My experience with Fussy Librarian

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. That means that if you click on a link I might make some money back. That doesn’t mean I don’t really love what we’re talking about today. I will never tell you about anything I don’t love and use myself.

Pretty exciting day, here. It’s the first day of July, the first day of Camp Nanowrimo, and the first day of the Smashwords Sale. Exciting day.

It’s been a while since I’ve had a new fun thing to tell you about. But, as my writing and promotion skills improve, I hope, new tools become available. Or, maybe I just find out about them long after everyone else does.

Anyway, I wanted to tell you about the Fussy Librarian today.

The Fussy Librarian is a daily newsletter that lists free or discount e-books. As I’m sure you can imagine, this is a decent set up for both authors and readers.

I discovered Fussy Librarian while I was looking for a new way to promote my books. I had heard of a newsletter sent out to readers looking for bargain books. I won’t say which one, but the first one that I found was $100. That’s a lot of money to promote a book for free. That’s more than my whole promotional budget for my next book launch. Like, twice what I was planning to spend.

So I kept looking, and I found Fussy Librarian. The price was a lot more reasonable, and I considered it worth it. I scheduled Seeming, the first book of Station 86, just to see how it would do. The plan was to use Seeming to test the system before Missing Stitches came out.

Now, I don’t have a ton of time to spend on setting up promotions. I’m busy, we’re all busy! But setting up the Fussy Librarian took just a couple minutes. I chose the genre, provided links, wrote a blurb, and was ready to go.

Once it was submitted, I got a confirmation right away. I expected that, of course. I didn’t expect the occasional check-in emails to make sure everything was going alright. I didn’t expect that, when I only set this up on Smashwords, that I’d get a polite email asking me if I was sure that was correct. (It was. As I said, this was only a test.) I was really touched by how helpful everyone was.

Of course, all the sweet emails in the world don’t matter, when compared to the big picture. How did it go?

Well, let me share some real numbers with you. I’ve promoted two books with Fussy Librarian so far. The first was Seeming, as I said, for a test. Seeming was on Fussy Librarian on Monday, January 28^th. My free downloads for that Sunday were two. My free downloads for that Tuesday were also two. In the past month, Seeming has been downloaded 64 times. But on January 28^th, it was downloaded 104 times!

After that success, I scheduled promotion for Missing Stitches during its launch. Now, I don’t have a specific download number, because they were free and Missing Stitches goes through my publisher, Solstice Publishing. But however much it was, it was enough to put Missing Stitches at number two in New Adult and College Fantasy on Amazon, and number three in overall free fantasy.

I’d consider that a pretty damn decent result. I’d sure never had a Woven book go that high before.

So what do you think? Have you ever used a promotional newsletter before? Let us know in the comments below.