Those Fiverr gigs I mentioned last week have been keeping me busy — hence the slowdown in posting here. Unfortunately, it also resulted in a slowdown (or more like a full stoppage) on my novel WIP, but I have plans to get back into that tonight. I know I don’t usually blog in the middle of the day, but for once my freelance writing is done for the day. I’ve been wanting to talk about the results of my recent free run of Dominion of the Damned, so I figured I’d seize the opportunity to give a quick rundown so I can focus on noveling this evening after Husband turns in.
Quick recap: Last month I enrolled my zombievampocalyptic suspense novel, Dominion of the Damned, in Kindle Select. For five consecutive days earlier this month, from May 5th through the 11th, I made the Kindle version free on Amazon. Here’s the rundown of how that went:
- On the first day I reached the Top 20 Free list in my selected categories (Dystopian and Dark Fantasy) in both the US and the UK. By day two I’d moved well into the Top 10, and stayed there for the rest of the free run, getting as high as #3 in Dystopian. At some point I also charted in the Top 10 in Austrlia, where I got as high as #2.
- I ended up giving away 2,114 books total — far, FAR more than any free runs I’ve done on other titles. That breaks down to 1,799 in the US, 270 in the UK, 12 in Germany (surprising, until I remembered that I have a friend who used to be stationed there who probably made some recommendations to his Air Force buddies), 3 in France and 2 in India (both of those are just plain surprising), 15 in Canada and 13 in Australia. Interesting that 13 books is enough to chart at #2 in Australia but 15 didn’t even crack the top 100 in Canada. Clearly, there are a lot more Kindle readers in Canada than in the UK or Australia.
- During the run I racked up two more verified purchase reviews and sold two copies of Restless Spirits.
Sounds great, but the true test was whether it would continue to give me a boost in sales and visibility once the free run ended and the price went back to normal. Well, since then I’ve sold 10 more copies of Dominion (nine in the US and one in the UK), and a copy of Eucha Falls. Granted, those sales aren’t enough to let me lay aside freelancing any time soon, but they’ve added up to enough royalties to cover one of our smaller bills, and considering it had been weeks since the last time I’d made a book sale, and months since I’ve sold a copy of Dominion, I’m pretty happy with those results.
As to visibility, I also had another positively glowing verified purchase review, AND reports have come in from the wild (okay, one report, from my sister, but I’ll take it) that Dominion has begun to show up in the book recommendation e-mails Amazon sends out to its customers.
All in all, I’d call it a success — so much so that I think I’ll plan to rotate through each of my titles and do a free run every six weeks or so, except for when I have a new release, in order to ensure that my books stay visible.
And once again, I’d like to thank David Gaughran’s Let’s Get Visible! for helping me pull off a successful execution of this strategy. If you’ve got books to sell, you should definitely read this book.