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| I'm very proud of this chart! It's years since I've done any. |
To offer your book as a free download, you have to have it solely with Kindle Direct Publishing, and you can only do it for five days in any 90 days. It's easy to do from your KDP Bookshelf, remembering, of course, to allow for the time difference. KDP works on Pacific time which is 8 hours behind, but quite conveniently fits in well with an 8am start here.
When it was all set up, I blogged about it here, and tweeted about it with the hashtag, #freedownload, to attract people looking for free downloads! This worked very well and by 4pm, I had risen to 11th in both the Historical Romance and the Historical Fiction charts. I had tweeted again at lunchtime to tell those that had missed the first tweet. (I think I'm allowed, because I don't shout 'Buy my book!' all the time. And one day's indulgence shouldn't hurt.) Then, I tweeted some more asking for help to reach the Top Ten. It's really exciting seeing your book go up the charts! At the end of the day, it was 7th in Historical Fiction and 8th in Historical Romance, so I was really pleased.
Of course I know that it was all only freebies, but as I saw last time, when I did it for the whole five days over the Jubilee weekend, it does make your book more noticeable, and all I have to do now is to get people to really buy it.
Lastly, the interesting bit is that most of the downloads were in America (including India): nearly twice as many as in the UK. I was also pleased to see downloads from Germany, France, Spain and Italy. I guess Japan isn't ready for Gipsy Moth yet!
Have you tried giving free downloads? How did you get on?
When it was all set up, I blogged about it here, and tweeted about it with the hashtag, #freedownload, to attract people looking for free downloads! This worked very well and by 4pm, I had risen to 11th in both the Historical Romance and the Historical Fiction charts. I had tweeted again at lunchtime to tell those that had missed the first tweet. (I think I'm allowed, because I don't shout 'Buy my book!' all the time. And one day's indulgence shouldn't hurt.) Then, I tweeted some more asking for help to reach the Top Ten. It's really exciting seeing your book go up the charts! At the end of the day, it was 7th in Historical Fiction and 8th in Historical Romance, so I was really pleased.
Of course I know that it was all only freebies, but as I saw last time, when I did it for the whole five days over the Jubilee weekend, it does make your book more noticeable, and all I have to do now is to get people to really buy it.
Lastly, the interesting bit is that most of the downloads were in America (including India): nearly twice as many as in the UK. I was also pleased to see downloads from Germany, France, Spain and Italy. I guess Japan isn't ready for Gipsy Moth yet!
Have you tried giving free downloads? How did you get on?
I've done it, Jean, a couple of times. I did pretty well when I advertised it on the free book sites and tweeted etc. I didn't break the Amazon top free 100, but it got close the second time. I'm getting more savvy about promoting and will be doing another one in a couple of weeks. I'm trying paid for (very cheap) guaranteed mentions on a couple of sites. It does spike sales briefly, but on the whole I think it works because both books are selling, slowly, but at least selling.
ReplyDeleteThanks for y our comment, Liz. Yes, you're right, you learn with experience each time.
ReplyDeleteGreat result, Jean - and it brings your name to more people!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Rosemary. It is worth giving it a try for a short time!
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