My Voracious Readers Only Promo

My Voracious Readers Only promo ended in the blink of an eye. The company's hook is, an author is given a one-time free opportunity to acquire twenty readers for a particular book. The readers receive an epub or similar format and they agree to sign up for the author's newsletter.

It's an interesting concept, one that relies on the author achieving good results so he or she will decide to set up a paid account with VRO. I suppose it's a gamble on the part of the company, but VRO probably attracts enough paid signups to make up for managing the giveaways that never amount to anything.

A paid account probably wouldn't be worth a monthly expenditure on my part (especially at $30.00!), and truly, how many writers have a new book to promote every thirty days? (Yes, I know they can probably offer the same book over and over, but I still don't see the point.)

It's telling that it took eight hours for me to reap twenty readers, but par for the course. Part of it has to do with genre. In my LibraryThing giveaway, the book with the most entries was a sci fi novel. I think it ultimately got something like 155 entries for a thirty-book giveaway. I couldn't even muster the entire thirty for mine. There just aren't a lot of women's fiction readers; not compared to other genres. Then there's the fact that my offering was a novella, not a full-length novel; although, come on ~ free is free.

I'm not counting on a lot of reviews. I may get two. That has been my usual result with these things. I guess the newsletter signup piece is a bit more interesting, though I'm a bit cynical about that as well. It's really easy to subscribe, then unsubscribe, especially if you only hit that subscribe button because you have to. (I have experience with reluctant subscribers as well.)

Like most of my promo experiments, this one will be a wash. It's not going to hurt me unless those two reviews are scathing, although negative reviews wouldn't actually impact my near-non-existent sales. 

I've definitely wasted a ton of time on promos; thankfully, not a lot of money. It was a "fun" venture that I'm not eager to repeat. But it didn't hurt to try it once. And truthfully, finding a bunch of email notifications in my in-box reminds me that, yes, I am an author. Solitude can easily lead one to believe they're really not. 

Today may or may not be a writing day. It will depend on how much my previously written narrative stinks. As you know, I'm on the fence with this whole enterprise, and I need something to convince me it's worth continuing.