Thank you to Kerrie Flanagan from Author Relations with CraveBooks for this week’s guest blog about promo stacking!
Selling more books is a goal for most Indie Authors, but getting your books in front of new readers can be a challenge. Promo stacking is a great strategy to drive traffic to your books during a sale, a book launch, or anytime you’re looking for that boost.
Why Promo Stacking
The purpose of this technique is to get your books on various promotional newsletters over the course of 3-7 days. Each of these newsletters has its own list of readers who have signed up to receive these daily book deals via email for their favorite genres. Because they chose to sign up for the emails, they tend to be engaged readers. In addition, the platform offering the promo newsletters, usually puts the featured books on their website as well.
How to Stack Promos
It takes a little preparation to effectively set up your promo stacking, but it is definitely worth it. Pick the dates you want to participate in promotional newsletters. If you are running a sale, you can easily schedule that price drop through D2D.
There are a couple of approaches you can take. Let’s say you want to participate in seven promos. You can spread those out and do one a day; so you can run one on Monday, one on Tuesday, and so on. Or you can do multiple in one day over the course of a few days so maybe you do two on Monday, three on Tuesday, and two on Wednesday. When you stack multiple in one day, it may be harder to track which ones are more effective.
Then find the newsletters where you can run the promo. The prices for these can range from $5 up to $100+. Think about your budget and what is going to work for you. Once you decide, you will add your book information (blurb, cover, links…) and schedule the date you want to run it.
If you are short on time, consider using a service like CraveBooks where there are over 20 Daily Deal newsletters to choose from in various genres. This allows you to create an account, upload your book information one time and then sign up for as many promos as you want, all in one convenient place. Plus if you are a Platinum member, you get stats on the performance of each promo. Your information gets saved so when you want to stack promos again, all you need to do is go in and schedule those.
CraveBooks also has a cool new feature where you can include your Smashwords links (In addition to the other usual ones like Kobo, Apple, Amazon…). This is great because the royalty rate for authors using Smashwords through D2D is 80%.
Whether you are running a sale, offering a free book, launching a new book or just looking to drive readers to your books, promo stacking through paid newsletters can be an effective strategy to get more readers and ultimately more sales.
To find a list of promotional newsletters for free and paid books, check out this helpful list from Kindlepreneur.
https://kindlepreneur.com/list-sites-promote-free-amazon-books/