I’m Robert Stanek, a pro author since 1994 and an indie
since 2001. Today, I have a special report in a continuing series of articles on book promotion services. Book
promotion services are marketing services that help authors promote their books
for a fee. As these services often charge a pretty penny for such work, the participating authors and I decided to research the low-cost book promotion
services available at Fiverr. After all, we thought for $5 what did we have to
lose?
Our findings may shock you – they certainly shocked us.
For this study, 24 authors participated, using the services to promote 39 books from 8 different genres, including:
Mystery
Thriller
Romance
Scifi
Fantasy
Horror
Literary Fiction
Nonfiction
At least 12 of the 24 participants used each service discussed one or more times, as well as 44 similar services for a total of 53 services. What follows is a
summary of results gathered between June 2014 and February 2015. In the interest of full disclosure, I gave each participant $20 of fun money to start them off.
Book promotion services at Fiverr are largely the kind that
say:
“I’ll promote your book to 2,000,000 on social media!”
“I’ll tweet your book to 50,000 followers!”
“I’ll promote your book to 200,000 on Facebook!”
“I’ll promote your book to the Top 50 Facebook kindle
groups!”
“I’ll pin your book, tweet your book, post your book on
Facebook to thousands!”
That alone should have been our first clue that we might be
wasting our time and money, but what the heck we thought because it’s only $5.
Or is it?
Although the name of the website is Fiverr, you typically
end up paying much more than $5 for each gig, and a gig is simply an offering
from a seller in Fiverr vernacular. For example, Facebookprogig (
https://www.fiverr.com/facebookprogig)
offers a gig that says “I Will Promote Your Amazon Kindle Ebook to the Top 60 Groups,
Twitter, Pinterest for $5” but the gig has up to $30 worth of extras you can
add on.
The extras are where the sellers make their real money. Many
of the participants fell for the extras big time, figuring if the gig costs $5
I must be getting some extreme value from this $10 or $20 add on. They were wrong. Wrong,
as anyone could ever be.
The problem is the buyer really isn’t getting much—if any— additional value from each extra, even though the extras may cost $10,
$20, $40, $50, or more each. As an example, with the gig from Facebookprogig
mentioned earlier choosing $20 of extras was no more effective than simply
choosing the $5 gig itself.
But was the gig effective in the first place? From
the hundreds of reviews, you’d think absolutely that it must be the bees knees
of gigs—yes, a 60’s term to hint at our collective gullibility.
The problem we discovered quickly with gigs at Fiverr is
that most have a tremendous flood of high praise, along with 100% positives, 98%
positives, etc. However, there’s no way of knowing if any of it is legitimately
earned or deserved.
Many of those with promotion services at Fiverr hail from
Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Russia or some other distant shore. Nothing wrong
with that whatsoever. However, their profile photos then typically show
themselves as a beautiful blond woman, a fair-skinned brunette or something equally out of place.
Blog Promotion
Blog promotion is one several categories of book promotion
services. (Our categorization, not Fiverr's) With blog promotion, the seller will post an article on his
or her blog about your book.
Lincolnrocks (
https://www.fiverr.com/lincolnrocks)
promised to promote a book on a Kindle Book Club blog and also tweet about it. Now
that seemed like a great idea. Why not have a book on a popular blog? The
extras though added up quickly. $20 for extra fast service. $20 to post about
your book on Facebook. $50 for side bar advertising on the blog. $10 for an
Author Success guide. Meaning, you could quickly be out $105 and not $5. If you want a
blog post about your book, spend the $5 and not a penny more, but you’ll be
writing your own post.
DreamTheAnswer (
https://www.fiverr.com/dreamtheanswer)
offers to promote your book on two blogs for $5. You write the articles and they
are posted (but quickly drowned in the sea of others following you).
The participants tried many other blog promotion services as well.
Results: The results of using blog promotions of this type
from Fiverr were a mixed bag. We’re not sure of the actual value—or if there’s
any value at all. Sometimes the articles didn’t even show up in search results.
Our advice: Lots of authors have used blog tours to help
find success. Join a blog tour or start your own! The cost then is not $5 or
$25, but nothing—and you’ll have a lot more fun.
If you’ve already tried blog tours and want to give blog
promotions a try, send a message to any potential seller and ask them for the
link to their blog before you buy. That way you can see what you’re getting
yourself into.
Facebook Promotion
No shortage of promotion services promise to promote your
book on Facebook pages and in popular Facebook groups. Here, by promote, they
mean posting a description and buy link for your book.
BookKitty (
https://www.fiverr.com/bookkitty)
offers to promote your book on several Facebook pages, with a total following
of about 15,000 for $5. Not a good value.
Jazzy7 (
https://www.fiverr.com/jazzy7)
offers to promote your book to 90,000 Facebook fans for $5. For $10 extra you
can get 3 additional posting, for $20 you can pin your website URL to the top
of her page, for $40 you can get 25 statuses (whatever that is), for $10 you
can get social bookmarks. With 2000 reviews and a 96% positive rating, what
could go wrong? Plenty. Not a good value.
Best Graphic 201 (
https://www.fiverr.com/best_graphic201)
will promote a book to 50 kindle reader groups for $5. Her 300+ reviewers
seemed to love the service. But is it a good value? Uncertain.
Merlin George (
https://www.fiverr.com/merlingeorge001)
said she’d post a book to the Top 60 Kindle readers groups and best 20 ebook promotion
groups for $5. Reaching 80 groups for $5 isn’t a bad value, and it could save
time if you really wanted to post the same message to these groups.
fanni121 (
https://www.fiverr.com/fanni121) promises to promote your business / product / ebook to 4 million Facebook fans and said a refund is guaranteed if unsatisfied. The problem is no one who used this service saw any results. Recently, in a follow up test of the service, we also saw no results and contacted fanni121 after he/she stated the gig was delivered. Our lengthy message explaining our test of the service for our research report, also suggesting ways the service could be improved, and making a request for an order modification was met with a rejection of the modification request and no follow up message whatsoever. We followed up again and stated that the gig was supposed to have a money back guarantee and that we were trying to help them give actual value. The response was a single word: Refund. And, we did get a refund.
However,
Fb_dami (
https://www.fiverr.com/fb_dami)
says he can promote a book to over 5 million Facebook fans for $5 (the gig title says 2.5 million but the gig itself says 5 million). For $10 extra,
he’ll add a picture or video. For $20 extra, he’ll promote for 3 days. For $50
extra, he’ll bring people to your website and raise your ranking. For $50
extra, he’ll do a huge promotion for 7 days. For $50 extra, he’ll give daily views for 30 days.
Fb_dami's 900+ reviewers seemed to love this service. While
you can get everything including fast delivery for a whopping $180, why in the world would
anyone ever spend more than $5, or perhaps $15 if you wanted to display a book
cover or video? If the promotion works, you can simply run the promotion again.
But does the Fb_dami promotion work for surely it must if actually reaching 5 million? Do the extras work any better? Some limited results were seen for the $5 gig, but it’s a resounding
no on the extras. For $20, $50 or $100 you are not getting 4X, 10X or 20X value or results. You’re getting less extra value than if you simply purchased the original $5 gig again at a different date.
UPDATE: 2/24/15. We tested Fb_dami's service again just recently. He now says if you agree to give him a good rating when you sign up for the gig, he'll throw in some free extras worth $30, including pictures with posts and twitter promotion. What you actually get though seems to be the $10 Silver package or part of it. At any rate, if you mention "ReadIndies" when you get the gig, you are supposed to get the same whether you give him a rating or not.
The participants tried many other facebook promotion services as well.
Results: We saw negligible results from BookKitty, Jazzy7 and
similar offerings. With offerings that reached many groups or many Facebook
users (through many groups), there were some results, especially click through,
if few actual sales.
Our advice: Join any of the hundreds of book-related
Facebook groups available, many of which are focused on sharing free and
discounted books with readers. Where allowed, share posts about your books. You’ll
quickly accomplish a few things. You’ll likely get better results than you
would if someone made posts for you, and you’ll also get to meet other authors
and readers.
Twitter Promotion
With twitter promotions, the seller promises to tweet about
your book a certain number of times, usually once or twice for $5.
Indie Book Value (
https://www.fiverr.com/indiebookvalue)
will tweet your book to his/her 75,000 followers for $5 and says he/she is a #1
bestselling Amazon author in his/her category. For $10 extra, you can get four
tweets per day for a month. For $20 extra, you can get 12 tweets a day for a
month. For $40 extra, you can get twelve tweets for two months.
Not a good value, not even for $5.
Gsmolin (
https://www.fiverr.com/gsmolin)
says he is a "#1 bestselling Amazon author who will tweet your book to
665,000 ebook lovers and has the only twitter promotion service with proven
results". For $10 extra you can get the Gold service -- one tweet a day for 5
days. For $20 extra you can get Platinum service – one tweet a day for 5 days
with hash tags, which is the same strategy the author says he "uses to get his books
into the Amazon Top 100".
Although George was friendly, very responsive to questions and helpful, his service doesn't have the following suggested. In fact, the tweets from his accounts have little actual following. For example, the account used for .99 books has only 150 or so followers. The 665,000 ebook lovers the tweets are supposed to reach is based on using hash tags in tweets, such as #kindle #ebook, etc.
George did craft great tweets, but were they worth $5 each? Not in our opinion. It's also worth noting that George is the only one who took me up on the second chance offer I discuss later under Disclosure and seemed to be one of the few who actually, genuinely wanted to help authors succeed.
The participants tried many other twitter promotion services as well.
Results: We saw negligible results with Indie Book Value and similar offerings from those with less than 100,000 followers. It was refreshing to find that some gigs in this category had a relatively few reviews as compared to the floods
of gushing praise found elsewhere for gigs of highly questionable value or
merit.
Our advice: Twitter’s free to use. Tweet with appropriate
hash tags when talking about your books and you’ll reach beyond your followers
to others who follow those hash tags. A hash tag is simply a keyword, such as book, preceded by the number sign (#), as in #book. Tweet with #GoIndie #ReadIndies or
#FreeToday as your hash tags and I may retweet you to 30,000+ followers. My fee
since forever for a retweet: $0. That's right, nothing.
Disclosure
Though
I tracked and compiled the results with the participating authors, I myself did
not participate. Before writing this report, I tried to give every seller
listed a second chance. I posted a private message to each explaining I was researching
book promotion services. I explained the research and asked them to give a free test run of their service, the results of which I would also include in the report. There was only one taker, though plenty of complaints, and that should tell
you everything you ever needed to know about these services from Fiverr. We will continue this research throughout 2015 hoping against the odds to find services of actual value.
Closing Thoughts
Working on this special report was an eye-opening experience for everyone involved. To a one, we came away with a single, overriding thought. That thought was this:
When you see a gig at Fiverr with hundreds or thousands of rave reviews, get the hell out of there.
Increasingly, the same is true of Amazon.
Remember also that $5 in Sri Lanka, India and Indonesia is an excellent hourly wage and that $50 can represent nearly a week's wages. Average monthly salary after taxes:
Therefore, it was extremely disappointing to find that nearly every one of these services treat your gig as if it has no value to them, often using automated means to perform the actual work required or simply copying and pasting something over and over -- and always doing as little as possible. Worse, the same remained true even when we bought gigs extras that added up to a lot of money.
The participants and I didn't expect a lot for $5 or even $20. However, we did expect that when we worked with parties in countries where this represents a good wage, we would actually get good, earnest efforts on our behalf -- and that rarely, if ever, happened.
Update
Wanted to update this special report based on feedback from Fiverr sellers. It's important to note that Fiverr takes a 20% commission on all monies received and also holds funds for at least two weeks (18 or more days typically). This lengthy payment process makes some sellers reluctant to give 100% efforts, especially with new members or those they haven't previously worked with.
When working with international sellers, it's important to keep in mind that $5 can represent a lot of money and your cancellation of an order or request for a refund could cause serious harm. Rather than canceling an order or requesting a refund, try working with the seller to see if you can come to a mutually agreeable resolution.
Thanks for reading,
Robert Stanek
After hearing about Robert, I broke down in
tears, fits and sobs really, the kind reserved for family because Robert Stanek was
like a father to some of us in the writing community, a favorite uncle, Uncle
Robert, to others, and a valued mentor to a great, great many. So many writers,
hundreds really, owe their start in writing and careers to this guy, and the
same is true of thousands who work in Big Tech, on web-based platforms or in
web-based businesses. This guy taught them all how to set up those very
businesses. This guy who was larger than life. This guy who was so down to
earth. This guy who was so humble. This guy who so loved life. This guy who so loved
family. This guy who took care of everyone else. This guy who gave and gave and
gave over so many decades to so many and never asked for anything in return.
By 2000, his professionally published books numbered over
100. Those books, published and distributed by the biggest names in publishing—IDG,
Simon & Schuster, Random House, Macmillan, Pearson, Microsoft, McGraw Hill,
Time Warner—blazed trails. At a time when few understood the world wide web and
its technologies, Robert was not only one of the few recognized world leaders
in the web and its technologies, he was the recognized world leader in
explaining how those technologies worked clearly and concisely. 
Robert was a King maker, unmade by the very things he helped
establish. He put upstart Amazon on the map by writing about the company to his
audience of millions from its earliest days. He transformed Microsoft Press
from a publishing company its readers swore published books in a foreign
language called Microsoftese into one praised for publishing books in plain
language—that plain language approach Robert himself created and that praise
itself was for Robert’s books. His words and style were so beloved they eventually
became the plain language style of Microsoft itself.
Credit where credit is due one might imagine, but instead as
Robert revealed through his varied writings and blogs, he got no credit for any
of it. At the end of the day, his work taught tens of millions, enriched the
pockets of his publishers, agents and managers, but left Robert and his family
with 3 cents on the dollar. Robert’s work was used in $1B-$2B (yes,
B-I-L-L-I-O-N $) worth of training courses and other Microsoft and
non-Microsoft work for which he never received a single cent. Not one. None.
Zero.
In 2000, Robert Stanek founded the modern indie author
movement with his breakout self-published books that transformed publishing and
the way we publish today. In 2001, Robert became the first indie author to
serialize an e-book at Amazon and has since gone on to write more than 150
indie books. In 2002, his Keeper Martin's Tale and Kingdoms & the Elves
books were the first indie e-authored books to top Amazon's bestseller lists.
In 2005, the same books were the first indie e-audiobooks to top Audible
bestseller lists where they dominated for the next three years (#1 fiction for
14 weeks 2005, 167 weeks Top 10 YA 2005-2008). His Kingdoms & the Elves became
one of the top grossing e-audiobooks of all time and was featured on the
Audible Home Page throughout the Summer of 2005.
