A few weeks ago I whacked my book, Stealing Mercy, to free.
I posted about this decision and you can read about it here.
This is/was an experiment. This summer I lowered Mercy to
.99 cents when I participated in a group promotion. It took weeks for it to
fall to .99 cents and then after the promo when I tried raising the price,
again it took weeks and weeks. I honestly didn’t know if Amazon would ever drop
the price to free even though it was free on all the other e-readers. But on
Thursday morning when I woke up and checked my Amazon page, Stealing Mercy was
not only free, it was also ranked #38 on Amazon’s historical romance list. I
watched it throughout the day as it moved from 38 to 30 to 17 to 7 to 5 to 3. Currently,
it’s #1 in historical romance and #7 overall.
I am not putting Mercy into the kindle select program, so I
don’t know why Amazon would go out of its way to promote me. It had 12 reviews,
but one of them disappeared. I don’t know why that particular review went
astray, but since I have heard of it happening to other authors, I can only
scratch my head in wonderment. I’ve been doing that a lot for the past few
days. I now have 13 reviews.
I managed to let a few online promotional sites (like 3)
know about Mercy’s freedom, but since we had out of town guests staying with us
for the last few days I don’t know how, or if, they have featured Mercy in
anyway. What I’m saying is—I really don’t know why Mercy is doing so well. I
wish I could point a finger and say, ah-ha—well,
no wonder. How did I miss this gem of marketing brilliance before? Now all of
my books will sell like hot coals on a cold winter night because I’ve learned
the secret.
But I haven’t learned the secret. Here are a few of my
marketing attempts:
I have a blog
I participate on a group blog
Occasionally I make comments on the writer’s cafe kindle
boards. I usually really enjoy this. I find the writers to be witty,
intelligent and for the most part, generous, helpful and kind. To my amazement,
I have found that when I start a thread (conversation) my comment will get
thousands of views. The first time I commented in the writer’s café, I had over
500 visitors on my blog that day. Go figure.
I belong to several online writers’ groups. I rarely comment
on them, but I love to read and learn. I am lucky to “know” them, even if I
wouldn’t recognize any of them if I passed them on the street.
I try to take advantage of every free promotional
opportunity I stumble across. Today, for example, my novel The Rhyme’s Library
is featured on Predatory Ethics. http://mad-gods.com/blog/?p=2101
In short—I’m lucky. I’ve always known this to be true. My
husband claims I’m the luckiest person he knows. My three day ‘sales’ was at
9,000 when I left for church. I thought maybe I’ll be over 10,000 by the time I get home. I now have close
to 20,000.
Why would I give my book away for free? Because I want readers to love Stealing Mercy so much that they'll rush out and buy my other books. Maybe that won't happen. Maybe there is a group of readers who only read free books. The proof is in the pie. (Mercy, my protagonist in Stealing Mercy, is a pie maker.)
Head scratching continues.
No comments:
Post a Comment