The promotion of the eBook Emergence ran from 8/22 to 9/5.  Here’s the results and what I learned.

The price on Amazon and Barnes & Noble was lowered from $3.99 to $0.99.  For a fee, twenty different services sent an email to their clients on a designated day during that period announcing the discount and two others sent out dozens of tweets about the discount. 

379 copies of Emergence were sold for $0.99. Happily also about 20 copies each of the other two books in the series, Factotum and Inheritance, were also sold at the regular price. Thirteen Emergence eBooks were sold on Barnes and Noble, all the rest of the sales were on Amazon.

Three book reviews of Emergence were posted on Amazon. One of the reviews had 2-stars from a person who never rated anything higher than 3-stars. The other two were 5-star reviews.

It was difficult to assess the effectiveness of each of the services. One pattern that seemed to emerge was that the emails were far more effective than the tweets.

The fees for these services exceeded the revenues by quite a margin. In an effort to reduce the gap in the next discount promotion later this year, some services whose email presentation did not look good and the sales on their day were low will be dropped.

One service that exceeded my expectations in terms of the service they provided was It’s Write Now. They sent out the promised email announcement. They also tweeted the announcement and they set up and published an author interview which thought was well done. I’ve added the interview to my website.

The hope was that revenues would at least cover the fees.  That didn’t happen, but having so many people read my books is a good thing.  It was also heartening to see that some who purchased Emergence also purchased the other books in the series and it would be great to see more of this as people finish reading Emergence.

Also, getting reviews is a very helpful outcome.  Hopefully more will come as people finish the books.  Another very good outcome is that Emergence has been in the top 100 hundred best selling books in the Amazon category  Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children’s eBooks > Science Fiction, Fantasy & Scary Stories > Science Fiction during this entire promotion.  The highest it has been is #6, it has been #20 or lower during much of the time.

One more item of note is that a Goodreads giveaway of Emergence paperbacks was set up to end on 9/1.  When that ended, the 643 people who did not win a copy in that giveaway were notified of the eBook discount.