How Email Promos Actually Work (and Why They Still Sell Books)

Ricci Wolman: [00:00:00] If you’re on a platform, there might be a reader out there on Facebook or TikTok who wants to see your content, and they just don’t. If they’re subscribed to your email, if they wanna see your content, it’s sitting there in their inbox and they can open it and click on it whenever they want. And so we are big believers in email marketing as being the most powerful form of digital marketing still.

Ferol Vernon: Welcome to the Written Word podcast. The podcast for authors who want to build a successful writing career. I am Ferol Vernon, and I’m here with Ricci Wolman. And this is the Written Word Media Pod. Hey everyone and welcome to the Written Word Pod, uh, the podcast for authors who want to build successful writing careers, I am Ferol Vernon here with Ricci Wolman.

And, uh, today we are tackling email promos. We’re gonna go through what an email promo is, break down all the details and really get into it. Uh, how you doing, Ricci? 

Ricci Wolman: Great. Happy to be here today, Farrell, and very excited about this topic. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, this is, uh, something near and dear to our heart as Written Word [00:01:00] media really got its start with email promos and is still a huge part of what we do.

Uh, although it’s no longer the only thing that we do. But let’s start about, you know, really setting the table and doing a definition. So what, what is an email promo and, you know. Who cares? 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, I think I’m gonna start with a little bit of our Genesis story, so authors understand the context in which email promos were born, um, which was probably around 11, 12 years ago at this point.

But I, my background is in digital marketing, and at the time I was running a. Digital marketing agency. This was right when Facebook and social media was becoming a thing and my mom had written a book and um, had published it direct right about then. Kindle Direct Publishing was fairly new. And, um, I was helping her with some of the marketing, and one of the things that we tried was to set her book free as a way to get it out there as a marketing tactic, because free [00:02:00] is one of the most powerful marketing tactics out there.

And so we had set her book for free on KDP. And, um, you know, was super excited and started to watch what would happen on the day, on her free day. And, um, absolutely nothing happened. She did not get any free downloads and we were, um, disappointed, but I was mostly just really surprised because I was stumped by the fact that this book is out there for free.

Why is no one grabbing it? And it turns out that whether your book is free or 99 cents or 9 99 or $99, you have the same problem, which is just being on Amazon at a certain price point. Nobody really knows that you’re out there. You’re competing with millions of other books and titles, and I know someone specifically going to look for it.

It’s really hard to get any visibility for that book. So I started thinking about, okay, well how do we create visibility for this? And as [00:03:00] I said, right then, Facebook was fairly new. You could create a brand page was all the buzz. So I created a brand page called Free Boxy, and I started selecting. A free book a day, um, and building the audience on that Facebook page to see if that would be a way to start directing traffic to these free books on Amazon.

’cause at the time there were plenty of free books available on a daily basis, but it wasn’t just my mom. Other authors were having the same problem. Just having a free book out there wasn’t really doing much. And back then, you know, you, you could get a lot of fans really cheaply and every time you posted on Facebook, all your fans saw your posts.

So it was a magical time. And, um, we, you know, once we started getting a, an audience of, you know, a couple thousand people, we’d post a book and that book would shoot up the, the charts on Amazon, because now people were seeing the book, traffic was being driven to the book on Amazon and downloads were happening.

But, you know. [00:04:00] Uh, nothing good lasts forever. And Facebook started throttling the reach of those organic posts and we realized pretty quickly that in order to make this sustainable, we would have to move to a different type of marketing platform. And email marketing, uh, was something that was really controllable.

You weren’t at the whims of a social media platform. So we started porting all of our users from Facebook onto email. And, uh, that process was started around 10 years ago, and now all of our focus is on having an audience on email and Right, similar to how we used to do it on Facebook by putting the book in front of users who are on Facebook on any given day.

Um, now we send an email to readers every single day they see that book and that drives a ton of traffic over to Amazon. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, I think, you know, the story is so important for people to understand because we didn’t build the company exactly to what it is today without listening to the authors and figuring out what we need to do to sell [00:05:00] books for them.

And I want to just circle back to something that you said that think’s really important because there’s a reason why Written Word media uses email as its primary way to drive. Action for authors and not Facebook and social. And you said something, you said Facebook is throttling the organic reach. So can you talk a little bit about like, you know, what, what does it mean to throttle and what are the differences between, you know, promoting something on Facebook versus promoting something in an email?

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so on Facebook or TikTok or any of these social platforms, although you may have an audience or a following, you actually aren’t guaranteed to reach those people every time that you post. When people say throttling, it just means that, say you have a thousand fans on Facebook and you post something, maybe only a hundred of them will see it.

That’s only 10%, right? So Facebook is throttling your reach by not allowing all 1000 of your users to see that post. Now, when it comes to email marketing, you have. Much more control. If you have a thousand [00:06:00] readers on your email list and you send that. Email to a thousand readers, all thousand readers will get that email in their inbox, and some percentage of them are going to open that email.

It’s gonna be a much higher percentage than you get on social. And the choice is the readers, not the platforms. That’s the big difference. So if you’re on a platform, there might be a reader out there. On Facebook or TikTok who wants to see your content and they just don’t. If they’re subscribed to your email, if they wanna see your content, it’s sitting there in their inbox and they can open it and click on it whenever they want.

And so we are big believers in email marketing as being the most powerful form of digital marketing. Still, it’s not. You know, the sexiest, ’cause it’s been around for decades. Um, and people think, oh, does it still really work? You know, do I really need to do email marketing? And, um, the short answer is yes, absolutely.

Email marketing is super powerful. We’ll have another part all about email marketing and how it all works, but at its heart, the promos that we [00:07:00] run are dependent on email marketing. And the reason that the promos that. We run and we’ll talk about what we do and we’ll talk about, you know, email promos in general.

’cause there are other people who provide the service, but they’re successful because we build audience. So you need to be getting readers onto that list and keeping that list really fresh with engaged readers in order to see the results on your book. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, I think that’s really important for people to understand.

And you know, there’s this common misconception that like, oh, you know, isn’t everybody on TikTok now? Isn’t everybody on this? And the sort of game that’s played is. You know, on TikTok and some of the social platforms, you can quote unquote, go viral. Now, the dirty secret that they don’t want you to know is that a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction of percent of people actually go viral.

The overwhelming majority of people simply post into the ether, and then they have this throttling thing that they have to combat. Whereas email marketing and email promos are far more reliable and direct [00:08:00] and, you know, permission based. If somebody just wax a little thumbs up icon or a hard icon on a social platform, they’re not really indicating as much interest as when we’ve actually had an ad or something that we’ve talked to the reader, and the reader has said, I, I really wanna receive these emails and here are the genres that I like.

So it’s a much higher, uh, value reader that you’re reaching through an email newsletter service like ours versus something on social. 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, and I think, um, it’s important to talk about the mechanics of how promos work. So, you know, we run promo sites, there are other promo sites out there, but fundamentally they all function the same way, which is readers sign up to a list for us.

It might be free box or bargain boxy for some of the others out there, um, which also happened to be our partners. It might be Fussy Librarian or I Read, or IQ or one of those. But how it works is. A reader will come to Free Boxy, say, and they’ll input in their information. So [00:09:00] let’s just say, you know, Farrell’s a reader, he comes to Free Boxy, and he’ll say, Hey, here’s my email address.

I like to read on a Kindle, and I’m into sci-fi and fantasy. So that information then gets. Pulled into our system. So we know that Farrell likes Sci-fi fantasy and he wants free books on a Kindle. And then that’s one half of the equation. The second half of the equation is then an author. Let’s say I’m an author, so Ricci comes along and I say, Hey, I’m a sci-fi author, and my book’s gonna be free next Wednesday.

And I go to free books and I say, Hey, I’d love my sci-fi book to be in free box C next Wednesday. I put all the information in, I pay whatever the price is for that, and then next Wednesday. The free Booksy email goes out. It has Ricci, the author’s sci-fi book in it, and Farrell gets that email and he only sees free sci-fi books.

In that email, generally he’ll see anywhere from one to four sci-fi books in that email. And then as a reader, it’s highly relevant to him. [00:10:00] He opens it, he clicks, he downloads the book. So in many respects, it’s a kind of a perfect one for one matching system between the authors works in genre, and the reader who’s very much interested in those works in genre.

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, so I think that that’s great. But let’s focus a little bit more on the author’s perspective, right? So an author’s basically understands how this thing works. You know, email is great, it’s gonna actually drive sales. How do they pick the right promo? How do they select when this is the right time to run a promo?

Let’s talk through the author experience of, okay, let’s say there’s somebody out there listening who’s never run an email promo. What do they do next? And how do they actually execute one well? 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so promo is short for promotion. So traditionally authors will run a promo or a promotion when you’re doing something special around your price.

So most promos and most promo sites require you to have some kind of special price. Um, generally the buckets are free. You could be putting [00:11:00] your book for free. The reason that free is one of the buckets is because. As we talked about, free is really powerful, but if you are in KDP select part of their exclusive program, you do get up to five free day free days every 90 days.

So you get up to free, you get up to five free days every quarter, and um, you can set whatever date you want your book to be free. So if you’re gonna run a free promotion, you’re gonna drop your price to free for some number of days. That’s one bucket. The second bucket is on a price discount. Generally, 99 cents is kind of the best P practice, universal discounted price that most promo sites will accept.

Our properties will go all the way up to 4 99, so you’re dropping your price to 99 cents, 1 99 to 90. 3 99 or 4 99, you can run a promo on them. Many of the other promo sites out there will only let you run a 99 cent promo. And those are the two big buckets. You’re either running something free or you’re running [00:12:00] something at a lower price.

Your price doesn’t necessarily need to be dropped. So let’s just say you have a first in free series where your book is permanently free. You can still run a promo on that whenever you want to. Or let’s say your book is permanently priced at 99 cents. You can run a promo at that price as well. You don’t necessarily have to price drop it, but a lot of authors do, or a lot of authors who have these price points already have some kind of cadence where they say, I’m gonna promote this book every three to six months.

Ferol Vernon: Yeah. Okay. So this is really important. Let’s take a little time and talk about this. We get this question all the time, and you can go back and listen to some of our, um, inbound mail pods that we do when authors ask questions, but one of our most common questions is how often to run an email promo, right?

And we know for authors that are in KDP Select, they have, there’s some restrictions on doing those free promos or those countdown deals. But in general, like how often should I run one of these email promos? [00:13:00] 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, I think in general, running a promo on a specific title once every 90 days is pretty much best practice for a couple reasons.

One, when you run a promo, you are going to get some algorithmic lift in your rankings, and that will last some period of time. The second is that if you’re using promo sites, you want to allow the promo sites time. To replenish their reader pool. Otherwise, you’re not gonna get the best return on your investment because if you put the same book in front of the same audience and they’ve already bought it, you know, they can’t really buy it again.

So we recommend every 90 ish days. Um, we actually won’t allow you to promote within a 30 day period. We very aggressively continue to build our lists, but we have done the math to make sure that. Authors are getting a really great return, so you can’t promote the same title within a 30 day period. But that doesn’t mean if, even if you’re doing one title every 90 days, it [00:14:00] doesn’t mean you can’t be promoting other titles.

So successful authors generally are promoting at least one title a month, but they have a schedule of rotation where they’re not promoting the same title within a 90 day period, and that helps to keep. Your Amazon rank strong. Your reader is engaged, and to get your marketing flywheel turning for you.

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, I think that’s really important for people to understand is like the cadence. And you know, it’s interesting ’cause we have authors that we talk to all the time, and some of them, you know, we give them that advice, right? ’cause we say this is based on tens of thousands of authors that we worked with over the years.

So we have really good data on what works and what doesn’t. But then there’s authors who promote like every 31 days, the same title. Right. That just right on the edge of our limit and they’re really, really successful. Right. And then there are other authors who do a much deeper discount. They promote once or twice a year.

So I think like the mix is really important, uh, to you and your books and how everything works for you and your author career and what you have time for. I think that every 90 days, if [00:15:00] you’re looking for like, Hey, what’s the best practice? What’s the thing I can do that’s gonna gimme the most bang for my buck?

That it really does work pretty well. And so, you know every book, every 90 days, that can really help you build out your schedule. 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, we definitely advocate for testing and seeing what works for you. You’re absolutely right that we have authors who like. Every exactly 31 days, they promote a book and they get great results and they’re super happy with it.

Um, so that can work. And we have other authors who take longer breaks between titles. So you do what works for you. The best practice is, uh. You know, it’s a benchmark. It’s something that is a stake in the ground that you can use to anchor yourself. Um, but if you find something that’s working, you know, keep doing it.

Uh, don’t change it. Just because you’ve listened to this product, we’re telling you something different. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah. If it ain’t broke, right? Yeah. So let’s double down here and talk about. Running a lot of promos at once. So this is called a promo stack. And every more media, we have a product called [00:16:00] promo stacks that helps you do this.

But before we get into our product, let’s just talk about what a promo stack is, how it works, and then really like why it works. Um, because it is something that’s really cool and really unique about our industry that you can do these kinds of things. 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so I’m gonna do a history lesson here again.

Let’s do it. This, uh, this has changed over time. So 10 years ago, if you did a one day promo, whether it was free or discounted, you would get a ton of sales, ton of downloads. You would see a really nice spike and the algorithms. Mostly Amazon at this point. ’cause back 10 years ago, they were the biggest real player today.

You know, Google and Apple are in there as well, but 10 years ago when you did that, Amazon would really reward you. They would see this huge spike in sales. They would be like, oh my gosh, this book is hot. And the algorithm would help to push your book to readers across the platform, and you would see this really long tail of sales after having a one day spike.

Fast forward [00:17:00] probably that probably lasted, some authors can correct me here, three to five years, something like that, where the one day sounds right was really great. And then at some point Amazon decided they didn’t like that kind of activity anymore and they basically changed the algorithm to. Not punish per se, but to dampen the effect of a one day spike.

And so authors started seeing this and realized, okay, we don’t want one big one day spike. Really what the algorithm likes now is a spike followed by some higher sales days, either before or after that spike, and that gave rise to what we now call the promo stack. So the way this would work is you would.

You know, if you do, if you had done a free booksy, you’re gonna get this huge spike. There’s just no way around it. So you would run a free booksy, but then you would put other activity on either side of it, and that activity could be sending an email to your list. ’cause you know you’re gonna get a, a bump there.

It could be purchasing a promo with another promo site [00:18:00] that’s out there. And that’s really what promo stacking is. It means stacking multiple marketing activities clustered around a three to five day period. 

Ferol Vernon: Got it. Yeah. And so I think, you know, what’s really important to understand for authors is not that you shouldn’t have a big spike, like that still works great, right?

Showing a lot of marketing activity. Everybody does marketing, that’s fine. But the smoothing it out, having more marketing over longer periods of times, it has slowly become more rewarded than just having a singular focus of activity. And, uh, I think it’s really important also to think about this. From the reader’s perspective, okay, so like if you’re a reader centric author, which is something we talk about all the time, and we encourage authors to think about, like, that’s a, at the end of the day, that’s your customer is your reader.

You know, if a reader sees something in two or three different places. Like it triggers some psychology that, Hey, [00:19:00] this book is popular right now. Right? And whether or not they consciously know that or not seeing something in a few places, you’re like, oh wow, something’s going on. And this is the same concept that you see.

If you’ve ever visited like New York City, you’ll see like. Uh, advertising on the subway, right? And then you’ll see it on billboards and you’ll see it in cabs. And so big companies coordinate this marketing. So you see things in lots of different places at once. And what that makes you feel is like, oh wow, this thing is really popular right now.

Something, something’s happening. And so by promo stacking. You can actually drive that behavior very easily so that readers see your book in a few different places. And I think sometimes a misconception that authors can have is like, oh, am I duplicating effort? Do I really need to do that? But it’s kind of a one plus one is three situation where by showing your book in a bunch of different places, a reader’s gonna be like, oh wow, this book like is on fire right now.

Like, I should maybe check this out. 

Ricci Wolman: That’s exactly right. And this is, you know, TRA publishers are really good at this in marketing, it’s called the Law, the Law of seven, which is [00:20:00] the belief that you need to have at least seven impressions on a product or a book before a reader is gonna make a purchasing decision.

And, you know, tra publishers within traditional media, they are the ones who are buying, you know, the New York Times ad pages, they’re putting it on the bus, they’re putting it on the Barnes and Noble posters in the window. So that’s exactly the idea. Behind promo stacking is that you get this kind of halo effect where you get the one plus one equals three, but you also are really conducting best practice marketing for the digital algorithms as well.

That’s right. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah. Um, and so now let’s talk about our promos stack product and exactly how it works because, you know, we, we see trend, right? So every morning we look at what’s happening in the market. We look, we talk to authors all the time. We, you know, we meet authors at conferences, we read the emails that they send us, which, you know.

Send us an email, we’ll read it. I think sometimes people think, oh, it’s like this big huge company, [00:21:00] but like, actually it’s just Ricci and I and, and a couple of you know, wonderful people. And if you write us, we will respond to you. But, you know, our product was based on hearing that from authors, right?

Hearing what they wanted and building promos, stacks to actually do this behavior for them. So Ricci, I dunno if you wanna talk a little bit about like how it works for the authors that haven’t heard of it before. 

Ricci Wolman: No, I’m loving this. This is all like a trip down memory lane for me because Promo Stack became really popular.

But the challenge with promo stack is that it was really time consuming. To coordinate all of this marketing activity over a three to five day period because you had to make sure that you were gonna send out maybe the email that you’re sending out. And then generally what authors would do is they would pick at least one or two of the larger promo sites and then cluster around promos from some of the medium to smaller promo sites.

But what that means is that you were potentially going to 3, 4, 5, 6 different websites. [00:22:00] Selecting different dates and then waiting. You know, our system allows you to see availability right away. Um, some systems on other promo sites, you don’t have that luxury. You kind of apply for a date and then it might take a couple days or a week to find out if you get that date.

So you might try and set up this beautiful five day promo stack only to get an email back to see that you now have a whole on day four, but days one, two. Three and five are looking okay. And, um. Authors talk to us about this a lot and complained to us about it a lot. And so we started thinking like, how could we help here?

And um, you know, it’s a small industry. Everyone in the industry is trying to help authors. And so we thought, well, what if we partnered up with the other promo sites that authors were using and made that inventory available on our website? So you could see right away what was available and with basically one click of a button.

[00:23:00] You could build a 1 3 5 day promo stack. Um, but still get on all the sites, not just Written Word media properties, but other properties as well. And so, you know, Farrell’s the technologist here, um, he’s the one who builds such a, like, seamless user checkout experience and he figured out, thank you, Farrell, how to make this work and how to bring partners on board and make sure that the dates they gave us are available.

And so how it works now is if you’re an author, you can come to our website and you can select a promo stack in your genre. That will span, not just Written Word media properties, but properties outside of Written Word media. They’ll also do things like if you wanna run Facebook ads in parallel to your promos, the promo stack will do that as well.

And all the promo stacks there are prepackaged. So as an author, you would come in and again, if Farrell’s the author, he would say, Hey, I wanna run a five day science fiction promo stack. We have a great filtering system. And then he can see. All the different [00:24:00] promo stacks are available and he would pick one.

And then when you go and schedule, you can see, okay, I’m running a free book. You know, day one is gonna be a free Booksy Day one to five is a reader Reach Facebook ad, you know, day two is on fussy librarian. Day three is on. Who are some of our other partners we got on there? Did 

Ferol Vernon: you say Book barbarian? We have, yeah, 

Ricci Wolman: book Barbarian who’s sci-fi specific and um, and then we’ll do.

The logic in the background to make sure that it all works out. Um, and so on checkout, you can see exactly where you’re gonna run on any given day. Uh, you would pay one price. Um, we work with the partners to make sure that they’re. You know, getting all that information and it’s been a really great innovation.

I think for authors. It’s saved authors a ton of time. Um, so it’s been a really gratifying product for us to put together. Um, even though I know there was some, you know, hoop jumping on the, on the back end to figure out how to make it work. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, yeah. It was not easy to execute, but I think that’s not anything that authors need to worry about.

Our job is to do the hard so that it’s easy for you. Right. Yeah. And I think, [00:25:00] uh, the analogy that I used when I was trying to explain this when we were building is really like, you know, think about a grocery store. And you know, before you’d have to go to a butcher, you know, to get your meat or your, your fish or whatever, go to a baker, right?

You go to a dairy place and you get all these things together and you have to go lots of different places and you come home and you have a really good elements for a meal, right? But then what happens is the grocery store cut deals with all these people, right? They got the meat counter and this, and they brought them all into one place and it’s incredibly convenient, right?

And we did the same thing with. Promo sites out there, but bringing it to authors so that you can really come to one place, get all the promos that you need, stack them together, you can do it with one checkout. Uh, and that was really important to us when we were talking to authors and we were building the product, you know, the original incarnation we’re like, well, what if we just made it easy for you to like pick your own right and build your own thing?

And then, you know, really as we talked to authors, what we realized is like, that’s not really what they wanted. What they wanted was to be able to like hit a few buttons and have the whole thing taken [00:26:00] care of, and then we’re like, okay, so now we have to build that. Um, but that’s what we built. Uh, and it’s worked out great.

We’ve gotten incredible feedback. We really feel like we have, you know, right now we have 10 partners, you know, we’ll add a few more this year, but we really have, you know, the best promo sites out there all under one roof. Um, and it’s really all in service of, of making it more convenient for authors.

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, it’s really great. And I know we’re coming up on time, but the one thing I would wanna reiterate in today’s episode is that running promos and running promo stacks. It’s really the most foundational marketing tactic that you can do that’s gonna give you a great return on your investment for very long time.

So running promos and then setting up your own email list, like those are the two marketing tactics that are critical if you want to build a successful. Author of business and you know, feel very lucky to be able to help with the former. And we’re building products that are helping with the ladder as well, and building [00:27:00] up your own email list as well, because we know how powerful email is and we really do think that it’s worth doubling down on.

Ferol Vernon: Yeah. And also, you know, before we close, I’ll just share one story from an interaction I had with an author a few months ago that I met in person at a conference. And it was, I was talking about our services and how it works, you know, some of the things that we’ve just been talking about. And they had a few ideas about things that they wanted to do to promote their book.

And they were talking about, oh, well what if I did like a buy one get one? And I did this kind of like special delivery. And then afterwards I followed up with this. And you know, they spent about two or three minutes. Explaining this marketing technique that they were gonna use. And, you know, I paused a little bit because everybody’s path, everybody’s journey is different, right?

And I said, you know, that’s, that’s fine. And that’s, that sounds really cool, you know, but how much time is that gonna take you to do? And they kind of went through it and, you know, they hadn’t really thought about it, but once they started architect, you know, it was gonna be. A couple of hours every week for the sort of two and a half weeks that they had planned to do [00:28:00] this.

And I said, you know, you can probably buy a promo stack with us in, you know, two or three minutes. And I was like, I’m not selling you on this, but just how do you wanna spend your time? And they were quiet for a moment and then they were kinda like, you know, thank you for telling me that, like for pointing that out.

And I think I say that not because to say our product is so amazing, but because sometimes it can be a lonely endeavor. And having somebody just sort of talk to you about like, Hey, you know, there is an easy way to do this. Like, yes, you have to pay a little money. Our products are not free for the most part, but like you said, it’s foundational.

And in terms of like the number of minutes that you’ve invested versus the return that you get, we really believe that there just isn’t a way to do better than promos and promo stacking. And that’s really what we believe and why we’ve built what we’ve built. 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah. On that note, what I will say though is you do wanna make sure that you are picking reputable promo sites.

Yeah. And REI actually has a really great directory where they list a bunch of promo sites and what the reach is. [00:29:00] The important thing about. Picking a promo is that you want the cost to be commensurate with the reach and the results. So the biggest promo side out there is BookBub. It’s a really large promo side.

It has the most number of readers, but the cost for a promo is pretty steep because it’s commensurate with reaching millions of readers. So you’re spending hundreds or thousands of dollars. Our promos tend to be. You know, start at like $25 and go up from there. But we price our promos specifically to the return that we think authors are gonna get.

So on average, we’re trying to get authors, um, to at least break even or be positive ROI on the promos that they’re running. And then the partners that we pick, we vet very much for quality to make sure that they’re, you know, reputable and gonna give great results. So if it’s, um, not. You know, BookBub or us, or one of our partners, just make sure that you take a look at their audience numbers, ask some questions like, what if I don’t get the results that I want?

What kind of results can I expect to make sure that [00:30:00] you’re, you know, giving, um, your hard earned money to. A place that’s gonna actually give you a good result. Yeah. Um, generally if it sounds too good to be true, it is. So if someone tells you, oh, it’s gonna be $10 and I’m gonna sell 300 copies of your book, if that exists, let us know.

But it probably isn’t. And so generally, you know, the cost should reflect the value that you’re getting back. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, and I think that’s important to note. And the res list is a great list, but also you can be sure when you buy from us. All of the promo sites that we have have been vetted. And what I mean by vetted is literally I have talked to the owner or the founder of the company.

They’ve had to go through two meetings where I grill them on their techniques, how they treat authors, how they acquire their list, and I make sure that they’re really reputable companies and that they’re going to, you know, serve our authors well. So it’s just important to know that, like we do all that work for you when you’re picking a promo off of Written Word media.

But you know, our product is [00:31:00] certainly not the only product out there. And you know, if you go outside that’s great, but like you said, make sure you pick somewhere that’s reputable. 

Ricci Wolman: I would say not only that, so within the properties that we have every month, we look at the number of clicks that authors are getting per genre, and we make sure that those clicks are stable or rising and are again, reflective of how much we’re charging.

And then before we bring promo partners onto our platform, we actually test titles. So if you’re a gold or platinum member with us, you get emails and say, Hey, we’re testing a new partner. We’d love to put your book onto their platform for free so you can report back on the results. Um, and we, we test their lists and make sure that our premium members think that the results are good, um, before we’ll actually bring them onto the platform.

Ferol Vernon: Got it. Okay. Alright. That’s a good place I think for us to pause. Great. Today I could talk, I talk about this all day. 

Ricci Wolman: There’s like a million other things at, so we might have, have to do part two on promos. 

Ferol Vernon: There’s people out there that like, eat, live and breathe [00:32:00] promos. We are those people. Yes. Um, but not everybody is.

So I think, uh, let’s wrap the pod. Great discussion today. I am Farrell Vernon here with Ricci Wolman. Thank you for joining us. We’ll see you next week and until then, may your words flow and may your readers grow.