I’m posting this for my author friends. We all stick together when we find something that works…or doesn’t.

I have video book trailers for three of my books. I uploaded them to Youtube and generally mention their existence and include the Youtube link as an excuse to market. My video trailer for The Legend of Stuckey’s Bridge was posted on Youtube on May 27, 2013. As of this writing, it has 2,215 views. I’ve been plugging it every now and then for the last twenty months. It is embedded on my blog pages, linked to on my website, and I periodically blast it on Twitter to 6,000 followers and the Stuckey’s Bridge Facebook page to 3,800 followers. The problem with Facebook is if fans aren’t actively following your posts, they never see your status updates in their news feed, and the problem on Twitter is a tweet has a shelf life of only seven minutes. I can’t say the video has sold any books, but it is a useful marketing tool, an excuse to say, “Hey, look at me!”

Fast forward to January 17, 2015.

I realized I hadn’t “uploaded” my book videos to their respective Facebook pages. Honestly, I didn’t know you could do such a thing. I’ve always posted a link to Youtube. Keep in mind Facebook does not like to show links to other sites, so when I do post a link, a majority of my followers never see it in their newsfeed. Well, guess what happened when I uploaded Stuckey’s video to Stuckey’s page!!??…

I uploaded the video at 5 p.m. on a Saturday evening. At 10 p.m., it had 1000 views and 39 shares. People seemed to like sharing and watching the video on Facebook without having to click a link and be taken to a different site, well, that, and Facebook actually let them SEE the post. The video caught fire quickly, and I watched the views go up each time I refreshed the page. Finally, I went to bed.

Sunday evening at 5 p.m. (24-hours in), the tally was at 2200 views and 95 shares. We had accomplished in 24 hours what it took us 20 months to do on Youtube. I knew being Sunday, the numbers would grow by leaps and bounds for the rest of the evening, so I watched. (I also added the Amazon link to the comments.)

Sunday 7 p.m. – 2900 views, 114 shares. (6 views per minute since 5 p.m.)

Sunday 8 p.m. – 3400 views, 140 shares. (8 views per minute since 7 p.m.)

I thought the viralness (my new word) would die down since people had to go back to work on Monday morning, but I was wrong. The views and the shares kept growing.

Monday 2 p.m. – 4675 views, 170 shares.

Tuesday 11 a.m. – 5691 views, 204 shares.

Wednesday 5 p.m. – 6200 views, 218 shares.

Thursday 10 a.m. – 6585 views, 234 shares. We also got 74 new Likes on the page.

I’m calling that a successful campaign and the best part is – it was free! But, did it transfer into sales?

It took a minute of lag time, but it did transfer into sales. Sunday and Monday saw sales increase by 15 per day. Tuesday and Wednesday sales increased by 20 per day. Thursday sales increased by 25. Strangely, the individual books did not increase by much, but the trilogy, containing all three books in the series, is where we saw most of the sales, so you can multiply those above numbers by 3 if you’re counting actual books. These are hardly the numbers the books sold when they first came out, but free marketing is free, so I’ll take ’em!

Note: It helps to have an established book page or author page. I didn’t start from scratch. It also helps that my demographic for that book is the state where Stuckey’s Bridge is located, population 2.9 million. The people there already know the legend and are excited to find out anything new about the bridge.

Regardless, it’s worth uploading your video to Facebook. You won’t get the views logged onto Youtube, but when all is said and done, I’d rather have sales. If you’re curious about the video, here it is…embedded from Youtube…

UPDATE FRIDAY, JAN 23, 2015

21,480 people reached, 6,980 video views, 6,019 unique views

851 LIKES, COMMENTS & SHARES

456 Likes: 60 On Post, 396 On Shares