Guest post: Graham Storrs, author of Timesplash

Today’s guest is Aussie writer Graham Storrs, who discusses the fickle nature of Amazon giveaways. I’m certainly finding this myself, with The Far Horizon free today (link in right colum). Is there rhyme or reason? Other than dumb luck, I don’r think so.

A Tale of Three Books

Background

Patty’s regular readers may remember I turned up here a couple of years ago talking about a book I’d just had published called TimeSplash. It’s a near-future, time travel thriller set in Europe and featuring a pretty screwed up young woman who, for quite ignoble reasons, decides she needs to save the world from the time travelling terrorist she used to sleep with. The book was picked up by NY small press, Lyrical Press, and was released as an ebook on 15th February 2010 – two years ago to the day.

From the start, sales were lacklustre. No-one noticed the book at all. The publisher managed to get it a single review on an obscure blog and it had no other publicity apart from what I could give it myself. In fact, my own efforts at publicity (although not great) were so much better than those of the publisher that I eventually asked them for my rights back and they very kindly agreed. Some moths later, I had re-edited it, given it a new cover, and self-published it through Amazon and Smashwords – still only in ebook formats. About the same time, a Canadian publisher called Iambik Audiobooks brought out an audiobook version, read by my friend, the author, Emma Newman.

Takeoff

The new ebook edition did a lot better than it had done in its original incarnation but it was still not doing well. Then, in January this year, 2012, TimeSplash spent three weeks at the #1 spot in Amazon’s “Paid in Kindle” Technothriller Best Sellers list, stayed in the top 5 in the Science Fiction list and stayed in the top 200 overall throughout that period. It wasn’t a massive success but, for a two-year-old book that had not been selling, to suddenly make more sales in three weeks than it had done in the previous two years, it was certainly a big surprise.

KDP Select

And the reason was that I enrolled the book in Amazon’s KDP Select programme. This scheme gives Amazon worldwide exclusive rights to sell your ebook for 90 days at a time – you can’t distribute it anywhere else at any price. In return, the book goes into their Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, so subscribers can borrow it for free, and the author is allowed to give the book away for free through Amazon for up to 5 days.

On the face of it, the exclusivity clause seems excessively restrictive – and many authors, publishers and distributors have complained loudly about it. But from my perspective it was a no-brainer. eBook sales through the Kindle Store have always vastly outpaced sales through all other outlets combined. Losing those other outlets was not a big financial risk. And the promise of what those five days of promotion might yield made it an easy decision.

I set up a two-day giveaway for TimeSplash at the beginning of January. By the end of the first day I had given away 8,500 copies and was number 1 in all the relevant categories. By the second day I had given away 19,500 copies and was #13 in the Kindle Store overall. I was stunned and amazed – and not a little creeped out – by the way the reading public had pounced on my book the minute it was free.

It was nice to be number 1 and it was nice to have such a high overall rank, but that was only in the “Free on Kindle” part of the store. As soon as the giveaway was over, those ranks would evaporate because it would be back in the “Paid on Kindle” section again.

After the Giveaway

The amazing thing was that, although the book went back to its old rank, it very quickly climbed again. Even though it was no longer on offer, people were still picking it up – and this time they were paying for it. It was quickly back at the top in techno-thrillers, and close to the top in science fiction. And it stayed there for three weeks before finally slipping back down into the noise again, where most Amazon shoppers will never see it. However, by early February it had not yet gone back to where it started and continued to make a steady stream of sales at a lower but most gratifying level. Without a doubt, the KDP Select scheme boosted sales for TimeSplash beyond my wildest expectations and gave it a new lease of life. I would recommend that everybody who doesn’t mind that horrible exclusivity clause should give it a go. Do not, however, get your hopes up too high.

The Science of Book Marketing

Being an inveterate experimentalist, I didn’t just throw TimeSplash out there. I put two other books into the KDP Select programme at the same time. One was my short story collection, Placid Point, and the other was a rather fat collection of crime stories (it contains two novellas as well as lots of shorts) which I publish under a pseudonym. I set up the same two-day giveaway for each of these books. And, guess what? They both flopped.

The giveaway period saw a few hundred books downloaded for each and, afterwards, sales were not much higher than before.

How do I explain that? I can’t. Perhaps people don’t like short stories as much as novels. Perhaps its just the hoard of people who vacuum up free ebooks from Amazon who don’t like short story collections. Honestly, I have no idea. The fact is that two out of three books in this experiment did nothing and the other was a best-seller (albeit briefly). On the basis of the overall result, I’d have to say that KDP Select doesn’t lead to success more often than it does.

And then there was my attempt to replicate the experiment. At the beginning of February, a month after the first giveaway, I ran another giveaway. Same three books, two days for each.

This time it was a flop for all three books. Each of them had fewer downloads during the second giveaway period than in the first, in fact, considerably fewer. TimeSplash went from 19,000 given away the first time, to fewer than 1,000 the second. What is worse, the second giveaway had the effect of reducing sales below the plateau reached after the first giveaway. In each case, sales fell to about half of the pre-giveaway level.

Why did this happen? I can only think that it’s because the first giveaway saturated the grab-a-free-book market and then the benefits of having raised the book’s profile were eroded by having two days of zero sales, which pushed the Amazon rank way down – to a level it is always difficult to recover from.

Conclusions

Despite everything, I’d still say, give KDP Select a go, because you’ve got little to lose and loads to gain – even if you only hit the jackpot one in three times. Just don’t do giveaways twice with only a month between them.

Actually, there are lots of great side effects, too. I think I picked up quite a lot of new Twitter followers, and my blog traffic doubled after that first giveaway weekend. I also picked up lots more reviews – on Amazon and elsewhere. And I now have a much better understanding of how an Amazon rank translates into actual numbers sold.

And do you remember that library scheme thingy? Well, Amazon actually gives you money for each time a book is borrowed. The amount varies unpredictably from month to month but in December the scheme paid out about $1.70 per loan. I don’t know yet how much the payout will be for January but by the end of that month, subscribers had borrowed nearly six hundred copies of TimeSplash and I am thinking of it as a little bonus, or windfall. Something I really did not expect to happen.

And if you were one of the thousands who grabbed a free copy, or one of the thousands who bought a copy afterwards, please accept my heartfelt thanks.

And thank you too, Patty, for this opportunity to tell the tale.

You can find TimeSplash in the Kindle store

You can find my blog here: http://grahamstorrs.cantalibre.com/

And I’m always happy to chat on Twitter: http://twitter.com/graywave/