Is Your Royalty Income Going Down?

It’s Labor Day weekend here in Canada and the kids and I are back to school tomorrow.  I love the fall.  It always prompts me to re-assess things, see what’s working, what’s not working, and do some planning for the following year.  This weekend, I’ve been re-assessing my book promotions.

If you’ve been following my blog posts, you know that I sometimes question my marketing techniques for my books.  Should I do free promos?  Should I do Kindle countdown deals?  Should I just discount to $0.99?  If I do free promos, how long should they be?

Without a doubt, the KDP free promos are not nearly as effective as they used to be when I got into publishing on Amazon.  You used to be able to publish a book and put it on free promo for a couple of days and it would get downloaded a bazillion times (around #500 free) and then re-enter the Amazon paid ranking system at somewhere under #20,000 depending on the number of downloads you had.  Earlier this year, I was noticing that only about 1 in 5 or 10 promos did that well and the others barely got down to under #2,000 in the free store.

During the summer, I’ve been busy working on my Ontario real estate directory, so I’ve been neglecting my kindle books.  In fact, I haven’t done a free promo in months.  I wasn’t sure they were effective anymore.  However, what I did notice is that my Amazon and CreateSpace income had dropped significantly.  I’ve actually seen a 50% drop in income on kindle and paperback books since May.  So…..I think it’s worth doing free promos again.

I printed a schedule of the rest of the year and the first half of 2017 and set up a system where each book (both perma-free and paid) gets promoted for 2 days every 6 weeks.  I set up the promos in the KDP dashboard and then I set them up using KDROI, where I can get my books submitted to multiple sites in just 5 minutes.

Then, I added “set up book promos” to my schedule of things to do each Monday morning so that I can set up the promos for the following Monday through Saturday.

I plan to continue with this strategy and see if my income increases between now and the end of the year.  If I start to see a difference, I may look at other promotion sites, such as Ask David and social media.

I’ll keep you posted…