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Deal of the Day Breakdown

As I said in the video, my estimate for the number of books I would say was 160, the actual number sold during the 24hr DotD period was 165. This means that my estimate was nearly spot on!

I immediately followed up with a Sorry You missed out sale. I discounted to 50% this time, the first time I did this I used 30%. The DotD was discounted to 60%.

The graph below have four lines.

The bottom yellow line is the average nunber of books/pdfs sold per day.

The grey line is the average cash value of those books/pdfs.

The orange line is the number of books/pdfs sold on between the start of the DotD, up until last night.

The blue line is the cash value of the books/pdfs over the same period.

What the graph shows is that the first day of the DotD is by far the most important. They start at 10am US Eastern time and end at 9:59am the day after. For me that is 3pm to 2:59pm. Nearly all the sales happen during the US afternoon and evening.

When I sent the email announcing the sale, most Americans didn’t get to read it until the following morning, so the sale peaked on the 26th.

My main concern was that by discounting by 50%, I would need to sell twice as many units to earn the same amount of money. Anything less than double the sales volume and I would be losing out, and that is bad business.

You need to compare the lines in pairs. The Orange vs Yellow and Blue vs Grey.

Orange vs Yellow

To put hard figures on the last two data points, the average number of books/pdfs sold per day, from my publisher account on DTRPG was 19/day. In the sale yesterday, I sold 39. The three lowest points were 40, 42, and 39 yesterday. So I never dipped below double the volume of sales.

Blue vs Grey

The average value of books/PDFs sold in march leading up to the sale was $40/day. These are only the sales from my Publisher account and does not include books sold through Community Content Programmes, or royalties on commissions.

The worst day for the value of sales was the 28th of March where they dipped to $57. It has hovered around that $57- $69/day for the entire second half of the week.

The sale has more than doubled my volume, but increased the value of sale by about 65%. I was worried that a doubling of volume but at 50% off, would have not earned me any increase in earnings.

How that can happen is that my more expensive titles became much more attractive during the sale, 50% off a $1.99 PDF is only $1 saved, 50% off a $7 PDF is $3.50 saved. That seems like a much better deal.

It seems like a good sale is a way of selling more, higher value PDFs, more so than selling large numbers of cheap PDFs.

My last insight is that the sale does tail off quite quickly. What I think is the most efficient is probably launch the sale and tell the world about it by whatever means possible, keep it running until after the first payday, then tell the world before the sale ends.

Last time I did a follow up sale like this, I create a banner for the sale page. This time I also put the banner on my publisher page.

You can see it at the top of the listing. I cannot imagine that it has a negative effect. If anything I think this follow up sale was more efficient than the previous one. Also using the same banner on the Sale announcement page, on my publisher page and in the email announcements, has to be a good idea.

So that is it.

The bottom line, Deals of the Day are good, and Sales are good. No real surprises.

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