Adgitize

Actual Superfan Results

By: Ken Brown
Published: 2/15/2021

Creating a List of Superfans

Two weeks ago I talked about creating a superfan onboarding sequence. Like you, I read things on the internet, on Facebook and in novel marketing books I find on Amazon. I'm creating this website to show you the steps I'm taking to what I hope will one day be a six-figure income authorpreneurial business. So, I'm going to lay it out to you straight. How did my attempt at creating a list of superfans go?

Superfans to Success
There are a couple of steps to the superfan process. Step one - acquire the superfan. Step two - nourish the superfan.

My first step in the process is to acquire the superfan. I decided to take a few steps in late January to grow my superfan list. I wanted to set my first book to permafree. So you can get Eclipse of the Triple Moons, for free at the time of this article. You can find it free on all the major booksellers, Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Barne's and Noble and Smashwords. But you can't just set the price to free and expect people to rush out and get it. You can stand in the middle of a cornfield during a one-hundred plus temperature day and give away free ice-cream, But if no one knows you're out there, then you'll just stand out their watching your ice-cream melt.

That's really what it's like selling books or in my case giving them away for free. You have to let people who might be interested know about your free book. I decided to try out three advertising mediums.

• Freebooksy
• Fussy Librarian
• Facebook

The first two on the list are advertising newsletters designed for authors who want to advertise their novels. They both have newsletters for free books and discounted books. I chose the free newsletter of each and set them to run five days a part so I can get a feel for their advertising impact. The newsletters only ran one day.

How Did the Newsletter Ads Do?

I was quite impressed at their reach and the response to my ad. The Fussy Librarian ad "sold" (the book was free) 936 books on the day of the ad. I chose the fantasy genre for this ad. The Freebooksy ad "sold" 680 ads. I chose the YA fantasy for this ad. I'll have to go back and try a fantasy genre only later to see if that changes anything. I gave away a lot of free books. I was pretty stoked by the results. Did it help grow my email list?

The Facebook ad I ran for thirteen days, showing a picture of the book and making it clear the book could be purchased for free. The user had to click the link on the ad, land on my book landing page, Eclipse of the Triple Moons, and then scroll down to find the links to buy the book. I didn't get quite as strong of a response to those ads as the newsletter ads. I did find about five people a day downloaded the book to their Kindle or Apple reading device.

Did My Advertising Help Grow My Email List?

I did receive twelve people who signed up for the free book I offered to the people who signed up for the Adgitize Press Readers Group. Unfortunately, five of those twelve didn't take the second step to "Confirm" their email address, which means they didn't download the free book exclusive to the Readers Group. Which left me with seven subscribers to the newsletter. One person signed up, picked up the free book and then immediately canceled their subscription. The conversion of the people who saw the sign-up form was at forty-six percent, so decent, but there's work needed to get the readers to reach the Haskell sign-up form landing page. That's a pretty expensive process to pick up a handful of superfans, and at this point I can't guarantee they are superfans. We'll have to see over the course of a few months to find out how engaged they are with my bi-monthly newsletters.

The permafree strategy is designed to offer a free book, and the expectation is from the people who download it, a few will buy the other books in the series. Right now, I only have one more book in my series, Zita's Revenge. Everything I've read leads me to believe that the permafree program works best when you have a minimum of four to five books in your series. You shouldn't even start the process until you have that many books. So I jumped the gun as a way to test the process. I was curious. I only sold two books of Zita's Revenge. That means I didn't make a profit. Not even close. I'm pretty sure most of my "superfans" came from my Facebook ad and not organically from information I have in the back matter of the book.

I did find an interesting benefit that I didn't expect from the ads. Despite the fact I haven't run an ad for fifteen days, I'm still selling (free) four to five books a day on Amazon and Apple. That is totally amazing and I found it exciting that one day the book was in the top 150 in the sci-fi fantasy genre on Amazon, and may have run higher if I would have looked at that statistic on the days of the ads. I'm still learning and writing new books in the series. I'll let you know how it all goes. I hope this helps you in your author process.

Cheers. Remember to Write Everyday. Ken.