New Gold City

Source: Shitao, "Don't ever let go of my hand......." Last week I reported that I was doing an experiment on the Kindle Direct Publishing promo system. I wanted to see what would happen if I didn't use the multi-pronged marketing apparatus that's set up around KDP free books. See the blog entry for that HERE . The results are in and not so happy. Over a two day period, Saturday and Sunday, I received 230 downloads of my novel, Beyond the Will of God . Two weeks earlier, I'd pushed on the marketing apparatus hard and received over 10,000 downloads in three days.  This was not a controlled experiment. The biggest wild card in it is that the poor showing last weekend may have been because those fishing for free books were saturated from my offering just two weeks earlier. If that's so, it makes me doubly wonder about readers in search of freebies. Maybe it's a smaller group than we realize. Or maybe they don't use Amazon's standard Kindle Free lis...

Several weeks ago I used three of my Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) free days and watched 10,110 people download my novel, Beyond the Will of God . The book is currently priced at $2.99 (that will change in the fall and go up to $4.99). By most accounts that's a fairly successful KDP promo. Unfortunately, Amazon has changed their algorithms around in the past few months. Whereas once my successful free days would give a novel lift in the Amazon ranking system that would extend past the promo, now their calculations give my book very meager support. Within a few days Beyond the Will of God had dropped from being in the top 20 popularity list for mysteries out of the Top 100.  I'm not complaining. There are many benefits to getting exposure to 10,000 ereaders in a three-day period. The main one, obviously, is that my book is out there. When people like it, they'll let others know. Amazon's networking approach to sales is also impacted. My book will show up on lists lik...