Book Gorilla, an alternative to BookBub, who are actually pretty cynical about self-publishers (“We’re as tired as you are of emails stuffed with books by authors we’ve never heard of. Ho hum, who needs them?”), nonetheless has some very interesting statistics about when to discount a book.

Average Estimated Daily Open Rates

  • Monday – 48.21%
  • Tuesday – 47.56%
  • Wednesday – 48.01%
  • Thursday – 47.79%
  • Friday – 47.54%
  • Saturday – 47.12%
  • Sunday – 47.65%

But that’s not the end of the story. Although slightly fewer subscribers open their BookGorilla alerts on weekends, those that do open them are more likely to purchase Kindle books. If every day were the same, the percentage of average weekly Kindle books downloaded on each day of the week would of course be one-seventh, or 14.29%. Instead, what we find is that the weekend is prime time for paid Kindle downloads :

Percentage of Average Weekly Kindle Books Downloaded by Day of Week (Paid Kindle Books):

  • Monday – 13.90%
  • Tuesday – 15.12%
  • Wednesday – 13.42%
  • Thursday – 13.37%
  • Friday – 13.78%
  • Saturday – 14.98%
  • Sunday – 15.42%

In other words, Sunday, Tuesday and Saturday are the top three days for paid Kindle downloads via BookGorilla, in that order. It makes sense to us, because even if our subscribers are slightly less likely to be online on the weekends, that factor is offset by the notion that many people have more time on the weekends, more time to read, and more likelihood to spend some time and a dollar or two looking for their next great read.

This is pretty surprising. Anyone who runs a blog probably knows that traffic goes down on the weekend. But it doesn’t matter – more people make their purchases on the weekend than during the week, and that’s what the whole process is about. A good bit of advice if you’re interested in running a newsletter campaign with one of these services. For many authors, the cost of being run in the newsletter is made back in sales.

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