How to point readers to your price promotions

This article was originally published by selfpublishing expert Matthias Matting on his German website www.selfpublisherbibel.de. He kindly gave us permission to translate it into English.

Readers and authors alike love price promotions, which can be very efficient marketing tool for e-books. The basic idea is that bargain hunters, a very particular target group, can be leveraged to boost a book’s rankings to the point where it gets noticed by the “normal readers” willing to pay regular price. But if no one knows your book is on sale, obviously, nothing happens. The sales platforms know this, and most of them take steps to bring your price promotion to the attention of their users either on their website or in newsletters. Here I attempt to give you a list of the current strategies in the table below.

I’ve included services that specially target German clients.

What should you think about before your price promotion? Give the platforms enough time for the registration of your e-book and timing of your promotion. Make sure they’re not all promoting your book on the same day. Experiments have shown that it’s better for your ranking if sales go up in several steps rather than all at once. The big guns (right now, probably XTME and Lesen.net) you should save for last.

Most of the platforms don’t charge fees, but many offer the option to purchase additional advertising (this is indicated in the table under the column “Announcements”). And that might well be worth your while, especially since there are plenty of other authors pushing their books that way these days. At present, Amazon.de runs about 300 sales promotions involving reduced prices per day.

Where to go for marketing promotions