There may still be some numbers working their way through the system, but I was very pleased with yesterday’s free offer of Lost City for Kindle readers worldwide.
Like most indie authors, I’m still working out promotion, especially with Kindle Select, where we have five free days in our 90 day exclusive periods with Amazon. There are many author blogs discussing the value of freebies. In my view, it helps me to get my Princelings stories where I’d like to see them – in front of the reader! Do I lose sales? Probably not, since how would those readers have found it in the first place were it not for the offer? And I hope they like what they read and go on to read (and buy) the others, as some people did yesterday.
Yesterday I had a surprise when I had five downloads from the German site. I know I have one reader in Germany, I suspect it is one of my two friends. When the second download came, I thought it would be my second friend, although I have only had one German site purchase in the past. Then suddenly I had five German downloads. I hope they enjoy the book enough to purchase Princelings of the East and Princelings and the Pirates. I hurriedly updated my author page on Amazon.de and hope they appreciate that I welcome my German readers. Thank you for reading it in English. Incidentally, Lost City reached number 4 in English language children’s action & adventure stories there yesterday. Well, if you find a niche small enough, you can be big in it!
Having said that, it also reached number 6 in children’s action & adventure (on kindle) in the UK and 8 in the US. It peaked at 36 in kindle Fantasy (all ages) in the US, and 67 in all childrens kindle fiction in the UK. Those are far better figures than Pirates got on its first free days in February, although it is probably due to the rate of downloads. Lost City only had the one day, yet its total was only 10% short of Pirates which was on for two days. It was in the top 1000 free kindle books in the UK, and sneaked into the top 600 in the US. So I’m very pleased. Yes, many authors get to the very top and have downloads of thousands on free days, but some of them have thousands of blog hits daily too! I’m not in that league, and I’m not in their genre either. When I was trying to get published in the traditional way, the feedback I got was ‘difficult to place in today’s commercial market’, in other words, not mass market, not a popular genre.
I think the results of this free day are due to the help given to me by a whole host of authors and bloggers, and websites devoted to helping indie authors promote their books. I’m going to put a new links section here to help people find them. I’ve also been blogging and tweeting for another six months, have more followers (thank you for following me). I’ve extended that through challenges and other activity. I’ve tried to learn from other authors.
The main thing I want to do is to give my readers an enjoyable time. OK, so that you come back for more! But then, I have more stories about these characters to tell, and I hope we have fun together when I do!
