Monthly Archives: May 2011

The difference between free and nearly free…

23 Monday May 2011

Posted by in epublishing, Websites

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…turns out to be quite considerable. A glacier-slow drip of sales at Amazon became a torrent of downloads when the book was made free instead of 99 cents/70 pence.

Downloads at the UK Amazon site passed the 1,000 mark this morning, while over at the US site, the figure is close to 3,000.

It really brings home the scale of Amazon’s market share. The book has been freely available online since late 2009, via Scribd, Smashwords (and the various sites to which Smashwords ships books), Feedbooks and Manybooks. It took eight months to reach 4,000 downloads on Smashwords, while on Amazon that number has been reached in less than two weeks. It’s exciting, but a little bit frightening, too.

Amazon update update

12 Thursday May 2011

Posted by in epublishing, Free reads, Sales

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Well, how quickly things change in this new epublishing world. Last week I was delighted because I’d had two sales in May through Amazon – bringing my total Amazon tally to a not-terribly-awe-inspiring FIVE WHOLE BOOKS. Well, five whole files, anyway.

Yesterday morning Amazon marked the price down from 99 cents/70 pence to… FREE! The effect on downloads via the Kindle Store was instantaneous By this morning my four Amazon.com downloads had burgeoned to a more impressive 1,072, while the UK sales had grown to a sedate but respectable 122. Of course there won’t be any royalties as no-one is making any money out of this arrangement, but it does mean that The Roman and the Runaway will be lurking on people’s Kindles and may even get read by some of them. 😉

Amazon update

05 Thursday May 2011

Posted by in Indie writing, Marketing, Websites

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For the first time, I put a few posts on the Amazon Kindle forums to promote The Roman and the Runaway in the last week. Maybe four, in different, appropriate-seeming places (‘Kindle books for 99 cents’, that kind of thing). I’ve got a (probably very British) horror of self-promotion and certainly don’t want to put people’s backs up with anything that smacks of desperation or (even worse) spam.

I also joined a few of the ‘you tag me and I’ll tag you’ forums – one on Amazon itself and the others on the Kindleboards site. With these, you add Amazon tags to other authors’ books in return for them tagging yours with your preferred categories. So for my book, for the US site, those are:

young adult, contemporary fiction, fathers and sons, boarding school, runaways, family relationships, kindle, 99 cents

Some people put a huge amount of time into tagging other books with these tags and getting more on their own in return. I’m not sure how much of a difference the tags make, but I have sold one book on Amazon.com and my first ever* on Amazon.co.uk since doing this small quantity of self-promotion last weekend, so perhaps it does have an effect!

I still don’t think I’m going to dedicate my life to it, though…

*Woohoo!