Being a new – or newish – author means making mistakes. You do it often, but if you are serious about the work, if writing is your passion, you dust yourself off when you fall, you learn from your mistakes, and you move on.
Or, if you are like me, you blog about them.
Have you noticed how often my blog posts begin by sharing the lessons I have learned from a pattern of mistakes? I have a theory on why this happens that has to do with shiny objects, but I will save that for another post.
Today, I am going to talk about stacked promotions, what they are, how they work and when to use them. I am also going to share the expert advice I discovered after I had already shelled out $400 that I really couldn’t spare, to load up my stacked promotion the wrong way. More on that later.
What is a Stacked Promotion?
A lot of authors operate under the misconception that a combination of price promotions equals a stacked promotion. The discount usually leads to a stacked promotion, but they are not the same thing at all.
A price promotion is just that, a fixed period during which you promote your book using discounted pricing. A stacked promotion would be a way to advertise – or promote – those discounted days.
To be more precise, “Promo stacking refers to the marketing practice of running multiple coordinated marketing campaigns within a set time frame with the goal of increasing the sales and rank of a specific title or series.” That is the official definition given in a comprehensive article on the subject “Promo Stacking: Effective Strategies For Every Author” published on writtenwordmedia.com this summer.
The purpose of promo stacking is pretty straightforward. You want to stack when you are trying to reach a wider audience or just a larger one. You might use it during a launch, a price promotion, or if you are shooting to land on a bestseller list. Generally, it is more effective when used for a specific, limited-time event.
How to Promo Stack
There are a variety of strategies for the best ways to promo stack to achieve your purpose, but they all agree on what you can stack. There are a fixed number of options you have as an author for effectively using your promotion dollars; therefore, a promo stack will involve some combination of these.
These are the more regularly used promotion vehicles:
- paid advertising – on Amazon, Facebook, Goodreads
- paid or free book promotions sites – BookBub, Fussy Librarian
- Social Media – Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter
- your network – blog tours and newsletter swaps, joint promotions
- email campaigns – reaching out to your fans directly
And then there are the more obscure or less used vehicles:
- Organic – SEO, algorithms and recommendations, word of mouth
- Additional Content Marketing – guest posts and podcasts,
- PR and Media Coverage – local papers, magazines…
- In-person events – speaking engagements, book signings…
- Merchandising – opportunities with Amazon, Draft2Digital or more
A Word of Warning
Let me start with three cautionary statements. First, none of these options is inherently better than others, although some are more effective. Second, some choices are more costly than others. And third, you absolutely cannot do them all.
Let me address this first point with a lesson I learned the hard way. Promo stacking takes time and effort, more effort than you might think. Sure, you can hire someone on Fiverr.com to submit your promotion request to dozens of sites, but there will still be plenty of work for you, designing your promotions, choosing locations, timing, strategy. So be selective. Also, remember my second point, promo stacking can get expensive.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”‘What is Promo Stacking…’ Promo stacking takes time and more effort than you might think. Also, remember my second point, promo stacking can get expensive. #amwriting” quote=”Promo stacking takes time and effort, more effort than you might think. Sure, you can hire someone on Fiverr.com to submit your promotion request to dozens of sites, but there will still be plenty of work for you, designing your promotions, choosing locations, timing, strategy. So be selective. Also, remember my second point, promo stacking can get expensive.”]
For my stacked promotion, I chose a combination of paid options and free options to make my money go farther. I started with paid book sites like Redfeatherromance.com and Redhotandromantic.com because they are targeting to my audience and I have had good luck with promotions there in the past. Once they were locked in, I reviewed my budget and timing and went from there.
What I Chose – and What I Rejected
For me, some of the choices were easy, some less so. I chose to run a five-day stack during a price promotion leading up to the launch of my new series. I made the first book of my Beguiling Bachelor series, Bedazzled, free. Beholden, book 2, I reduced to 99¢ and book 3, Bedeviled, went on sale for $1.99. I left the newest novel, Besotted, at full price – $2.99. I ran the promotion October 9-13 on Amazon. As I write this, I am #200 on Amazon for all free books, #3 in my genre, and on track to reach 1000 new readers. Of course, it is only day one. But if I selected my promotions wisely, this will continue. I promise to share the complete results next month.
Once I had my romance newsletters in place, I went with the advice of Nicholas Erik, in his Author Marketing Guide on Promotion. His synthesis of dozens of author’s experiences over multiple years has become my marketing bible. And what did Nicholas say? He said a lot. Especially on the subject of getting Amazon algorithms to boost my efforts.
“It’s important to note that spikes aren’t “penalized” – selling a lot of books in a day is never a bad thing. However, you can amplify the effect of those sales when you spread them out over multiple days, rather than firing all of your promo sites, newsletter, social media and blogging efforts on a single day.”
Nicholas goes into great detail about how the algorithms work and the four-day lag to consider when an author is a Kindle Unlimited participant, as I am. Using his theories, which I learned after I booked most of my paid promotions (I told you I would share my mistakes), I ran promotions for five full days. Sadly, Nicholas also tells authors to promote with an eye toward increasing the numbers of newsletter subscribers they reach at the end of the promotion, but I read this too late and ended up front-loading my stacked promo. I will try to compensate for this with free promotion options.
So, back to my choices
I have built up an incredible network of romance authors through the opportunities I offer them to promote their work on Tuesday’s Maddy’s Romance Madness blog. I also have an assistant, Crystal, who is a whiz at blog tours. So that networking became an excellent option for my promotion stack. I have a great list of fans for my newsletter, so that too went in the mix. I have no experience with paid advertising, so I skipped that one for now but I was doing a lot of promoting on social media, so I figured I could always boost a post or two. So far, I haven’t opted to do that, but the numbers on days four and five will drive that decision. Remember, I want to end the five days on an upswing.
As for social media, I focused on Facebook where I have a strong following. I designed several different carousels, teaser, video, and static posts. Then I identified more than a dozen Facebook groups that would be prime targets for promotion in addition to my followers – groups of romance readers and Kindle promotion groups. These groups would have a combined audience in the tens of thousands, all free. Just to be safe, I planned a series of Tweets too.
More About Nicholas Erik and his Marketing Guides
Oh, do I wish I had read this before I paid for this promotion. Nicholas Erik has done his homework as I said, collecting data from a wide variety of authors. And smack in the middle of the page on visibility, Nicholas tells you the top five methods for fiction authors to drive traffic:
- your newsletter
- Amazon algorithms and recommendations
- pay-per-click advertising
- paid newsletter promotions
- one – and only one – other option from the list
Remember, no one can do it all.
So, how was I faring against the expert advice? I had my newsletter set to go at the end of September and reminder emails during the promotion. My paid newsletter promotions were all set, although they were not designed to end with a broader audience the last days. With no clue how to even create a compelling ad, I avoided pay-per-click advertising. And I had spent so much money on my paid newsletters that I had no money left for ads.
That left my one other choice. Count on me to try to overachieve. I had a blog tour in the works, along with lots of posts for Facebook and Twitter. Had I spread myself too thin? The results next month will let me know.
I will admit that I felt overwhelmed trying to keep track of what was happening when and where. So from that respect, I did too much. I had Google spreadsheets galore to keep me on track, and as I mentioned at the start, I had spent a lot of money to promote a book that would make me next to nothing. Everything, and I mean everything, hinged on driving those Kindle Unlimited sales and my books’ rankings.
Don’t Do it Wrong, Do it Right
Now that I have learned more about stacked promotions, I have some hard-won wisdom to share.
First, limit your budget for paid newsletters and leave some dollars for paid ads. Ads are better targeted, and often cheaper. If you can’t get a Bookbub ad, which is worth every penny, choose your alternative sites wisely, targeting where you can and comparing cost per potential reach carefully. All promotion newsletters are not created equal.
Second, recognize just how much you can handle. Stacking promotions is time-consuming and expensive. Know your limits.
Third, follow the strategies outlined by the experts for your specific goal – launch, price promotion or ranking. They differ slightly, and experienced experts have laid out exactly what to do. Do your homework. This is not the time to experiment unless you have money to burn.
Final Thoughts
All of that said, I am beyond excited halfway through my first promotion day. The numbers are encouraging, and I am hearing from existing fans that they appreciate a chance to save money to finish the series. It’s too soon to see if I get a long-term boost, new subscribers to my email list or the carry-over to the new series launch but I feel confident that I will do a stacked promotion again. I will just learn from my own mistakes and do it smarter.
Gem of the Week
Long before I set out to do this stacked promotion, I had bookmarked both the Nicholas Erik Marketing Guides and the Written Word Media article on my computer. I found both after I needed them. I estimate that I would have spent at least $100 less for this promotion, or moved that money to more targeted pay-per-click advertising if I had just read the articles before I scheduled my paid promotions instead of after.
My costly mistake was that I forgot I had a secure, free, searchable repository for these articles, books, images, and ideas – Evernote. I had failed to use a tool in my arsenal that would have made it easy to search “stacked promotions” or “promo stacking” and found exactly what I needed when I needed it. Learn from my mistakes and get this gem.
If you are unfamiliar with Evernote or use something less versatile or user-friendly like Dropbox, you will want to look at Evernote more closely. It reduces the data you store on your computer, is great for personal and business use – especially now that they have added templates (see menu planning and meeting notes for an idea of their versatility). You can save with tags, in notebooks, use templates for travel, home, work, sales, and search on just about anything to find your files later, including searching PDF content.
Did I mention you can access it from all your devices? Learn more or sign up for your account here.
Want to dive deeper on any of these topics?
- For a bible on Stacking Promotions read the entire Promo Stacking article at https://www.writtenwordmedia.com/2018/06/25/promo-stacking-effective-strategies-for-every-author/.
- For more on which stacking strategies to select depending on your goals read the marketing guides at NicholasErik.com
- To compare free and premium features: Evernote at http://bit.ly/2pKh9kt.