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November Book Sales Experiments Recap

A month ago I shared that I was experimenting with free shipping for the paperback version of my book, The Tiny MBA.

Turns out that wasn't my only experiment in November 😀 I also:

  • Ran my first ad in Dense Discovery
  • Discounted the book 30% during our black friday/cyber monday sale
  • Sold a bunch of "gift" bundles to people who wanted to give the book to clients.

And it went well - November was the 2nd best sales month for the book since launch, and double October sales! 🚀

Unfortunately, all of these other promotions make it impossible to tell if the price changes had any impact. Whoops!

The other side effect of having the shipping price effectively included in the sticker price is that that our margins per book shrank considerably compared to when we charged shipping separately.

The gift bundles are also tricky since previously, I'd typically offer free shipping on books as an incentive for smaller bundles (less than 20 books) but when shipping is already included, I'm stuck with per-book discounts.

Now that our holiday sales are over, I'm going back to having shipping be separate from the book, at least until I have a period of time when I know for sure that I'm not going to do any other experiments at the same time!

For December, I'm considering one more push of "gift bundles" geared towards folks who provide business services. So far it's been a mix of people who want to receive all of the books themselves and then mail them to their clients, and people who prefer to buy a bunch of 'prepaid coupons' that their clients can redeem and we ship directly from the warehouse to the client.

I gotta pick one to focus on, and I think I'm gonna choose the latter (prepaid coupons) and make it geared towards people looking for last minute gifts, since they can give the ebook immediately and get the paperback after christmas.

Will report back!

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