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
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.
Five-day freebie period reached its end. Victim was downloaded 815 times, way more times than I thought would happen. I was right about it being a kind of drug. I'm feeling withdrawal. Now is the wait time to see if people who downloaded the story will read it, comment on it, encourage other readers to acquire it, and also go look at my other work. To date, one good review. I gave the book a Jewish tag, because the Holocaust is vital to the plot, and it reached second most downloaded status among free ebooks with a Jewish tag. Among all books, it got to the 1200 status. Now that the free time is over the ranking has gone back to sold category where it is ranked 444,385 among sold books. One thing the giveaway taught me is that it doesn't take all that many downloads to start rising in the rankings.
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