#KindleScoutCampaign

[mylincolncole-blog]

Kindle Scout Campaign - All Stats and Results Across All of the Campaigns I've Run

I'm about to give you all a conglomerated list of stats and other information about all of the campaigns I have run up to this point. I'll continue updating this post as I run new campaigns over time to keep it up to date!

Campaign Four - The Everett Exorcism

My most recent campaign, which I talk through extensively in my Kindle Scout blog posts. This one was not selected (they did not like the iconography on the cover and felt the book wasn't a good fit). I tested out a lot of services for this campaign and reviewed the services on my blog here. I was proud of the stats despite everything and I'm not too worried about their decision. If they feel it isn't a good fit I would rather not be locked into a contract.

Campaign Three - Collision of Worlds

I ran this campaign with a pure set-it-and-forget-it mentality and didn't really promote it much at all. It didn't really perform very well, and the book I submitted wasn't one I expected to get selected (it was a second book in a series that wasn't very popular, and the first book wasn't on Kindle Scout originally).

It floundered during the first half of the campaign, saw a little bit of traction during the second half, and was inevitably turned down by the Kindle Scout editors.

Campaign Two - Raven's Peak (Selected)

This campaign resulted in my first contract with Kindle Scout and constituted a lot of hard word and time spent putting it together. I had a pretty substantial period in the center when the campaign wasn't trending, which made a pretty big difference in the number of page views it received on those days.

The book after launch has sold a lot of copies and received some sizable promotion from Amazon, which is why I had no trouble turning to Amazon again when I had another series ready to publish to offer it to Kindle Scout first.

Campaign One - Second Chances

When I put together this campaign I had no idea what I was doing. I was barely into the writing process and just tossed this one up on Amazon without an agenda or goal in mind. I didn't know what to expect and had no audience, so the stats are reflective of that.

The nice thing about this campaign is that it shows Amazon and Kindle Scout aren't going to bias an author from previous efforts. My first campaign was a complete flop, but my second one (when I knew a little more of what I was doing) turned out really well and ended up getting picked.

Zero hours in hot & trending...

More Blog Posts

[mylincolncole-blog]

Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 6

The Everett Exorcist was not picked for publication by Kindle Press. They sent me a long email detailing out their reasoning, and a significant part of it was the cover and the use of a rosary. I'm not too concerned because I think the rosary fits the genre and story perfectly, so I wouldn't have wanted to change those things anyway.

It's Over

Time to move on. I'm working on finishing up books II and III and plan out my launch plan. I'm hoping to launch them all in rapid succession, so it'll be a little while before they are available for the world. In the short term, however, I'm also going to start working on some more projects and planning the next book to get out in the world.

So, this is only the end of the Kindle Scout journey for TEE, and there is still a long way for this book to go to get out into the world. I'm actually excited to be able to start making plans to launch it on my own and having complete control over everything because I have some cool ideas to try out I couldn't have used with Kindle Scout.

What comes next?

One more post on the way after the acception/rejection from Amazon with details about everything surrounding the campaign and a little bit more information into the process. 

More Blog Posts

[mylincolncole-blog]

Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 5 - Ending Results

First of all, if you want to check out my services list of promotional places and recommendations, click here. I go into pretty deep analysis about a lot of different places I have checked out to get nominations and page views for your campaign! It's worked out very well for me (at least pre-results) and hopefully my advice can help you!

Now, onto the details!

Campaign is over, so here are some final details about how it went! It ended midnight and it is hard to believe it is finally over. Now, I have to go through and fix up my website post campaign. It feels a lot like taking down decorations after Christmas: it is fun putting them up, and not nearly as fun sending them all back to storage!

It's Over

It's good to be over with, and now I can finally sit back and relax. I'm not sure how well I'll be able to relax, but at least I'm busy. I've actually been working on writing the second book in the series. It's coming along slower than I would like, but the fact that I have anything done with it is a huge plus.

If my book isn't picked, I'm planning on releasing them close together in timing. If it is picked, I'm planning to offer it to Amazon, and if they say 'no thanks' then I'll just publish it on my own. Either way it won't be a huge deal, and then I'll be on to new projects!

Thank you all!

Now is my opportunity to formally thank everyone for their support and for following along with this campaign. I put a lot of work into all of this (both writing up the blog posts, running the campaign, and writing the book itself) and to a large extent it is a relief just to be done with it.

I can't thank you enough for your support, and I hope you get a free copy directly from Amazon. Even if you don't, however, I'll make sure to offer free copies up to everyone who nominated after the fact!

A little bit of analysis

Should you spend money on your Kindle Scout Campaign? When it comes to Kindle scout and spending money and why hot and trending and pageviews matter, there are a few launch elements to keep in mind:

*Sales *Reviews *Also-Boughts

Sales and also-boughts contribute to how Amazon recommends books. If your book syncs up high on another books also-bought list, then amazon will recommend your book to people who read the first book, and it caps to display 100 books (but could be considerably higher). Likewise, a book that is selling very well is more likely to be recommended by amazon to new readers, so getting sales begets more sales. Reviews show amazon how well their system is working, and thereby contribute a community opinion of the book that helps when recommending.

Kindle Scout books that are chosen are given to everyone who nominated two weeks before launch, and reviews are allowed to be loaded onto the book before launch. This doesn't contribute to sales, but it does contribute to also-boughts and reviews. This can give your book a huge leg up on recommendations, which means more sales, which in turn means more reviews and also-boughts. It's a sort of self-feeding cycle, and so the more pageviews/nominations you get the stronger the initial push to this cycle.

However, you don't need any of this to have a successful book launch, and many books are able to come out in one day and almost immediately attain huge success on the quality of the writing. Kindle Scout is willing to invest in these titles as well, because the goal is to add good content to their library. The best case scenario is good content and this early boost of also-boughts and reviews.

So, no, you don't have to spend any money to get selected. The biggest problem you face revolves around the possibility of not getting picked: investing in page views and nominations is essentially investing in your book's launch, and the more you get the stronger your launch is. However, if your book isn't chosen, then all of that investment is for nothing.

Hence, if you invest, you're essentially gambling that money, and either it can be a huge investment that will pay off in your book's launch through Kindle Scout, or it is a complete waste that could have been better spent on your actual book launch after you are declined.

One way to hedge your bets is, in your thank you note invite people to follow your newsletter for a free copy post launch (which essentially attempts to hold onto the benefit of pageviews and nominations) and to try and build excitement about your book, but even that results in an overall loss.

So, no, you don't need to spend money to get selected by Kindle Scout, and if you do spend money you need to think of it more as investing in your book's future than just running this campaign. Do whatever you can to build things up for after the campaign is over with. My goal with this blog (and why I spend money on my campaign) is as much to tell people what did and didn't work for me and help people put their money in the right places.

What comes next?

Later I will release a few very important posts about the Kindle Scout process, including a post about whether or not my book was picked and my launch plans with or without Amazon, a post about all of the services (paid and free) I've found over all of my campaigns through the years, and a post about all of my stats across the four campaigns I've run.

More Blog Posts

[mylincolncole-blog]

Exclusive Insider's Guide - Kindle Scout Campaign Promotional Services Recommendations List (Paid and Free)

Here is a list of all of the various promotional options I've compiled over running all of my campaigns, and hopefully some of them will come in handy for you (or at least the ones that you end up using).

If there is one blog post of mine that you are going to read to find out everything you want to know about promoting your kindle scout campaign, then this is the one. However, if you're interested in finding out a lot about each of these programs and how the worked out for me, then you might want to go through the blog posts and my guidebook to figure out what will work best for you.

So, without further ado, let's begin!

Paid Services

Recommended

Best Indie Press - This one was new for me, and up front I didn't really think it would be ideal. For one thing, It is incredibly expensive ($250, though you can get $50 off with coupon code 'TS50' when you sign up). However, one thing they do is direct traffic to both your campaign page and a facebook post to get signups, and I've gotten a fairly large number of people to view my book trailer and like my page on facebook from their service. All told, the cost per click came to about 15-20 cents per click (counting the facebook clicks) so it isn't cheap, but I would definitely consider them to be high value clicks and on the days my campaign ran I saw a noticeable uptick in all sorts of web traffic. You can check it out here.

Online Book Club - I've used OBC for a while now and I've had really good luck with their services. The only initial problem is that they are incredibly expensive. This ad ran over one day and generated a trackable external click load of 600 (and It ended up being my second highest campaign day altogether). That being said, the clicks were fairly expensive, but what you get in addition to clicks is targeted advertising across a lot of platforms. For example, they share on twitter, facebook, pinterest, instagram, linkedin, and other places to drive clicks to your campaign, and it ends up generating a lot of action. They also have a built in giveaway that people can sign up for and you can share. All told, it's about $300 dollars for a book of the day package, but I'm hoping to talk the owner into designing a better Kindle Scout package for authors to trickle nominations in.

Author Shout - This site builds a landing page for your campaign and then drives traffic to it using links. I discussed it in quite a bit more depth in an earlier blog post from my The Everett Exorcism campaign, and I was please with how well they performed. They drove a fair number of traffic to my campaign, and it trickles in instead of all at once which makes it the perfect supplementary Kindle Scout promotion. Definitely make sure to sign up early in the campaign because it is designed to run all 30 days! Check it out here!

Melanie Rockett - This one was new for me as well with my most recent campaign, and like the previous resource Author Shout it makes a perfect supplement. Melanie does a good job building some custom links and shares throughout the campaign to quite a few followers, and it serves to keep a steady trickle of nominations. She also worked extremely fast, which was another plus, and has multiple tiered packages. You can find her on Fiverr, and I would recommend getting the 30 day package (the 15 day seems sort of pointless in the grand scheme of things). Check out her offerings here.

Just Kindle Books - This is a fairly well established site with a decent following, and they offer a direct Kindle Scout promotion for only about thirty dollars. Quick responses and a lot of professionalism, and they have a coupon code (PAIDAUTHOR) which might get you $5 dollars off. Check that one out here.

Readper - This one was from a friend of mine named Jaxon Reed and he blasts out to his newsletter on your behalf. Super cheap with some solid results. Check it out here.

Google Ads -

Facebook Ads -

Amazon Giveaway -

Not Recommended

Author Ad Network - I ran this ad one time, and never again. It was incredibly expensive and completely not worth it. I could hardly believe it performed so poorly considering the price, but it was in the range of 100 clicks and came out to around a dollar per click. They are certainly in the business of making money off of authors with a lot of flash but don't have the marketing muscle to back it up. I won't even link to it, so you'll have to jump back on google if you want to find it. 

Goodreads Ads - I only don't recommend this one because it isn't worth spending time on. All in all, it isn't terrible and they are high value clicks, but my daily impressions were so low while bidding $1.20 per click that it just wasn't worth the effort. You have to load money in advance, and the clicks cost so much that it is a double negative: you'll spend a fortune per click and still take forever to get them. Just not worth it.

BookBub Ads - I would recommend this one because of how valuable the clicks can be, but again they are extremely expensive. For example, on Reddit you can get 1,000 impressions for about 40 cents, whereas on BookBub that would cost about $4 dollars. So, 10x as many impressions, which would make it nearly impossible for BookBub to compete. On top of that, you have to get invited into the program to be able to run ads at all, which is a huge negative in my opinion. In general, I just can't recommend it when there are options out there with considerably cheaper clicks. Still, it might be worth requesting an invite to the program and playing around with it, because outside of Kindle Scout it can still be incredibly valuable.

On the Fence

Books Butterfly - I used to recommend this one, and in some cases it is good, but it is just too hit-and-miss for me to want to stand firmly by it. You can run the free promotion (gold level is $100) and get a fair number of nominations out of it, but the problem is inconsistency. I've run it and gotten a huge burst (900+) of clicks, and then on another day you might get 100. Definitely worth checking out if you want to hit a mid-campaign boost, but use at your own risk. You can find it here.

Scout Boost - This one barely (BARELY!) made it out of the not-recommended section, because it is expensive and just performed so-so. You can use a coupon code for 25% off (25%-OFF-NOW) which makes it almost worthwhile, but the results were incredibly mediocre. The thing is, I could have spent that money going deeper into ad platforms and gotten as good, if not better, results out of it. Use it at your own risk here.

Twitter Ads - A lot of people hate twitter ads, and sometimes I can really see why. They can be incredibly useless clicks, and if you aren't careful they can quickly balloon your costs. If you run a twitter ad, make sure you use cards, have good ad content (do not spam hashtags in ads) and run with incredibly low bids. What sort of annoys me is: they recommend I bid about $2 per click, but when I say 'nope' and bid .07 cents, I still end up spending my entire budget. That means that they would gladly charge me over twenty times the minimum price of a click if I'm willing to pay it. That's the biggest reason I won't strongly recommend them, because you have to pay more attention than most other places.

StumbleUpon Ads - Very easy to use beginner platform, but it doesn't register pageviews quite how I would like. The problem is, they use embedded forms to bring a webpage INTO their webpage, so you stay on stumbleupon but you are fed content from outside. To be honest, it is a little too clever for its own good, because the source website isn't tracking credit quite how it should, and a LOT of websites (Amazon, for example) add code that stops this sort of embedding from happening. It's a tool used by a lot of hackers and bad actors to steal data or passwords, so that sort of limits the functionality of this website. Still, it is nifty and you can get fairly cheap clicks (plus, they 'reward' you for running ads) so it isn't too bad. Also, the fact that it is clean and easy to use is a huge benefit for beginners.

Pinterest Ads - You have to be careful and make sure to bid low here, which also means results will come slowly. It isn't a bad place to play around with some money and has a pretty huge audience, you just can't use it as a staple platform.

Reddit Ads - As mentioned above, you pay by impression and can get quite a few fairly cheap. Then, it just comes down to luck of the draw. The problem is, even though you get impressions cheaply you have to pay a fair amount daily as a requirement, and when you say "spend $5 dollars" they often spend $6 or $7. Not a terrible place for clicks, but be careful. Also, another thing to note: reddit has some pretty ugly corners to it, and you might need to be careful about limiting certain subreddits so that they don't get your ad.

Gleam Giveaway - This can get expensive, but it has powerful clickthrough if you make your campaign visit a required action. Giving away bigger prizes draws way more people, and you can customize to also get shares of the giveaway, following on social media, or visiting other places on your website for additional entries. Gleam is fun to play around with, people love winning stuff, so it is a win-win. That being said, this can quickly become a very expensive option.

Bing Ads - Just like google with a much smaller audience and payment required up front. Also, clicks are going to default to more expensive, which is a negative. Still, it isn't terrible and if you like google this is very similar.

Book Trailer - This can be a lot of fun (and I talk a lot about this option here) but it doesn't directly get your clicks. Sure, there are some cool parts attached to it, but all in all I would say there are better places to spend your money. However, if you don't make it Kindle Scout campaign centric, then you can always re-use it for promotions months and years down the line. In the mentioned post you can find some information about how I made my trailer.

Handouts - I printed off some handouts and passed them out, but this takes a lot of effort and time to leave them at places and drive around. If you're looking for an interpersonal campaign, then this is perfect, but for me it is easier to do most of my work online in my spare time (I don't have hours to spare driving around to bookstores and libraries). If you do go this route, uprinting is pretty cheap for making handouts (bookmarks, in my case) and I made them open ended so that after my campaign ends I can just direct the traffic to a new promotion. It just spares me from having to worry about not getting them out fast enough.

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Free

Recommended

Headtalker - This is a great platform for building up shares on social media. Basically, you sign up for an account and then build a campaign. Fill in some details, run it through a vetting process, and then voila it is ready to go. How it works: on the day/hour you pick everyone who signs up will send out the exact same tweet/facebook message/linkedIn post/tumblr share. It also tracks how much 'reach' your team of supporters have (and it is cool to see that 1,000,000 plus people are going to get your post). However, keep in mind one HUGE detail: they are posting it, not retweeting, so if you put a message that says: "Check out my new Kindle Scout entry..." then THEY are posting that message as if it is THEIRS. The trick is to write things in the third person: "Nominate this Kindle Scout entry and get a free copy...". I won't support campaigns anymore that personalize the message because then I get confused readers wondering if I have a new campaign or a new book coming out. It is just bad practice. A couple of links you'll need: headtalker and then a facebook group that trades support. Join the group and then share/post and cross-promote!

Posting on Social Media -  Do this, but don't overdo it. Don't spam people or hit them too hard with hourly posts. I've heard of authors sending out newsletters every couple of hours (a huge no-no) and people scheduling twitter posts for ten times a day. Don't overdo it. Invite people to your stuff, keep up a new post every couple of days, but also post about other stuff (what you're working on next, things you think are interesting). Share with your fans, don't deluge them, and social media can be a hugely beneficial way to get nominations.

Goodreads - Join groups, meet people, and find places where they invite authors to promote. Leave links to your campaign, and people will click them. This generally gets me a handful of clicks over the life of a campaign, so I can certainly recommend this. There are a lot of things I don't like about Goodreads, but it is a solid community of readers and as long as you aren't spammy and overbearing you can find places that are receptive to your message.

KBoards - If you aren't on Kboards, then that is the first thing you need to do. Signup and jump in. It's a very active forum with some incredible information available from the savvy authors who chat there. There is also a dedicated thread over there just for Kindle Scout campaigns. You can share your link, nominate some campaigns, and when your campaign is about to end you'll bump up the list to receive nominations from the other board members. The benefit of this is people can nominate and support, but the thread is centralized around promoting campaigns and talking shop, not just 'nominate me...no nominate ME' posts.

Not Recommended

Thunderclap - This is just like headtalker, except the minimum required is for 100 people to sign up. I would recommend it, except there is plain and simply a better option out there already. If you are considering using this, then just use Headtalker instead.

<script async src="//pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/adsbygoogle.js"> (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Hopefully some of this information was helpful for you in making up your mind about what to do with your Kindle Scout campaign. I'll keep updating it with new options and add new services as I find them. If I missed any that you want me to test out or mention then link them in the comments below. If/when I run more campaigns I'll make sure to test them out and add them to the list!

Let me know in the comments if you agree/disagree with my assessments and what your experience has been with some of these programs. Also, check out my Kindle Scout Guidebook for more information about the basics of running a campaign and for more tips and tricks not mentioned here!

I also have an indepth look at the Hot & Trending list and how pageviews work in the guidebook, so that might help you understand better how those work.

What comes next?

Now I'm turning to new projects. Will I put more books on Kindle Scout? Most likely. Who knows what the future holds, but keep an eye on my blog (or join my newsletter) to see what is next in my world!

More Blog Posts About Kindle Scout

[mylincolncole-blog]

Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 4 - Coming to a Close

Final Days, and more reviews of the new services I tried.

Coming to a Close

The campaign is winding down now and I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I put a lot of effort into this campaign to drive nominations and traffic to my Kindle Scout book, and then hopefully I can drive that traffic back out into my other platforms. 

Some of the things I did for this campaign didn't pay off at all, but some of them did even better than I expected. I've talked in previous posts about a couple of the better options I found while running this, and now I'm going to go into detail about some of the meatier (and more expensive) options that I used to drive nominations.

Scout Boost

This became available not long after I was selected through Kindle Scout, so I didn't get a chance to try it that first time around. That always sort of bugged me because I wanted to be able to get a solid review of the program in my Kindle Scout Guidebook but wasn't able to accurately review it. Running this campaign gave me a chance to actually sit down and test out their offering and see how worthwhile it really is.

They will let you pay for their service up to four times, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. It is simply too expensive, so I only ran it twice. I also signed up for their email to get 25% off, but even that isn't enough to take the sting out of the sheer cost of this promotion. When you're talking something that costs over $90 for a promotion for something without a guaranteed return, then you're talking something crazy expensive.

So, how well did it do?

...

...

Not well. It was, in fact, one of my worst performing days in pageviews, and that is compared to similar days with almost no promotion. Considering how expensive this promotion was, I know without a doubt that if I had just upped my facebook promotion to pay directly for clicks (even with relatively expensive clicks) I would have gotten a lot more traction out of it than I got.

I have another promotion with them coming up in a couple of days, so there will be a second chance to see if it performs better this time around, but all in all I'm thinking this one doesn't have a lot of bang for its buck.

Best Indie Press

This one went live Wednesday and works for four days. I actually scheduled this one and then ran into a problem wherein all of the emails they sent me went directly to spam (thanks to Google) so it took a while to get in touch. When we finally did, we had to adjust the days a little bit, which wasn't a big deal for me.

Working with them has been easy, and they are encouraging and offer some new ideas that are pretty cool. For example, I was encouraged to modify my thank you note at the end of the campaign with an offer. 

Basically, I sent in: 

THANK YOU! When you read this, you'll already know whether or not The Everett Exorcism has been selected by Kindle. If it was selected then you'll get a free e-book copy directly from Kindle. However, even if it hasn't been selected, I would like to give you a copy anyway. To do that, though, you'll need to give me your email address so I can tell you when the book is available for free on Kindle. Click here to give me that information: http://bit.ly/teefree Thank you so much for your support!

The note now offers a direct copy of the book whether or not it is picked, and this will hopefully get signups either way after the campaign ends. It'll also help with early reviews if the book isn't picked, so it is a win/win.

They also recommended creating a book trailer, which I did, and then their goal is to drive traffic through likes to the trailer to get people to visit on facebook.

All in all, some really solid suggestions...Which means, the only thing left to do is see how well they performed...

Book Trailer

I know this one is just showing up out of the blue, but that is because it sort of happened out of the blue. I didn't really plan to make a trailer early in the campaign, and none of my efforts were tied to it, but about midway when I was bored and without anymore things to work on I decided to try and have a book trailer built.

I made one previously for Raven's Peak and thought it turned out really well, but this time I wanted something different. I wanted something themed around the genre rather than something that tries to stand as a real trailer. Ideally, it would get the blood pumping and make people excited without really delving too much into the story.

Did I succeed? You can be the judge. I do wish the guy who made the video had made it a little bit darker, but the music cue and timing is spot on, and the after effects are really cool.

So the question is: how did I do it, and do I recommend it...

Yes. For the most part, it was a super easy experience and the trailer came out really well. It was a little longer than I would have liked, but that isn't really a problem. It looks good in Facebook's timeline and only took a couple of days to make. Fiverr is a great place to find people to work on something like this, and Videohive is a great place to get videos you can use in the trailer. Frank is the

I will try to keep track of it and see how things pan out, and then I'll let everyone know what comes of it.

Social Advertising

Twitter has been fairly steady but not amazing with results. Facebook is, of course, rather expensive. My clicks have been coming in around 4-10 cents per click, which is worse than expected. I actually stopped the ad, changed a few things and modified the targeting, and then I'm running it again to see if this time I can do better.

I made a bookbub ad and I'm giving that one another try, but the clickthrough was abysmal the first time around. Reddit is too costly to recommend. Stumbleupon is pretty good, but I'm not sure how well that translates to page views because of how they display pages.

Goodreads is just completely not worth it. I overpay dramatically for clicks, and in general they still don't see as much traffic as I would like. In general, it just isn't really panning out and I don't think I'll bother re-upping the account next time. Bing didn't do bad, but the cost per click was expensive.

With Google, my ads have been costing about 1 cent per click, and I'm directing the traffic to my giveaway page. That has actually paid off really well and seems to be driving a lot of traffic back out to my campaign page. Penny click ads can be worthwhile when they work, but it's been slipping in results for the last few days and I don't know if it will manage to stay valuable.

In general, with ads you will want to start small and slowly ramp up. Pay as little daily as possible, monitor results, and make sure you are getting value out of it. The ads that seem to do well you can ramp up to higher cost per day, and the ads that perform poorly should be turned off or re-evaluated. 

Don't go overboard or wish for huge results, because it is really easy to spend dozens or even hundreds of dollars and get almost nothing in return. I play around with ads on a regular basis because I want to get better at using them, and I've gotten to a point where I can get decent results fairly cheap. That being said, it cost me a lot of wasted money to get to this point.

However...it feels like email advertising (which used to be an author staple) is really slipping in value. It is expensive and the results keep diminishing, so I think we are reaching a point where (at least for a while) social advertising might be one of the better ways to generate returns. Just be careful, take your time, and constantly monitor your results.

Upcoming

One more post about the campaign itself, and then you can expect to see a post after the acception/rejection email is sent from Kindle Scout, and that should cap off my Kindle Scout flurry of posts. I didn't go way into depth about what Kindle Scout is or if you should try it out (I did that last time around when I ran my Raven's Peak campaign and wrote my guidebook) and I wanted all of this information to be a pure supplement of everything I did before. I used a lot of the tips and tricks from my guidebook so I'm not going to spell them out again.

I've had a lot of fun with this one with trying all sorts of new things, because a lot of the promotional methods I've been trying out will also go into new promotional campaigns I run to helps sell books or for other reasons. 

More Blog Posts

[mylincolncole-blog]

Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 3 - Reviews and Results

First, some Book Keeping

Time to start reviewing some of those services I mentioned last week. Several of the promotions haven't gone out yet, so you'll still need to wait for those, but there are other ones I can mention and tell you how well/poorly they did.

I also wanted to share a link to something I've been working on putting together. It isn't complete, but the intention is that it will show selection data by month/day as well as genre and subgenre. Right now it has all of the selected books and some of the authors filled in, and then I have to go back through and add in the genres to track those.

Ideally, this will help anyone who wants to see how often they pick books, what time of year they pick certain kinds of books (i.e. when is the best time to submit romance/sci-fi/etc.). I had an old spreadsheet that I stopped updating because I rebuilt it into this, so please enjoy! Everyone can view, but if you would like to collaborate on it with me and hopefully help fill in some of the missing details (as well as add more stats!) let me know.

Once the sheet is done, I'll add some analytical information (like best time of the year to submit based on aggregate data by genre) but until then, you can at least see which months get the most books picked.

Onto the analysis!

Right off the bat, there are two services I would like to talk about on the positive side of running this campaign. The first is AuthorShout.

AuthorShout

I actually didn't really know what to expect with this campaign option, mostly because it was only ten dollars. They offer to promote your book for the entire month for the meager fee and will even go so far as to build out share images for you. I hadn't really heard much about them for or against, but for ten dollars it was pretty easy to give them a shot.

Here is one of the images they put together for the campaign:

What this told me right away was that they put some work into it and didn't just pump out crappy images. Don't get me wrong, a lot of it is probably placeholder, but they are attractive images nonetheless.

They also custom built tweets based on campaign data, including the tag line, blurb, and other features to get readers to check out the listing, which is nice. It isn't just a flurry of 'go nominate this and get a free copy' tweets.

Finally, the results: they have a landing page built for my book, and from the first couple of days it showed up in the top 50 external sources of traffic. Each day, the number went up (I had 11 clicks directly from that landing page on June 1st and that number kept climbing) and that doesn't even count the number of clicks that they brought in from twitter directly to the campaign. I'm expecting a sizable number of clicks to continue trickling in through the end of the 30 days, and if the book is selected they will continue promoting it even after the campaign is over with.

For ten dollars, this service is hard to beat. It is better than the $129 option I paid for with my last campaign, and the fact that it trickles in nominations rather than blasting them all at once is a huge bonus and makes it the perfect supplement to other services.

https://authorshout.com/

Melrock Kindle Scout Promo (Fiverr)

I honestly signed up for this one late, and it was on recommendation of a friend of mine who recently ran a campaign. I had honestly never heard of her services, and I figured I would give it a shot (for $30 bucks, which isn't too terrible).

First problem, though: she offers two services, a 30 day and 15 day kindle scout promo. I was caught in the middle of this, and since it was only a $5 difference it seemed kind of pointless to chop it down to only 15 days. I went ahead and signed up for the 30 day, figuring that I would just lose out on the 5 days that had already run. I decided not to approach her about prorating because I wasn't really that worried about it.

However, she had the campaign live and ready to go (with custom share images) in only about two hours, and she added in additional twitter support without my requesting it because I had missed out on the previous five days. She worked fast and seemed genuinely interested in helping to promote my book, and she has also worked to put together custom tweets and promotions to help drive nominations.

I can't track results as easily with her promotion since most of it comes from twitter or overlaps with other options, but if nothing else I'm happy with the exposure she has been giving me. I will ask her later in the campaign if she has any analytics I can share on my blog about the results, but I can still recommend her service to anyone who wants a strong advocate of their books to post. Here is one of the share images she created for my campaign:

https://www.fiverr.com/melrock/kindlescout-30-day-promo

Moving on with some more information: My newsletter blast early in the campaign didn't perform nearly as well as I would have liked. I only saw about a 5% click through rate, which was about 4% lower than I expected. The newsletter was set on auto resend, so it will blast out to everyone who didn't click as well which will hopefully bring those numbers up.

I also have a newsletter planned later in the campaign for the giveaway I'm running, so it will hopefully funnel some of the newsletter subscribers who weren't willing to support me out of their own goodwill into doing it with the chance of winning something!

Speaking of the giveaway...

Gleam Giveaway

My giveaway started on June 1st, and the primary goal of the giveaway was to drive people to my campaign page to check out my book. This was a new promotional idea I wanted to try out, and so far it has paid off. From the very first day it went live it directed quite a few clicks to Amazon, and the people it directed seem to be very engaged with the book. There are other entry options, including voting Raven's Peak book of the year at online book club and checking out anthologies on Amazon, but the first and most important is to check out my kindle scout entry.

To help drive traffic to my website (and hopefully back out to kindle scout) I signed up with a couple of giveaway promotion websites (namely, GiveawayPromote.com and sweep-stakes.com) to hopefully push a lot of extra traffic to my giveaway page. I also submitted the information to a lot of other sites to promote the giveaway, and the results in general have been really good. They diminish over time, but it serves as great trickle content for multiple purposes (website traffic, nominations, votes, email subscribers, and possible new fans).

This is one of the more expensive things I've done, but it isn't a ton of work and can be done quite a bit cheaper than I planned. For example, signing up for gleam is free and most sites you submit to have a free option to promote giveaways. Your prize can be as low as $25 dollar gift card (I wouldn't recommend going any lower) and that can still drive hundreds of people to your campaign, if not quite a few more.

Freebie Campaign

This one hasn't actually started yet, so I won't be able to give results until later. That being said, I have over 100 authors signed up and 120 books total, which means there should be a lot of people driving traffic to my website. I've made my requests to check out the book unobtrusive, but with luck it will pan out and get a lot crossover traffic to my page.

I'll let you know more about the results in the coming days, but for now know this is something I'm excited to see how it goes.

Summer Solstice

The anthology isn't quite finished yet and I'm still collecting stories, but this is another place wherein I'm hoping to create high value crossover traffic. Basically, the goal is to direct people to my newest anthology and then get them to click over to my campaign as well.

With luck, this will also get a fairly substantial number of views and clicks and really pay off. I'll let you know more about how well this did toward the end of the campaign.

Library Book Signing - Handouts

I had really high hopes for this promotional idea, but it didn't really pan out. I left a bunch of bookmarks around different places and asked family and friends to hand them out as well, but in general the response has been thoroughly underwhelming. 

Most of the people who came to the book signing weren't interested, and they simply weren't the right audience for my book. That being said, the signing itself was a success and I sold nearly all of the books I brought, it just wasn't right for the campaign.

I have confidence that the handouts can work, but for me it has been a problem of wrong place and wrong time.

A few recommendations I would have for it, though: don't tie your campaign to the handouts too tightly. What I did was build a landing page for the handouts, and then on the landing page it features my campaign. After the campaign ends, I will be able to change the landing page and continue handing out the cards. If, on the other hand, you link the cards to your Kindle Scout page, then you're crippling them once the campaign ends.

Book Trailer

I had a book trailer put together for this with a collapsing letters effect to capitalize on video formatting. It turned out a little lighter than I would have liked, but in general I'm happy with it. This will be useful for social media sharing.

Upcoming

That's all for now. I'll have more results and information later on once more promotions run, and hopefully I can post more analytical data.

I won't post any concrete results until after the campaign ends, so you'll just have to be patient for now!

Other Entries

[mylincolncole-blog]

Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 2 - Services

The Early Days

This is a continuation of my campaign information, and if you want to check out the first post I made about this, you can find the link below to part 1.

My campaign is running really well, and I've begun promoting it to try and bring in more nominations. I'm not really doing any general promotional things right now, focusing more on the bigger things I can write about later in my campaign.

Breakdown

5/24/17 - Campaign Submitted

I received my link on this day and submitted to multiple different locations for promotions, including Scout Boost, Books Butterfly, and OnlineBookClub.

 Scout Boost - This is something I haven't tried before. They charge $94 dollars (get 25% off with code: 25%-OFF-NOW) and feature your book in newsletters and other places to get nominations. They only send out up to three books daily, and you can schedule the promotion up to four times (I did it twice because after a while I expect the returns to dramatically diminish). This is scheduled for the 7th and 16th of June to run.

Books Butterfly - I used this service last time around to get views on my campaign and they did an excellent job for me. I'm hoping they do just as good this time (I requested 6/8 and 6/18 as promotional days but waiting to hear back from them).

OnlineBookClub - This is a wholly new service, because it isn't even something that they offer. Several of my books have been featured as books of the day on Scott's website, and Raven's Peak was even book of the month in April and got a lot of publicity. Setting up my campaign to run on June 13th is something of a trial run, and if it goes well he might be able to open this up to be a permanent offering to reach his 35,000 newsletter subscribers and 170,000 website members.

I also scheduled advertising to go out across several social media sites, including Facebook (+Instagram), Twitter, BookBub, and Goodreads. I also submitted to Bing, GoogleAds, StumbleUpon, and Reddit and those were declined until the campaign begins (since the links show 404 until the campaign goes live). So, now I know which sites actually check and which don't really care!

5/26/17 - Campaign Begins

Today, I resubmitted to the self-serve advertising locations since the site is actually live. With all of the ads, I set my bids incredibly low (a few cents per click at most) because I would rather simply not get any impressions than spend too much money on the advertising. I'll tweak as I go and drop off the lowest performing advertising platforms to focus my efforts once I see who is responding.

I also submitted to two other paid platforms today:

Author Shout - This is another website that runs a promotion during the entire month, and it only costs ten dollars. I'm not really anticipating any huge results out of it, but if it manages to trickle in several people a day I will be thrilled with it.

https://authorshout.com/promote-with-us

Best Indie Press - This is one that I am leery about using simply because of it's lack of presence or information, but it is one that I sincerely hope proves my reservations wrong. It's expensive ($250, but $50 off with Coupon Code: TS50) and I wouldn't have done it except I want to test it out and report my findings with it. I've seen a recommendation of it from someone I trust, so I'm willing to give it a shot and review.

http://unbouncepages.com/bestindiepress_kindlescout/

Other things I've set up that don't cost money...

Newsletter - I set up two different automatic resend newsletters today, spreading them over my campaign to cover as many days as possible. I thought about segmenting it out and trickling it in, but I ended up just doing blasts. *Note* The reason I set two newsletters is one is for my campaign, and one is for another promotional thing I will mention shortly.

Blog Posts - I've been writing these slowly and scheduling them in advance. My goal is to get about five to ten posts going during the campaign, some promotional and others informational (like this one).

HeadTalkers - Sort of self-explanatory, I set up a couple of these to help drive people to all sorts of different promotions. With luck, I'll get the twenty-five supporters I need to make these a reality (shouldn't be too hard).

Drive-By Promotions - This one is a little bit tricky because it requires a lot more effort to set-up as well as effort in general. Most people won't have time to do things like these, and my goal is more just to see how everything comes together long term.

Instafreebie Group Giveaway - I am hosting a group giveaway on the site for multiple genres with over seventy participating authors and even more books. I've done many of these before, but for this one I timed it so that it would start around midway in my campaign and run until it ends. Basically, authors sign up to promote their free books, I host the group, and we all direct traffic to the giveaway page. What I did was put global promotional links on my website (at the top and bottom) to drive website traffic over to my campaign page. (If anyone wants to join the giveaway, the signup is here). I usually get several thousand page views during promotions like this, so with luck at least some of those readers will nominate my campaign. It takes a lot of work to organize and setup, along with custom page design.

Handouts - I didn't do this last time, so this time I put together bookmarks, rip sheets, and QR codes for people to get to my website and then head over to KS to nominate. I also built custom landing pages to track traffic so I will know exactly how successful this part of the campaign is in bringing traffic. I'm going to a book signing on Memorial Day and I plan to hand out as many things as I can, and then I'll also be leaving bookmarks in as many shops, bookstores, and other places as possible. The other thing I did was make sure the bookmarks took people to my website, not the campaign site, so that after the campaign is over I can simply change the landing page to feature something new and still gain benefit out of that traffic.

Gleam Giveaway - I'm going to run a custom giveaway, also during the second half of my campaign. I'll be giving away a $50 dollar gift card, some custom The Everett Exorcism T-Shirts, and a paperback set of my World on Fire series. Altogether the prizes cost about $130 dollars, and the giveaway serves multiple purposes. I have a lot of entry options to help promote my books and brand, and one of the main options is to check out my book on Kindle Scout. This helps because I can drive people to the giveaway itself to reach an audience my normal promotions might not hit. It is also the feature of my second newsletter (so the first drives people to my campaign directly, the second drives people to the giveaway to hopefully catch the people I missed the first time around).

Summer Solstice - This was the exact opposite of the IF giveaway, because rather than scheduling it around the campaign, I scheduled to campaign to overlap with it. I put together several anthologies, and this will be the third one in a series of them. The Solstice is June 20th, and the book will be launched to begin heavily promoting that day. Much like the IF giveaway, the hope is to catch drive-by readers who come for the anthology and would like to support me. This one is incredibly difficult to put together and requires a lot of time and effort, and I do it to help cross-promote with a lot of friends and great writers from the Kindle Press World.

Basically, my hope is that I can drive a lot of traffic to my website for various purposes, and then customize the content on my website to unobtrusively funnel people to my campaign to check it out, too. The nice thing is I'll be able to track a lot of the results to see how well the various efforts performed.

My initial guess is that the drive-by options will be too much work/time expense for most people to put together, but I still felt it was necessary to mention them and hopefully help people think of ways to create their own drive-by promotions. It helps you practice funneling and website design as much as anything, and then when you try to do similar things to help promote real sales the experience is invaluable.

The other benefit of this is they don't usually cost money. It's more work, but if your checkbook is the problem and not time than these can be invaluable ways to save money while still bringing people to your campaign!

Results

So far, I have been getting over 200 page views per day, with the number running closer to 300 and peaking at about 420. As far as advertising goes, Facebook has been generating the strongest results, with twitter, google, and stumbleupon just behind it. Bing has been slow, but staying cheap, but reddit, pinterest, and bookbub have been somewhat floundering in results with clicks costing far too much to be worthwhile. I'm ramping those ones down and focusing my efforts in the routes with the strongest results.

My larger advertisements are also ramping up. My giveaway went live on Wednesday and my solo email went live Thursday of this past week (I have another one planned later in the month for the giveaway feature). I still haven't heard back from the service recommended by Tom Swyers so no idea if that one is going to pan out at all (they said contact back within 48 hours and it's been many days).

Upcoming

Next time I'll start reviewing the services I submitted to and giving you all an idea of what works and what doesn't. There were some services I didn't use this time around simply because I already analyzed them in my book and didn't want to spend more money (I'm more interested in trying and reporting on new things than simply getting campaign results).

I'll also post more statistics later on (don't worry!) and let you know how each individual piece performed. Hopefully, with all of the information I gather you'll be able to make your own campaign the perfect one for you!

If you want more in-depth analysis of just how Kindle Scout works and how to set-up a campaign, check out my guidebook. I already broke down things like the hot & trending lists, categories, blurb/cover/excerpt, and many other details that go into the basics of running a campaign.

Other Entries

[mylincolncole-blog]

Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 1 - Prep

The Everett Exorcism

I'm back at it, launching another Kindle Scout campaign! This book kicks off a series of stories about Arthur that take place before the events of Raven's Peak and the World on Fire series.

It is called The Everett Exorcism, and it is available on to nominate. If it wins, everyone gets a free copy of the book to read and review before it is available to the public! I've got some pretty huge plans for this campaign and I'll be releasing more information as the campaign runs to explain what I've been doing to promote it.

First off: some basic information. Kindle Scout is a program where authors can submit never before published books to possibly win a contract and get their book published. I actually wrote a guidebook about this late last year to help people who are new to the program run the best possible campaign to increase their chances of getting picked.

The biggest addition I can make to the guidebook at this point is just more anecdotal evidence of how valuable Kindle Scout has been for me. My current winner that was published July of last year has been featured multiple times by Amazon, on various newsletters, and was a part of the Prime Reading program from January through March. It has sold many thousands of copies and is now in the UK version of the Prime Reading program. The team over at Kindle Press works very hard to publicise and promote our books.

Early Promotions

So, without further Ado, here is some information about the early days of this campaign:

Basically, my plan this time around is to focus as much on auxiliary promotions as on the campaign itself to hopefully drive engagement on the website and cross visitors over into nominators. I printed out some bookmarks featuring Raven's Peak that I can use for both the campaign and general face-to-face interactions. It has a custom landing page where people will end up that will then direct them to my Kindle Scout campaign. 

I printed out 1,000 of these, and Monday (Memorial Day) I have a book signing event I will participate in where I will hopefully be able to pass some of these out. Others I will leave at as many locations as possible so people can easily get linked back to my website where the primary feature will be my Kindle Scout campaign. 

I have also made a rip-sheet with the book and a QR code for people to scan that will take them directly to the kindle scout landing page where they can quickly nominate. The tear off sheets have a simple bit.ly link they can type out to get there, too.

Aside from that, I don't have a lot of direct promotion planned for the first week or so of the campaign. With any luck, this promotion will continue to work all the way through the campaign itself, and even after it ends I simply have to change the 'content' on the landing page from the bookmarks after the campaign is over so they are still valuable.

One thing I've done is to link out everywhere possible to the campaign on my website. You can look over the website (at least during the campaign) to see what I mean and just how many links are passed around everywhere. Basically, anyone who lands on my website should have no trouble finding my campaign!

Upcoming

My next post will go much further into depth about my bigger planned promotions and later I will evaluate how successful they were. I'm planning on trying out a lot of different programs (some are the same ones I discuss in my guidebook, and some are new) and explaining how good/bad they are and why. My goal is to run a fantastic campaign, try out some new promotional ideas I have, and just have fun with the campaign. With any luck, I'll be able to help prospective Kindle Scout authors pick the right promotions for them.

So, I hope you'll stick around for my campaign! Also, check out the guidebook if you want some information about setting up your entry and capitalizing on the campaign to be really successful.

A little advance information, I'm using:

Scout Boost

Author Shout

A service recommended by Tom Swyers

Books Butterfly

General Advertising (Google, Bing, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit)

Custom Giveaway (Gleam) To promote

And several more options. I'll update general information about the campaign and (maybe) give more concrete results later in the process.

So, thanks for stopping by and with any luck you'll be able to get some useful information here about the campaign and a free copy of my book when it launches!