In October 2025, I noticed that my sales for The Fool had reduced quite a bit since the surges of July (first release) and August (book launch). I thought I’d break down exactly what I did about it for archiving purposes and in case any other writers could learn from me.

Before the sale

To set the scene, here are my pre-sale numbers:

At the beginning of December, before my sale, I had sold 127 copies. Across Goodreads, Storygraph and Amazon, I had 34 reviews, mostly from strangers. To me, this is kind of incredible. If I published a fanfic and got 127 hits and 34 comments, I’d be thrilled! And the comment button is right below a fanfic, no extra steps involved!

I felt confident in the quality of the book. I just needed more people to read it.

The lead up

I started entering competitions, though that’s a bit of a longer term game. I applied for a review from Self-Publishing Review—although a paid service, I read through a number of reviews and they looked very balanced. I had a bit of a research into promotions and came across Bookbub’s newsletter. I’d heard of it before, but I hadn’t looked into it.

Reader, it’s not cheap. But it would put my book in front of a lot more eyes. I decided to apply.

Now, Bookbub only features books that are discounted or free, and it’s significantly cheaper if it’s free (though of course you don’t make money from it, so it very well may even out). I decided that my priority was to have as many people see it as possible, so I’d make it free for a week. I applied for the week that coincidentally ended on the 21st of December, which is a significant date in the book.

It didn’t get selected, probably because I don’t have a huge number of reviews and I haven’t won any competitions. But I did get selected for the Kobo’s Editors’ Pick for free ebooks when I applied for that, because I figured I might as well double up.

I was incredibly lucky that on the first day of my sale, the review from Self-Publishing Review came through, and it was glowing. You can read that here. I was able to use that as social proof for my promotions, which was a blessing because I’m not exactly a natural at advertising.

I then scheduled my sale on my website, Google and Draft2Digital (D2D). Then I found out one of the quirks of Amazon when you choose to publish wide: they don’t let you schedule sales.

Amazon

There’s a common misconception that you’re not allowed to publish your book at a cheaper price if you sell through Amazon. I scoured my contract and couldn’t find anything in it, despite the fact that it’s in loads of online articles.

If you’re publishing in other places in addition to Amazon, you can’t enrol in Kindle Unlimited, in some countries you get half the royalties of those who go exclusive, and you can’t do promotional things such as scheduling sales.

You can, however, request a price match. This is perhaps why people think you can’t sell it cheaper—if Amazon finds out, they’ll match it, whether you ask or not. The internet informed me that I could ask them to do this in advance. The Amazon workers had not read the same articles I did.

Every time I emailed them, they had a reason not to match the price. By the time I actually got them to put my book on sale, it was Saturday, the second-last day. Despite this, 107 people downloaded through them. I’m still so annoyed I couldn’t direct people to them for 5/7 of my sale. I hate to think how many more downloads I could have gotten.

Advertising

Even though I hadn’t been selected for Bookbub’s feature, I decided to give their advertising a go.

I felt I couldn’t do it until I had Amazon playing along, so I only did it for the weekend. Considering the cost, this was probably a good call.

I started with two very careful designs that a friend helped me with and chose a couple of different targets. You target people based on the authors they follow, and you can narrow it by genre as well. After a little while, I started throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if I could increase my CTM.

Simple designs, small targets. It’s what they advise and it’s because it works. I’m hopeful that next time I try Bookbub ads, I’ll have a better idea of which authors to compare my book to. I have to get reading more indie fantasy!

I also tried Tumblr Blaze on the post I made promoting the sale that somehow became one of my most successful posts even before I blazed it. I figured it was only $10USD.

Results

This graph shows the distribution of sales over each sales platform.

Before my sale, I’d sold 127 books, which I was pretty happy with for a first time author with limited social media knowledge.

Through my sale, 356 people downloaded my book, meaning that at the end of December 483 people had a copy of The Fool. I also generated 12 paid sales for December, which was higher than October and November.

Now that I’ve let January pass, I can see that I sold 27 copies, my 3rd best month since release. My goal for the sale was lots of readers so that I could get more reviews, which would translate into more paid readers. It seems to have worked!

What I learnt

Professional reviews hold a lot of weight. When I release future books, getting these reviews should be a priority in advance to publishing.

I’ll also seek out more ARC readers. I hadn’t been on Instagram and Threads long enough to realise that it was okay to reach out to readers to ask them to review and I didn’t really know what I was doing with promotion. I think I ended up getting about 10 ARC readers who weren’t friends or family, not all of whom reviewed.

Authentic, excited posts gain more traction on Tumblr. Which I knew! But it’s easy to forget.

When advertising, less is more. Next time I’ll try and make an ad with the fewest words I can.

I need to read more in the indie fantasy scene. On Bookbub, people who follow indie authors are more likely to buy indie books, so reading fantasy books in general isn’t enough. I need greater familiarity with books in my genre.

Amazon was almost the biggest driver of downloads despite the small timeframe. Next time, I’ll use the chat function to bother a person in real time, which is what I ended up needing to do.

Final thoughts

I’m really pleased with this experiment and it’s one I’ll probably repeat when I release a sequel towards the end of 2026, though probably without the Bookbub advertising. I learnt a lot and I got a lot more eyes on my book.