The Fussy Librarian ebook promotion website has started to publish some valuable data detailing numbers of clicks and cost-per-click on recent free ebook promotions.
The site is aiming to help authors by increasing transparency and started collecting this data at the start of June and is updating it daily. The titles of the books being promoted are not given but the promotions are sorted into genres.
TFL doesn’t give the number of downloads for each title as it points out that Amazon prohibits the use of tracking IDs in emails, which would give download numbers.
I’ve taken a screenshot of mystery titles to show an example of the figures. The columns show from the left: date of promo, genre, A = Amazon-only, W = wide distribution, number of clicks, cost of promo, cost per click, ranking achieved.
At present, the data is only available for free promotions as TFL says its bargain newsletter runs on different software which makes tracking more difficult, but it hopes to add the reporting feature in the future for bargain promos.
Obviously, it’s early days to draw conclusions but the number of clicks and cost-per-click are impressive when compared with other promotion routes.
For example, a BookBub Featured Deal for a free crime fiction title costs $783 with average downloads of 41,500 (which would represent around $0.018 per download) while the screenshot selection from The Fussy Librarian data shows a mystery title costs $43 for a free promo and has a range from a high of 6,285 clicks to around the 2,600 mark. The cost per click on the TFL sample data I’ve selected ranges from just $0.007 to around $0.016.
BookBub is, of course, the colossus, of the ebook promotion sector and a free crime title would be promoted to just over four million subscribers while TFL’s promo would be sent to just over 87,000 readers, which represents just 2% (one-fiftieth) of the BookBub total. If you multiplied TFL’s low-end figure of 2,600 clicks by 50 you would actually get an incredible 130,000 clicks, compared with BB’s average downloads of 41,500. However, you should bear in mind this isn’t a fair comparison as BB’s figures are for average downloads while TFL’s are for clicks.
What it does certainly mean, however, is that The Fussy Librarian is well worth using as it’s offering effective and affordable ebook promotions.
It recently introduced a Free Ebook Promotion Subscription where you sign up to promote your ebooks on the basis of either monthly or every two months for a fixed rate that’s lower than the usual one-off figure. For example, a monthly mystery title promo would cost $32.80 a month rather than the one-off price of $43.
You can find out more about The Fussy Librarian promotions here on their website and you can see the latest data on free promotions here on their website.
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