current power of series in Amazon. I sold a lot of boxed sets thanks to my promo this past week. I sold only ONE Alondra prequel. Just ONE. Alondra is the only prequel book outside of the series but, because it's not a part of my boxed set series, nobody bought it during the promotion. This is also why I gave away 6k books of this novel a couple years back and had, like, zero co-sales.  Some will go back and get excited realizing there's another whole novel, but that's where your wait-thing you mentioned occurs. It could be a month, maybe two, or never.

My point is, make sure you hook your two books into a series. Numbered series for Amazon (related series also will run invisible).

Thanks a lot, A.L. I'm getting a little more comfortable with all this pricing stuff. And the hooking the two books into a series thing. That's just what I did in the attachment and then do the same for the ebook, right?

[alhawke]

Thanks a lot, A.L. I'm getting a little more comfortable with all this pricing stuff. And the hooking the two books into a series thing. That's just what I did in the attachment and then do the same for the ebook, right?

Yep. You have to link the ebook in series when ready, too.

[Gregg Bell]

Thanks a lot, A.L. I'm getting a little more comfortable with all this pricing stuff. And the hooking the two books into a series thing. That's just what I did in the attachment and then do the same for the ebook, right?

Yep. You have to link the ebook in series when ready, too.

Thanks