087: 2,363 Downloads on our E-book in the Kindle Store + How we did it!

Today is an exciting day for us! It’s launch Day of the Brilliant Business Planner! We released our related e-book, Time Management Mama: Making Use of the Margins to Pursue Your Passions, a week earlier in the Amazon kindle store. We tried something a little different on the day we released our kindle book, we offered it for free for one day only. Listen in to hear how that went!

On the Podcast

0:45 – Why we needed a planner to track our personal and business life
2:40 – Launching our e-book in the Amazon kindle store
3:14 – How many free downloads of our book?
3:30 – How Price and Timing factored in
4:30 – Involving our audience
5:30 – Keeping our audience updated
6:54 – Facebook Offers - Why they're so powerful
9:40 – The Role Key Influencers played
11:17 – The Results of  our Free Offer

Why we needed a planner to track our personal and business life

We created a planner in order to have a place to track both our personal lives as well as our business plans and results. Our personal planners were becoming a scribbled mess of business deadlines and future plans. Plus we needed a planner that could help us organize our blog deadlines as well as strategize for our Etsy shop and products.  Our Brilliant Business Planner hits the mark on all accounts because we designed it ourselves!

Launching our e-book in the Amazon kindle store

It was a spur of the moment decision to offer Time Management Mama for free in the Amazon kindle store, but once we made the decision, we just went with it!

How many free downloads of our book?

2,363 people downloaded our book for free! That number exceeded our expectations!  (To give you some context, we had 1,100 Facebook fans when we released our book.)

Top Factors Influencing the Number of Downloads

Price and Timing

The fact that the book was free, and only free for a limited amount of time was obviously a key reason for the number of downloads. The traction would not have been there without the free price tag plus the one day only limited time offer. These factors were highly motivating.  People who liked the book wanted to make sure their friends snagged the deal before it was too late.

Involving our audience

In the course of writing our book, we polled our audience for their best tips and included as many as we could in Time Management Mama. For each tip we included in the book, we linked to the tip giver's website or shop. Our audience felt involved and connected with our book project and wanted to share their name in print with their friends.

Keeping our audience updated

Once we saw that our free book offer was gaining momentum, we kept our audience updated as to how the free day was going. We told them our stats through Facebook posts, Instagram photos and Emails. People were excited with us and continued to share.  We sent one final email at 10 PM on launch day letting everyone know that it might be possible to hit 2,000 downloads!  We thanked them for sharing and once again, got them really excited to see what would happen.

Using a Facebook offer

Beth Anne set up a Facebook offer that really added some traction to our free day. The offer feature is in the same place where you add any Facebook post to your page.

Create your offer, then select the start and end date. The feature allows people to claim the offer. When they claimed the offer, we had it take them to Time Management Mama on Amazon. The claimed offer shows up in your Facebook notifications. If you claim the offer, Facebook will send you an email to remind you to go grab it before it expires!

The Facebook offer reached 5,202 people (we paid $13 to boost the offer), had 59 likes, 47 shares, and 179 people claimed the offer. Our audience really got involved and shared! The social proof factor was also huge – when someone claims an offer, their Facebook friends then see the offer in their newsfeed showing them which of their Facebook friends have also claimed the offer.  When people see a popular offer, they often don't want to miss out.

The Role Key Influencers Played

The day before, we emailed some key influencers and gave them a copy of our PDF book for free. We also mentioned that it would be free in the kindle store the next day if they were interested in reading it in that format. The key influencers were people we had previously interviewed on our podcast, people we wanted to say thank you to. Several of these influencers posted on their blogs that our book was free which we were very appreciative of. Several others shared our news on social media.

Results of the free offer

Some of the long term results of our decision to give Time Management Mama away for free on launch day are yet to be seen. The number of downloads did significantly help our ranking on amazon in the short term, especially in the highly competitive category of time management.

After our free day, Time Management Mama moved to the paid kindle store and our rankings were very good. At one point we were #6 in a time management category and reached #1 in top new releases for time management.

Another great advantage of our free day is that a lot of people have our book in their hands! Our book contains various links back to us and to our Brilliant Business Planner, so the potential for new podcast listeners and planner purchasers is high.

Note:  In order to offer the book for free, we had to be part of KDP select for a 90 day term.  Curious to check out Time Management Mama? You can find it in the kindle store.

Does our planner sound like just what you need to run your home and business? Learn more about our planner here.

What do you think?  Are you ready to rock it in the Kindle store?  What strategies have you used to market your ebook?  

-Sarah and Beth Anne