Marketing Update for Off Leash

On October 8 I launched Off Leash as two books. I sold 4 copies in total at $2.99 with 70% royalty rate. I also quickly realized this angle was not going to work. Offering the book with two endings selling it as two different books was saturating my market and sales. So a few days later I reworked both books into one book –Off Leash: Bonus Content and tagged the nitty gritty ending on as the 2nd ending all in one book. My stats at this point remained about 80,000. I also changed the price to .99 cent which meant a drop in royalty to 35%.

Marketing: Fired off queries to about 10 YA blog sites asking if they’d read an e-Arc of Off Leash.

Three YA blog sites responded. Again good exposure but no increase in sales.

Blog: I attempt to be more active with blogging and reading more YA books.

Twitter: I made it a point to really up my tweets and start following more YA authors/bloggers. Not sure if this increased sales but this is something I enjoy and again it’s tied into exposure. I also make it a point to always respond to 4-6 people when I log in. Whenever someone starts to follow me I also send them a note of thanks.

Goodreads: I joined and added a number of YA/Indie groups. I confess here I find it hard to utilize this site for promotion so would welcome any helpful hints. Even getting my book listed on Goodreads was hard.

Digital Book Today – On November 7 Off Leash was posted. In order to get posted you need at least 5 reviews (this can be very hard to get for an Indie author), but once I got them I fired off a note and they agreed to feature it. This was free.

The Frugal E-Reader – Launched Off Leash on Nov. 6th – the double exposure really helped to move Off Leash up to the Top 100 Amazon Kindle list. In terms of sales all together that day 6 books were sold.

The Kindle Daily Deal – This was my first paid ad at $59 (US). It was worth it. I sold 23 books and moved as high as #13 on the Top Amazon Kindle List for Best Children’s Books for Boys and Men. Four days later I was still ranked in the Top 100. This was great for exposure. A lot of new people on twitter started to follow me also.

Total sales todate: 38 books

What’s next?

I booked a Pixel of Ink ad for Off Leash which is about $119 (US) and I’m slated for Dec.10, 2011 – this is perfect timing. My second book, Off Limits I hope to have live on Dec 5th and I’ll be keeping that priced at $2.99 with 70% royalty in the hopes of making more sales.

Goodreads – goal is to better utilize this site

Facebook – attempt to get more exposure about the series through my Renee Pace site

Twitter – continue doing what I’m doing

YA reviews sites – research more and attempt to get more reviews – nice to have 20 reviews so I can approach other Kindle Nation sites that require this.

Locally – Mail my print copy of Off Leash to local Teen Magazine so they can have one of their teen reviewers read and post a review – aim is January.

Emailed my local library asking them to purchase a copy for their collection. Also emailed library to see if they’d be willing to host a local YA Indie group workshop – still waiting for reply.