The Drug of Free Download and One More Victim; 815 Hits, Each One a Rush

I enrolled "One More Victim" into the Kindle Select program. This puts it on the list that Kindle subscribers, who pay a certain fee, can then download for free and the authors get a percentage from a pot based on how many times their work was downloaded. Kindle promised promotions and all that. "One More Victim," which has a little bit of Holocaust in it and a lot of growing up going on, is an odd book and, like most of my stuff, doesn't fit easily into any genre, so, I thought, why not.

The book is still available for regular sale (at $2.99), but an author can do a five-day free promotion. I plunged. Wow. First night 40 downloads labeled up as "sales." "Victim" starts flying out the window, ranking by sales climbs impressively.

Who are these people? Nothing sells better than free, I know. And then you start to think, well, if they read it and like it, they might come back for more of my works and pay for them. We'll see. One encouraging sign: a downloader sent me a wonderful email and wrote a very nice review

http://bunnysreview.blogspot.com/2011/12/one-more-victim-by-randy-attwood.html

Maybe more will come.

I have no evidence as of this posting that any downloader has then purchased any other book of mine. But I'm sure there is a lot of "download now and read later" going on. So, we shall see.

Checking back on download stats and seeing them increase is quite a high. Probably a dangerous drug. It's right now at 606 downloads. One day to go.

The great marketing question is: How do you reach all these new ereaders who have just both their Kindles and Nooks and tablets? How do you reach the ones willing to pay?

Because the Holocaust is a critical element of the story, I added a "Jewish" tag and it was downloaded enough times to make it the number two ranked downloaded books among free ebooks with a Jewish theme. Go figure.

Last update: 800 downloads; each one for me a separate "high." No additional reviews. Two downloads on other books, but who knows if they are related. I think Amazon holds all the keys to the information kingdom.

Time to move on now and market other works. If by chance you are a downloader and see this blog entry, would love to see your comments on the whole experience.

Christmas Gift Time

Decided to offer a free download code to the work of your choice. AND you can send it on to friends as your gift to them. The coupons will expire 12/27. You need to email me which work you want: randyattwood@hotmail.com.

Available works can be viewed here:

https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/randyattwood

"One More Victim" my "Heart of Darkness"

One More Victim is now live on Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/One-More-Victim-ebook/dp/B006J0C6T8/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1323311067&sr=1-10.

In many ways, One More Victim is the oddest work I've done. I'm not sure it's wise to write about the genesis of a story.

Joseph Conrad did so in a series of fascinating introductions for a collection of his stories. And I think of One More Victim as my own sort of Heart of Darkness, not that I would ever try to compare myself to that great master. I remember circa 1975 looking out the back door of our house in Hutchinson, KS, in February, and seeing a group of crows pecking holes in our black garbage sacks. It started a poem in my head. The poem stated the essence of a story that took me almost 30 years to finish as I found the tale that expressed the poem and then finally wrote the last stanza of the poem that ends One More Victim.

The Holocaust is critical to the plot, not so much the atmosphere. Deep love -- not betrayed, but deep love not fully realized -- is an emotion most people don't want to explore. Writers do.

Genre? Description? I have no idea You tell me.

I want to acknowledge the photographer who took the picture that is now the cover art. Jared Wingate's work is very worthy of viewing. His website is: http://www.wingatephotography.info

Katy Soezeva is an indefatigable reader, prolific reviewer, and an excellent editor. She deserves much thanks from me for her careful and sensitive editing and suggestions about this story. Her blog is:  http://katya-s69.livejournal.com/

Epublishing has put me in contact with more and more creative people throughout the world. In terms of human expression, I think epublishing is an amazing evolution along the lines Mr. Guttenberg started. Otherwise, I doubt you would have ever encountered this story. And, I hope, you'll find the encounter worthy of you time.