My book promotion for Sword of Trueterra has come and gone. Here are my results.

On the whole, pretty lackluster. I sold a hundred and five books in all of November. I had been averaging about ten books a month. With the promotional costs, I still lost money, but making money was not my goal.

Ninety of the sales were ebooks and fifteen were paperback. To break it down further, Sixty eight were Sword of Trueterra ebooks and six were paperbacks. Twenty-two sales were A Vacant Throne ebooks and nine were paperbacks.

I started out by running two BookBub campaigns, one for the week of the 10^th through the 16^th, and then the 17^th through the 22^nd . The idea was to keep an undercurrent of sales with stacked promotions on the weekends. Each had a budget of $60 with an 80₵ bid. The first campaign spent the budget and bumped along selling about four books a day. The second campaign spent only half the budget. The first campaign had clicks in the teens. The second campaign started out strong and then faded. I don’t know why. It left me with one day of no sales in the middle of my promotion.

My first promotion was Best Book Monkey on the 9^th at the cost of $11.50 (a special half price deal). Actually, it was the kickoff, and not truly stacked like the others. I sold three books that day.

My second promotion was Bargain Booksy on the 17^th ($45). On that day I sold twenty-one books and twelve more on the next day. Some of those sales could have been from BookBub which was still clicking along at that point.

On the 23^rd, was Fussy Librarian ($25.80). I sold three books, which were probably from that promotion, because by then the Bookbub had ended.

I goofed up a little on the 24^th when I scheduled both ENT ($45) and Reader IQ ($30) on the same day. That made it impossible to see which one was working the best. I should have put them two days apart. That day I sold twenty-six books and six more in the following two days.

The day after that? Crickets. The goal had been for Amazon to notice the uptick in sales and start promoting the book themselves without advertising costs to me. Didn’t happen.

Time to put the promotion price of .99₵ back to $2.99.

Before running off for another month, here is an item I have been toying with, which has to do with keywords. When you publish a book in Amazon, during the setup, you can enter seven keyword phrases. These are the words that you suspect that readers will enter when searching for the next book to read. It is also a way that Amazon will categorize your book, even though they don’t call it that.

I tested out my keywords to see that if I were the customer and used those words, would books like mine come up.

Step one in this process is to go into Incognito. This is an option that will appear when you click on the three vertical dots in the upper right-hand corner of the screen when you are in Chrome. (I am not sure about other browsers.)  You don’t want Amazon to be considering your preferences. Then go to Amazon books and enter your keyword phrase and see what comes up.

For example, I used “coming of age” as one of my keyword phrases; a minor theme in my books. That brought up largely non-fiction works on the subject. “Coming of age for children” did give me mostly books for children, but with the work “Coming” in the title. “Coming of age fantasy” was not any closer. There were a lot of steamy-looking covers in that lot. I gave up on the phrase and tried “Fantasy books for girls” with far more success.

You can spend a lot of time doing this to come up with seven keyword phrases, but it should be worth the effort.