My Fabulous February

I know the month isn’t quite over yet, but it is the 28^th and I’m too excited to wait any longer. My sales for February have been amazing! My best month yet. I have well over 3000 sales for February alone! That is almost twice the amount of my last biggest sales month which was in August 2011. One problem I noticed last time I had a great month was that the month after, my sales numbers promptly dropped to less than half. If my sales for March drop to 1500, I’ll still be happy with that. But I want to try to analyze what I did this month in order to keep the momentum going for next month.

eReader News Today Sponsorship

I paid $50 for this sponsorship and it accounted for about 900 sales over the course of two days. It was absolutely amazing and well worth the money. I would love to have one of these sponsorships each month! The problem is that they are so popular, they are booked up for the rest of the year.

Free Promotions

Several of my books are in the KDP Select program, which means I can set them as free at will. Priscilla the Great book 1 and The Queen Bee of Bridgeton are not in the program, but I used Amazon’s price matching to get them to free. I gave away about 47k books in the month of February. This is a good marketing strategy because it allows people to try your work for free and make them more likely to buy your other work. It increases your visibility on Amazon’s lists and thus gets your book in front of more readers and buyers. Here is a breakdown of my free promotions:

Book	Freebies	Feb Sales	Jan Sales	% increase
Priscilla the Great	8500	540 (books1-4)	200 (books 1-4)	170%
Ain’t No Sunshine	12,000	620	384	62%
Nobody Girl	11,000	366	35	946%
Queen Bee	12,000	207 (DiRisio)	24 (DiRisio)	763%
Shadows	978	14	0	NA

How to read the above table:

I gave away 11k copies of Nobody Girl and sold 366 this month. Last month I sold 35. A note about Shadows of St. Louis. I released that book very recently and it had no reviews. I'm hoping that it will gather some reviews and that the next free day I give it will be more successful.

Now it could have been a combination of using frequent free days that caused such an increase in sales. I had at least one book free every day this month and sometimes two. For next month, I’m going to try to use one free day a week

Giveaways on Prissy Fit

I did lots and lots of blogging and follower hops and giveaway hops over at Priscilla the Great’s blog Prissy Fit. This took a lot of time and cost quite a bit of money. I’m not even sure how much it paid off in the long run. When you go from a free book to a paid book, you can immediately see your increase in sales and know what to attribute it to. With my blog, I can’t really do that. I won’t stop blogging or anything, but in March I have a very busy schedule with midterms and three speaking engagements and I won’t be able to blog as much.