The Kindle Daily Deal – The Best Promotion in ePublishing
Several months ago, Kindle launched the Daily Deal – one title offered for 24 hours at a price reduction of around 75%. RosettaBooks has placed six Daily Deals:
- Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
- Brave New World Revisited by Aldous Huxley
- Principle Centered Leadership by Stephen R. Covey
- Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut
- On Gold Mountain by Lisa See
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
All six of these titles became top ten titles in the Kindle Store (all categories) on the day of the Daily Deal. Most became #1. In the several weeks that followed the selection as the Daily Deal, the titles were first top 25 titles in the Kindle Store (all categories), then top 50 titles, then top 100 titles, etc. These store rankings were vast gains from the typical range of store rankings for these titles.
The spike in unit sales was mainly in the 24-hour period of the Daily Deal selection. In the first few weeks after the selection, the total number of units sold was a substantial percentage of the units sold on the day of selection. Since all of those later units were sold at full digital list price, the author and RosettaBooks earned much more money in the weeks after the Daily Deal selection than on the day of the selection itself.
On the day of a Daily Deal selection, we are seeing one-day sales gains of more than 100 times a typical day of sales for the same title. We are seeing sales gains of fifty times and more for the weeks immediately after the Daily Deal selection, versus the weeks immediately before. Ultimately, we are seeing site rankings for the titles better than before the Daily Deal selection – so the promotion is finding new readers for the title, not cannibalizing buyers who would have bought the title anyway at a higher price. Why is there such a high rate of sale after the Daily Deal selection? There is no special ongoing promotion. There has to be consumer awareness from the big one-day promotion about the title (the consumer just acted too late to get the special sales price), and there must be some strong word of mouth from people who do buy the title on the day of the Daily Deal.
The Rosetta titles selected for the Daily Deal:
- Were published a long time ago.
- Have had no active promotion from their print publisher in decades.
- Are typically not among the top half of Rosetta’s title portfolio in current ebook sales.
What clearer demonstration can there be of the power of price cuts accompanied with major site promotion?
