Business Post: Results from the Return to the Realm Sale (Patreon)

Alright, we recently ran the Return to the Realm Sale which highlighted and put on sale / gave away free book 2's.

Now, obviously, I don't have results from those who took part. However, here's some details on how it went for me:

The Basics

We had five (5) series added to the sale, 2 were put free and available for download, 3 were priced at $0.99. 

All these numbers are Amazon only (takes a bit to get wide data and I'm lazy).

Books Sold / Given Away

Gave away 2090 books (1100 and 910 (note, this book was wide and this is ONLY Amazon giveaways)) for the free books. Generated 26 borrows (i.e KU books read for the single book that was in KU) for the 5 days and also sold 2 physical books for that same book (it was for the First Stop). 

For the $0.99 sales, we sold a total of 47 (23/11/12) ebooks and 1 physical book. 

Financial Results & Analysis

Financially, for that same period of the previous week, we actually made a little less (about 7% drop in revenue) because we have the free books (but only a little). Basically, sales were up significantly, borrows down from previous month (and free books obviously way up on the giveaway). 

Most of that loss though was on my major 2 series, while the lower sales series I put up actually saw a lot more traffic. In general, having the less popular series was an overall benefit in such a big sale.

On a series based level; we saw a 13.9% overall increase in revenue for the series involved compared to the same period in the previous week. I expect we'll see an overall increase over the next few weeks too as people are kicked back into reading the whole series, which should an overall bump in revenue over the period. 

Conclusion

Definitely a success. It did take some time putting it all together, but it was enough of a boost in sales that it actually made sense to run this. We're doing a sign-up form specifically for this sale, so we're hoping to get a few people who are interested in it for next year.

Also, next year, we'll try to get more buy-in from more authors. The more authors involved, I think, the better for overall sales I'd say (assuming said authors do some pushing too!).