Little Rebellion Launch Reflections

The contest is over and the winners have been selected. I’m still in the process of contacting them so until I get a confirmed shipping address, I won’t be announcing the winners. But I would like to reflect back on the launch of “A Little Rebellion” and compare it to the launch of “Revolutionary RIght”, as well as give my thoughts on how the contest and other things went.

Launch Experience

First up, the general launch experience. Overall, much cooler than for “Revolutionary Right”. The first book was so rushed, we were trying to get it out before Christmas. It was my first book, which was very cool, but it felt so rushed and haphazard that I never really felt like there was a definitive day that was launch day. With book 2, Grey Gecko had grown as a company and was able to set a day to have everything go.

Even though we still rushed it some in order to have the book ready for Comicpalooza, I still have enough time to organize the contest and blog tour. It was a lot of time and effort, but it felt like something was happening on that day.

Blog Tour

The blog tour went much better than I first thought it would. So many friendly people were willing to help me out in spreading the word about the book. They were easy to work with and willing to give their time. I truly appreciate all that they did.

Some of them are also authors, so please, check out their books and continue to visit their blogs

• TK Toppin‘s “Idle Rambling’s” Blog
• Heidi Ruby Miller‘s “Just a Girl” blog
• Cassandra Davis‘ “Cassandra’s Muse” blog
• Katje Van Loon‘s “Bacon and Whiskey” blog
• Pippa Jay Green‘s “Adventure’s in Scifi” blog
• Hilary Lesch’s “Novel D’Tales” blog
• Peter Bradbury‘s “PeterBradbury Blog“
• DA Bale‘s “Indie Author’s”
• Gayle Ramage’s “Gayle Ramage-Author”
• Katje Van Loon‘s “Gossip Diet” blog
• Laurie J’s ”Laurie’s Thoughts and Reviews”
• Diana Ramsey’s “Off Beat Vagabond”

Blitz

The prelaunch blitz was a bit of a mixed bag. Many people agreed to  participate but only through a Facebook event that I created. Only 3 people signed up based on my blog post. In total, about ~40 people signed up, plus some family members via phone or email. On the first day, the sales went great. The book went as high as #39 in Space Opera and #4552 overall in Kindle books. That’s pretty good for an unknown author.

Despite that nice launch boost, it failed to achieve it’s primary objective of raising the books awareness among strangers.  Amazon Sales rank has since plummeted and don’t think there have been but a handful of genuine sales since launch day. It was a great boost and I’m grateful to everyone who helped out, but the concept did not work as intended.

It’s possible the core idea is sound, and it merely needs some adjustment. Perhaps running it over two days instead of one will help it remain visible.  Or better coordinating the blog tour and some reviews to coincide with the day after the blitz. The problem there is Amazon took 24hrs to put the book up for sale, when normally it takes about 3. So we had to reschedule the launch. That’s easily fixed though.

Reviews

With “Revolutionary Right”  I submitted the book to about 10 different review sites. Only one agreed to review it, and that was a paid site. For “A Little Rebellion”, I submitted the book to over 40 review sites. So far none of them have reviewed it, though 3 have agreed too and 3 more have asked for copies. We’ll see what happens.

Contest

As for the contest, this was also a mixed bag. The idea behind the contest was A) To reward people who participated in helping me get the word out about the book B) Help generate more visitors to the website and more regular comments. On point A, I feel it succeeded. Most of the winners are coming from the pool of people who participated in the Blog Tour or the Blitz.

The reason for that, is that it completely failed on point B. A total of 72 new comments were made during the month of the contest. All but a few of those were on the week Sci-fi/Fantasy Saturday snippet posts. The numbers on each of those posts is consistent with what they were before I started the contest.

In terms of raw visitors, for the month before the contest, I had 694 visitors, 359 of them unique.  For the month of contest I had 574 visitors, 325 of them unique. Those numbers are pretty close, indicating no increase in traffic. If anything, the contest drove people away.

Conclusions

Overall, I’d say the contest and tour were worthwhile experiences. I got to know several nice people and information about the book got out to a far larger audience than the first one did. It may not have translated directly to more sales but it was more about spreading the word. As a tool to drive people to this blog, the contest utterly failed.  Will I do it again? Probably, but I’ll likely make some alterations.

First being planning further in advance. I want to try and get a bunch of reviews done in a short window around launch. Compressing the blog tour to maybe just a week. Maybe spreading the blitz out to two days. Though I might now do that again. I hate spamming friends and family for that kind of thing.