A brand new review!

There is a brand new review of NOT JUST ANY OLD GHOST STORY up over at Amazon.

Thank you kindly, David Bainbridge, for the absolutely kickass review. Reading those words told me that you really sat down and read my book with your eyes wide open and your ears radared out.

Many, many, many thanks!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R3EOYBQKBY8LOY/ref=cm_cr_pr_rvw_ttl?ASIN=B00MSDYIIM

 

(sure wish I could have afforded a better cover)

 

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon

Results of my Kindle Freebie Promotion

All right – so I promised you folks that I would write up a blog entry that would sum up the results of my September Freebie Promotion on Kindle for my novella NOT JUST ANY OLD GHOST STORY.

Nowadays you really need to move over at least a thousand freebie books in a day in a giveaway – and that’s just an estimated number – to show up on the immediate Amazon radar. Mind you, that depends on the genre you write in. If you’re writing romance you need to giveaway a LOT, really quickly, to show up on the Amazon TOP 100 FREEBIE list and ideally you want to giveaway enough free e-books fast enough to show up on the TOP 10 FREEBIE list – because not every Amazon customer is going to bother scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the 100 list, odds are they’ll just look at the Top ten or twenty.

Unfortunately, unless your book hits the top 100 or better it still isn’t necessarily going to achieve maximum visibility.

HOWEVER, if you move about 300 copies in a single day – well, that’s about 300 people with one of your books. Three hundred people who might not necessarily have picked up a Steve Vernon book until now.

Which means that my book is going to start showing up in the “also bought” lists. That means when Amazon sends those 300 folks their monthly/weekly/daily “Say-have-you-tried-this” e-mail notices, your other books will start popping up in their e-mail box.

As in – “Say, we here at Amazon noticed that you bought Steve Vernon’s “Hunting the Wild Booga-Booga” novel. You might also want to check out his “Hunting the Wild Booga-Booga Part 2” as well as his classic “Don’t lay no Booga-Booga on the King of Heartburn Slow”, not to mention his spine-tingling “Ooga-Booga-Booga Days” and of course his bestselling “Booga-Booga Revealed”.”

That all adds to a writer’s visibility.

The key to working the Amazon ranking riddle is best solved with a combination of how many e-books are “bought” by your readers PLUS how fast they are bought at any one given time PLUS how consistently they are bought.

So – ideally – if you give away 9000 free copies in a three day stretch it would be BEST if 3000 readers found your freebie and downloaded it on Monday, and then 3000 MORE readers downloaded it on Tuesday and finally 3000 additional readers picked it up on Wednesday. The key is spreading it out.

******************************************************

SO – let me tell you about the results of my freebie offer for my e-book NOT JUST ANY OLD GHOST STORY.

The offer ran from September 1 to September 3.

I used bknights over at FIVERR and Jeff Bennington’s KINDLE BOOK REVIEW as well as a series of well-timed blog entries to help promote the offer.

On the first day I moved 613 copies.

On the second day I moved 193 copies.

On the third day I moved a piddling little 66 copies.

That’s 872 copies in total.

I went from one review to SEVEN reviews.

With the exception of one stinker of a review the rest were all very favorable. One out of seven doesn’t hurt at all – in that it gives a nice perspective to any prospective new readers who are reading those reviews.

It also moved my book up to a high of the mid-300’s on the free Kindle list. I’ve got the exact number sitting somewhere. I must learn to keep better notes.
🙂

Here’s where the book is as of today.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #395,779 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

#94 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Mythology & Folk Tales > Folklore

It will float there for a little bit, but then sink slowly.

IDEALLY, I should have had a couple of more promotions timed for Day 2 and Day 3 to help keep the ball rolling – but I’m on a pretty tight promotional budget.

As I have said the ideal result would be to give away enough freebies over the three days to bump the e-book up into the top 10 bestselling freebie list.

Still, I am pleased.

I reached a lot of people and I made a bit of a splash and there is not telling where all of the ripples in that modest-sized splash are going to wind up.

So learn from my results and hone your own promotional techniques.

DON’T get discouraged if you don’t hit that TOP TEN freebie list with your first couple of efforts.

You are building a readership and any book that gets out there and gets noticed might pay you dividends down the road.

In the meanwhile – good luck, keep writing and just have fun.

OOGA-BOOGA!

 

Yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon