It's Time To Check Your "Free Sample".

We launched a new book, “Operation Chariot”, at the beginning of June this year.

​Given the popularity of our “Carter’s Commandos” series of books, we expected this new title to fly off the shelf, as fans of the earlier series came back to read this new offering.
 
We were disappointed,
 
The new book did sell, but not in the volumes we had expected. This puzzled us because we had put a lot of time and effort into marketing the book in advance of its launch. We were sure that the thousands of readers who had enjoyed Carter’s Commandos would be thrilled by this new book.
 
So why wasn’t it selling as well as the Carter’s Commandos series, which is continuing to do well?

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We checked the data from our marketing campaign and found that we were getting plenty of link clicks to the sales page. But the clicks weren’t converting to sales. Well, not as many sales as the number of clicks suggested we should be getting.
 
If you are familiar with our previous blogs on marketing, you will know that we have always said that if you are getting link clicks but not getting sales, it means that there is something wrong with your book’s sales page.
 
It might be your cover, it might be your blurb, it might be the reviews, or it might be the “free sample” as Amazon now call their “look inside” feature.

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We analysed each of those four things in turn to see what might be putting readers off.
 
We quickly ruled out a problem with the cover.
 
The cover image has been used in all our marketing, so people have seen it already and clicked on the link. That is “social proof” (as it is known) that readers aren’t being put off by the cover, so seeing it again on the sales page is hardly going to put them off buying.
 
This applies to the blurb too. The blurb is the primary text we use in our advertising, so if people have seen the cover image, read the blurb and then clicked the link, it means that the two things have encouraged the link click, not discouraged it.
 
Reviews are a tricky one. This is a new book. It hadn’t been read before, so it doesn’t have any reviews. We’ll have to wait for the jury to return on that but at the time of writing this blog the book has garnered 5 "ratings", all of which are 4 or 5 star.
 
So that just left the free sample.

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We clicked on it and saw immediately what the problem was.
 
The free sample opened up on the book’s “foreword”.

This was a few paragraphs intended to introduce the reader to the new series, why it had been written and the differences in writing style that might be seen by readers of the “Carter’s Commandos” series.
 
What it didn’t do, however, was get the reader engaged with the story. To get to that the reader had to scroll through the whole thing before they got to the proper opening of the book.
 
Why was the free sample opening on the foreword and not on the first chapter?
 
Because KDP and Amazon’s formatting engine interpreted the foreword as a chapter. So as far as Amazon was concerned, it was displaying the start of the story.

​Readers, however, could see that it wasn’t the start of the story and some of them were deciding not to scroll through to find the actual start. They just went back to scrolling through whatever platform they had been on before they clicked the link.

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​We had lost a potential sale.
 
Worse than that, we had paid for a link click before we lost the sale!
 
So, what could we do about that?
 
The answer was simple, if a little unconventional.
 
We moved the foreword from the start of the book to after the end. We even added a short explanation to it, to say why it was at the end and not the beginning.
 
This only affects the Kindle version, of course. The paperback version still has the foreword at the beginning where it should be. But by the time the reader has discovered that, the book is in their hands, and they can flick past it if they don’t want to read it.
 
But the free sample is always taken from the ebook version, so paperback readers will also be taken straight into the story when they read that.

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Did it change anything?
 
Yes it did.
 
The sales graph for the book, which had been consistent but low, suddenly took a step upwards. More copies were sold each day from that point onwards.
 
And it cost us nothing but a little bit of time and effort to find the reasons for the disappointingly low sales and to make the changes to the manuscript.
 
So, if your sales aren’t doing as well as the link clicks from your marketing say they should be doing, why not take a look at the book’s free sample to see if the reader is being excited by what they see on the first page, or being bored by the non-essentials that are put into the opening pages of books.
 
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