You may have recently seen my note about our big vision this year. We're aiming at the huge goal of giving away 50,000 free books to new readers in 2025. This is way more than we've ever done by... uh... 45,000 or so. If you want to read more about our goal you can do that by clicking here.
After revealing our big vision for the year, we got a question about it.
"Hi! Can you give more info on how this project works? Thanks!"
Where there's one curious, there's usually others. My response is below.
We got your message about how we plan to distribute 50000 books in 2025. It's pretty straightforward. There are a few aspects.
We offer our books free on our website... but those aren't the versions we're focusing on in this year's campaign because we want to get new readers. We've noticed as we've given books away for a few years that people who are already familiar with our ministry will gladly accept free things from our website, but if we want to give to new people, it is harder to give books away to strangers who don't know or trust our platform, and don't know if our books are any good. Not to mention, when we give a digital book away, it's not tied to a particular app on the readers device, so we can't guarantee the best reading experience.
I know a lot of people aren't comfortable with Amazon, but it has a very valuable function for us. It is a shared space that many of those "strangers" are already familiar with and trust, and it has a very professional and predictable reading platform that millions of people trust. It has a rating system (star reviews) that allows people to see whether what we're trying to give them is any good.
We've noticed that when we give something away free through Amazon, and if it has good reviews, people are much more likely to take it. Depending on what kind of book it is, we have been seeing around a %62 conversion rate (the percentage of people who arrive at the page who accept the free offer). I'd like to get this conversion rate even higher as our research continues.
Amazon's publishing platform allows us to do free promotions. We are allowed to give the book away for 5 days out of every 90. We can pick the dates of these days. We've noticed that if we spread them out on the calendar, the number of strangers who take the offer is higher. Now, if the plan stopped here it would probably be impossible to reach 50,000.
We advertise. This is where the money goes. We have been experimenting with the most efficient way to do this, and we're seeing pretty nice results. For our Christian fiction books, we've seen as good of a return as $0.21 per book downloaded. For our Christian non-fiction books, our best has been $0.35 per download, but we've also seen higher prices, which we don't like. I trim poorly performing ads as soon as I spot them.
Unfortunately, we can't just set up the ads and let them run. Ad performance degrades over time, so we have to constantly "refresh" the ads, try new audiences, and make adjustments based on the analytics we're getting. This is the part that takes a lot of creativity and attention. The money can go to waste if we're not paying attention to the analytics. We just simply would never reach 50,000 on the kind of budget we're talking about without constant adjustment and improvement.
It's entirely possible that as the year goes on, we'll discover methods that give even more improvement in our cost-to-download ratio, but as it is, I think we can get there with the $25,000 I quoted. It's a conservative estimate.
I'll attach a handful of ads to this email so you can see what types of ads we're running.
Interested and God bless you for the concern