Q2 Week 2 MARKETING: Promo Data

Last week, we talked about investigating Promo Sites: https://open.substack.com/pub/ineswrites/p/q2-week-1-marketing-the-promo-plan?r=2a5s0q&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Hopefully, after studying the promotion platforms to see if they align with your subgenre, you've planned at least one paid promotion for your Book or Series of choice for this Month/Quarter. I want to show you why this information becomes crucial as you start to build a list of promos that will work for you and that particular book or series.

Please note that the strategy I'm about to show you I did AFTER collecting data on promo sites for over a year.

In 2022, I wanted to take a series that I had neglected and show it some love by running a promo stacker. I had already taken the steps I told you about last week and studied the promo platforms to see which promotions would be a fit for my erotic romance catalogue. The first book in the series had earned itself a Bookbub Featured Deal. Instead of booking one a week, I decided to stack them and book as many as I could in a two week time period around the Featured Deal to give this series a serious boosts up.

The Watchers Crew is a dark polyamorous romance. There are four books in the series which are denoted in the image below at the top of the spread as TD, CC, DCA and SWW. The series is 9 years old and was producing 0 sales as a Baseline. I always start with a baseline of sales before I do any promo. I aim to take the series'/book's measure for at least 30 days to get that initial baseline. This series moved 0 copies in the previous 30 days before I decided to give it attention.

I booked 1-2 promo a day (preferably 1 a day to get cleaner results) which allowed me to get a feel for how well or poorly the promo delivered. I planned for the promo to last through the month of August.

The last week of July, I did a low spend FB ad of $10 per day to grease the wheels a bit. And I did daily Tiktoks on the first book -page turn with the dialogue of a couple of chapters. I could see this moving the needle with a handful of sales of Book 1 each day.

I had planned to spend $500 on CPC ads. I did not.

I had planned to post daily to Instagram. I did not post even once to Instagram.

All told, I spent $1056 and made $1878.81 on this 99¢ sale for a profit of $822.81 in two weeks. (Forgot to include the FB ads which would've been less than $100)

I should note that I offered the first book free to BB, but they emailed me back saying they thought 99¢ would be better. This was for the Dark and Romantic Erotica category. I do not like 99¢ sales and prefer free.

By the end of the year, this book series was back to moving 0-1 copy per day.

I had wanted to write more in this world because I had so much fun in it. But romance readers had moved on from polyromance and specifically wanted Reverse Harem romance.

So what did I do? I shifted and gave the readers what they wanted; I started writing romances featuring one woman and three men. I later ran a promo on my Reverse Harem series. I'll show you those results next week.

In the meantime, run the numbers for the promo you set up last week. If you haven't run a promo, now is a great time to get started. Be sure and look at your book's baseline of 30 days before the promo so that we can read the data 30 days later and make some decisions.

Ines, girl, why are you writing all of this down in a notebook instead of using a spreadsheet? Because I'm tactile and like to play with pens and stickers. You judgy person you!