John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 26

Why I Write Fantasy Literature: Lynne Cantwell

In my ongoing quest to uncover what makes an author choose fantasy elements for their work, I’ve begun asking other writers for their reasons. Today, I interview Lynne Cantwell, author of the the “Pipe Woman Chronicles” among others, who explains what magic tells us about a character’s emotional development, universal truths in most religions, and why a dictionary’s quality should be measured by whether it includes the word, “roynish.”

John Phythyon: You have a series of four books – “The Pipe Woman Chronicles” – that appears to use Native American mythology. Tell us briefly about the series.

Lynne Cantwell: Technically, it’s a five-book series; Annealed should be out in mid- to late May.  But yes, Native American mythology – specifically Lakota Sioux and Ute mythology – figure prominently.  The main character in the series is Naomi Witherspoon, a lawyer and certified mediator in Denver, Colorado.  She’s visited by White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman, a Lakota Sioux goddess, who tells Naomi that she’s been drafted to mediate an agreement between the Christian God and the pagan gods and goddesses whose worship Christianity suppressed.  White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman also taps a couple of helpers for Naomi:  her best friend Shannon McDonough, who’s a therapist; and Joseph Curtis, a Ute skinwalker, or shapeshifter.  There’s a fourth member of the team, but they don’t meet him until the second book.

White Buffalo Calf Pipe Woman is a pretty major figure in Lakota myth. She brought the Lakota their sacred pipe, and taught them their seven sacred ceremonies.

Joseph’s patron god is Coyote, a Trickster god who shows up in the stories of a bunch of Native American tribes.  Coyote, like Raven in the Pacific Northwest, is both a troublemaker and a creative force.

And by the way, a few other mythologies figure into the story, too.

JP: You’re obviously playing with multiple religions and legends in the series. How much do you explore the relationship between differing faiths?

LC: Not very much – even though at times, while doing the research, I felt like I was taking a class in comparative religion.  Naomi’s journey is one of trying to reconcile her Protestant upbringing with her Native American heritage (there’s a reason why the goddess picked her and not somebody else).  So for her, it’s more of a cultural exploration than a religious one.  Although spirituality was tightly woven into Native Americans’ daily lives, so culture and religion are kind of the same thing for them.

But I think one of the major goals of any religion is to teach its followers the right way to behave in order to get along in society.  That moral guidance – keep your hands off other people’s stuff, treat others the way you want to be treated, and so on – is remarkably similar from one faith to the next.  I hope that comes across in the books.

JP: Is religious conflict an important theme to you? Do you have something to say about how well two different faiths can get along?

LC: Hmm, what can I say that won’t give away the plot?  I can tell you this much: the big mediation scene takes place in Annealed.  Mediation is designed to help the two (or in this case, quite a few) parties come to a compromise they can each live with.  So you can expect that Naomi will be looking for similarities among the many religions in the series, instead of emphasizing the differences.  (Yes, I’ve written this scene already.  Yes, it was hard!)

JP: Your books are set in modern America, but they feature magic. Why is that an important part of the story? What made you decide to interject the fantastic into your tales?

LC: The magic in the “Pipe Woman Chronicles” flows from the intercession of the gods into the lives of these modern-day characters.  I mean, what else would you call it?  If Naomi’s new-found power came from Jehovah, she could call it a miracle, I guess.  But “miracle” is probably the wrong word for power granted to someone by a pagan goddess.  Hence, magic.

The other thing is that the series is urban fantasy, and the genre pretty much requires the incorporation of magic into the story.  Usually it means you’ve got sparkly vampires or werewolves or some other horrible, dark critters challenging the protagonist.  I think vampires have been done to death, if you’ll pardon the pun, and I didn’t feel up to attempting to explain werewolf pack dynamics.  So I went with Trickster gods instead.

JP: What about magic and monsters appeal to you? What do they add to stories that other elements do not?

LC: First, I don’t consider any of the characters in the “Pipe Woman Chronicles” to be monsters.  Even later on in the series, the people creating chaos have – or think they have – good reasons for their actions.  I don’t generally subscribe to the black-and-white, Good/Evil dichotomy that pervades Western storytelling.  Real people come in varying shades of gray – and in the “Pipe Woman Chronicles,” even gods can be mistaken.

I do prefer to read stories with fantastic elements.  I think magic can be a gauge of the character’s emotional development:  is he confident or tentative in its use?  Is she an arrogant jerk about it?  Does he use it to cover up his failings in other areas?  Does she absolutely refuse to use it, and why?  It gives the author another way to portray the character’s inner struggle.  I’ll grant you that you don’t get much inner struggle in a lot of light fantasy:  “Hey look, here’s a magic club!  Coooool!  I’m gonna go beat up those ogres and steal all their gold!” But there’s a fair amount of fantasy that does go deeper.  Which segues nicely into…

JP: Are there other writers who inspire or influence you? If so, who?

LC: I always cite Stephen R. Donaldson, first and foremost.  His Thomas Covenant is a brilliant example of what I’m talking about.  Covenant has leprosy, which was still incurable back in the ’70s when the original trilogy was published.  He has adopted tactics to ensure his survival, and then he gets transported to The Land.  Donaldson adeptly portrays Covenant’s distrust of a place where he’s healthy again and where people think he’s some kind of hero, as well as how he grows into a person who can finally reconcile his actions in The Land with his truth in the “real world.”  The final book of ten is due out this fall.  I can’t wait to read it.

Some of my other favorite writers are Graham Joyce, for his use of the fantastic in the modern world; Patricia McKillip, whose lush, lyrical prose is so wonderful; and Kent Haruf, who doesn’t write fantasy, but whose spare, simple prose is wonderful in a different way.

JP: One of the hallmarks of Donaldson’s protagonists is they all have some debilitating weakness that stunts and threatens to prevent their growth into heroes. Thomas Covenant has leprosy and consequent unbelief. Morn Hyland has Gap Sickness. Terisa Morgan has such low self-esteem she surrounds herself with mirrors just to remind herself she still exists. Is that a technique you like to use? Does Naomi have a weakness that interferes with her ability to fulfill her destiny?

LC: I like to think that my characters have more self-confidence than either Covenant or Terisa!  But yes, Naomi and Joseph both have their flaws.  And Naomi is fully as suspicious of her goddess-granted power as Covenant is of wild magic but is less of a jerk about using it.  If I had to compare Naomi to one of Donaldson’s characters, I’d say she’s more like Linden Avery, except without the angst.  Plus, Naomi’s funnier.

JP: What other things do you try to emulate from your favorite authors?

LC: Well, not Donaldson’s word usage, that’s for sure.  At one point, I based the purchase of a dictionary on whether it contained the word, roynish.  (It means mangy or coarse.  It’s Donaldson’s adjective of choice for the barking of Lord Foul’s ur-viles.)

I don’t know that I consciously emulate anyone, to be honest.  My style is probably more a result of the twenty years I spent in broadcast journalism than anything else.

JP: What did you do in broadcast journalism? How did that inform your voice as an author?

LC: I worked mostly in radio news, as a reporter, anchor, writer, and editor.  So my sentences tend to be short, with active verbs and few modifiers.  You won’t find me writing many sentences that start with “there is” or “there are” – that sort of passive construction is just wasted air time.

JP: Did working as a journalist lay the groundwork for the kinds of novels you chose to write? What bearing did it have on your deciding to become a fantasy author rather than another genre?

LC: I’d like to say that spending so many years as a reporter, up close and personal with tragedy and bureaucratic bungling, made me want to flee into a kinder, gentler fantasy world of my own design.  I’d like to say it, but it’s not true; I was writing fantasy long before I started working in radio.

I will say, though, that it makes me crazy when I run across a novel in which the author includes a “newspaper article” or TV news broadcast about something that’s happened in the book.  Newspaper articles are written in a specific style; broadcast news style is similar but more conversational.  I can always tell when the author hasn’t got a clue that a style exists at all.  In fact, it bothers me so much that I wrote a couple of “Getting It Right” posts for Indies Unlimited about it last year.

JP: How has becoming an author changed you?

LC: I’ve been writing fiction since I was a second-grader, so the most accurate answer is, “not at all.”  But since I’ve become an indie author, I’m probably a lot more boring to my friends, because I have less free time and I always want to talk about indie publishing!

Lynne Cantwell has been writing fiction since the second grade, when the kid who sat in front of her showed her a book he had written, and she thought, “I could do that.” The result was “Susie and the Talking Doll,” a picture book illustrated by the author about a girl who owned a doll that not only could talk, but could carry on conversations. The book had dialogue but no paragraph breaks.

Today, after a twenty-year career in broadcast journalism and a master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University (or perhaps despite the master’s degree), Lynne is still writing fantasy.

Read a sample of Seized, the first book in the “Pipe Woman Chronicles”, here.

Buy it from Amazon.com.

Doing it Wrong: Lessons Learned from a KDP Select Free Event

That loud thud you heard last week was the sound of my free event for Red Dragon Five falling flat on its face.

As you may recall, I offered RD5 free for three days (Monday, April 22 through Wednesday, April 24) through Amazon.com’s KDP Select program. The idea is to raise the book’s profile while it’s free, so that, when it goes back into the paid store, it sells better.

Back in March, I did the same thing with “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale”, and the results were quite good. I sold 150 books in 10 days and carried some of that momentum into April. It was by far my best month for sales since first publishing in 2011.

Red Dragon Five did not fare as well. After generating a respectable 1071 free downloads in the U.S. on the first day, the numbers fell off sharply the next two. When the event ended, I had 1531 total downloads in the U.S., far fewer than the 2500+ “Sleeping Beauty” got. Worse, SB got 1500+ downloads in the U.K., where RD5 got 41. So I was expecting sales to be softer following the event than SB’s.

What I got was a lot worse. In the seven days since Red Dragon Five went back into the paid store, I’ve sold three copies. Yes, three — two in the U.S., one in the U.K.

Obviously, I’m doing something wrong.

Like all artists, my ego can be fragile, and so my first thought at this disaster ran to, “The book sucks. Of course no one bought it. You wrote something no one wants to read.”

Fortunately, there is evidence to the contrary. Going into the free event, Red Dragon Five had two reviews, both of them four stars. It has since garnered two more — a three-star review and a five-star. In the former, the reviewer took issue with my blending Norse elves with Middle Eastern religion. He’d have preferred I use Middle Eastern elves. However, he liked the story and the world very well. Despite it being only three stars, he liked the book. You can read his review here. The five-star review said something I hear universally when I get feedback on this novel: once he started reading, he absolutely could not put it down.

So the problem doesn’t seem to be the content, which, as an artist, is a relief. I don’t want to write sucky books no one wants to read.

But that means the problem is the packaging. In a way, that’s good, because it’s easier to fix than overhauling a bad novel. However, first I have to discover what the barrier to entry is.

I would like to believe it is not the cover. The book is called Red Dragon Five. It’s got a big, red dragon on it. It has the dynamic color of red in the foreground against black. It’s striking. At least for the moment, I’ll operate on the premise that the flaw is somewhere else.

That leaves three obvious possibilities. It’s either not finding its market, the marketing blurb doesn’t entice potential buyers to make the purchase, or the price point is prohibitive. At $3.99, I doubt it’s the latter.

But which of the other two is it?

That’s the problem. Somehow, potential buyers are not finding their way to Red Dragon Five and deciding four bucks is worth it.

There is a minor bright spot in this gloom. RD5 may have only sold two copies in the U.S., but State of Grace, the first Wolf Dasher novel, has sold 11 and been borrowed once through Amazon Prime. Sales of SoG had been every bit as moribund as RD5. They took off (as much as 11 sales can be considered taking off) during the free event. Likewise, I sold two copies of the introductory short story in the series, “The Darkline Protocol.”

That tells me pretty clearly that series books sell each other. RD5 raised the profile of State of Grace and sold a few copies of it. So the free event wasn’t a complete disaster. If nothing else, it taught me that little nugget. (More properly it confirmed it, since I had suspected it was true.)

And, looking at the glass as half-full for a minute, the free event was extremely valuable to me in another way. It demonstrated quite clearly I’m doing something wrong. Reviewers like the book. So if I can’t sell it, I’m obviously not marketing it correctly. Knowing that is a good, good thing. It means I can try to correct it.

So I’m back to the drawing board on the marketing of Red Dragon Five. As frustrating and disheartening as last week’s free event turned out to be, the nice thing about being an independent author is you can adapt to data from the market pretty quickly. I’ll be making some adjustments in the very near future. Stay tuned.

Why I Write Fantasy Literature: The Magic of Love

There is no power on Earth — real or imagined — that surpasses love. It makes us do things we ordinarily wouldn’t — like buy flowers, give up watching a second football game on Sunday afternoon, and even throwing ourselves in front of a bullet, should one ever be fired at someone we care about. Nothing else carries that kind of weight. Nothing else makes us think of someone else instead of ourselves.

And when it happens, it is truly magical. There’s no explanation for what makes a person fall in love with one person and not another. There’s no real good explanation for why one falls out of love or falls in love with someone else while in an otherwise loving relationship. Two people meet, they get to know each other, they spend some time together, and somewhere along the way — often without realizing it — someone falls in love. It’s just magic. It just feels right.

Writing about love is the primary occupation of most authors. It’s not just the romance authors and the chick-lit authors. No, it goes across the board. In an action story, there’s a love interest. In a mystery, love and lust are often motives.

Love is the universal theme, and, like most authors, I can’t stay away from it. It invades nearly all my stories.

And that’s one of the many reasons I like fantasy literature. Because love is magical, and using magic to explain it seems the most logical way to me to treat it.

A book about a missing super-weapon is the perfect vehicle for a love story.

For example, in my latest novel, Red Dragon Five, the two main characters Wolf Dasher and May Honeyflower, are pretty obviously in love.  They are in a committed relationship, they share an apartment, and they clearly enjoy each others’ company.

Consider the following exchange between them early in the novel:

He collapsed on the bed in the small flat they shared. His eyes still hurt from the all the security briefs he’d studied today.

“She’s too hard on you,” May commented.

“Tell me about it.”

She pulled her hauberk over her head and threw it on a chair. Then she pulled the pins out of her hair and shook it out. Rich brown tresses cascaded over her caramel skin. He felt all the air go out of him. She was indescribably beautiful, and the sight of her with her hair down and just a short shift on over her chest enraptured him. It was his favorite look for her. Well, when she was wearing clothes.

“You’re hard on her too, though,” she said.

The comment snapped him out of his lustful thoughts. Instantly, all the stress and disappointment of the day returned.

“How do you figure that?” he said.

She turned and smiled at him. His heart melted again.

“Come on, Wolf,” she said. “Imagine for a moment you were the controller, and you had an agent like you to command.”

“What do you mean, ‘an agent like me’?”

She smiled again. Then she seated herself on the edge of the chair and started unlacing her boots.

“You don’t like protocol,” she answered. “You much prefer to jump in head-first and start stirring things up. You’re explosive, Mr. Dasher. When Shadow Six is on the job, chaos is coming rapidly behind him.”

She tossed off a boot and gave him a teasing look. He searched for an appropriate response.

“Well, I get things done,” he said.

“Yes,” she replied, unlacing the other boot. “When the situation needs shaking up, you are the perfect agent for the job. But sometimes subtlety is required, and that’s not your strength.”

She continued to smile at him. Her golden eyes flashed mirth. He decided not to be offended. Besides it was true.

“I’m sorry,” he teased, “were you making some sort of point?”

She giggled and tossed her other boot aside. Then she stood up, came over to the bed, and flopped down next to him. He put his arms around her, and she snuggled into him.

It is a typical scene between two people in love sharing their days. Wolf may be a spy and May a soldier, but, at home at least, they are a normal couple enjoying each others’ company.

But a writer can establish that in any novel. You don’t need magic to show two people in love. But the magic of that most complicated of emotions can be shown even more effectively with sorcery.

Later in Red Dragon Five, Wolf is about to go off on a dangerous, unofficial mission. May is not about to let him go without some sort of protection. She uses a charm her father taught her to give Wolf a way to call for help.

She sketched a circle in the center of his chest over his heart. He flinched a little at the scratching of the quill’s tip, but he didn’t resist what she was doing.

She drew a second circle inside the first. Then she began writing sigils between the lines, creating a ring of symbols he didn’t recognize.

Drawing them took about ten minutes, during which neither of them spoke. When she was finished, she pulled out a dagger and pricked her index finger with it, drawing blood.

“Give me your hand,” she said.

He did as he was told. She grasped his index finger and pricked it as she had hers. Before he could cry out, she mashed her own bleeding finger to his, mixing the blood. Then she smeared the mingled blood in the inner circle of ink on his chest. She leaned in, kissed the bloody mark, and whispered, “Wolf Dasher, my love.” Then she blew on the mark.

Wolf saw the sigils and circles light up with green, magical light. His whole chest felt warm. His heart seemed at peace.

A second later, the magical light disappeared. So did the blood on his chest. The ink had dried. It looked as though he had a small tattoo.

“Now,” she said, “if you get in trouble, you touch the finger I cut to the center of this mark and think my name. It will send a signal to me, and I will be able to find you. I will come to save you.”

He stared at her in wonder. In the past seven months since he’d started dating May Honeyflower, he’d discovered she was an amazing woman. But this was something deeper, something more bewitching than anything he’d yet seen. He felt the love in his heart grow stronger.

Magic illustrates magic. I use the word, “bewitching,” deliberately to convey the sense that there is something otherworldly at work here. Wolf is entranced. He’s totally ensorcelled by this extraordinary woman he’s found. The magical spell she casts mirrors the real one he’s already under — his love for her. He felt the love in his heart grow stronger.

Magic begets magic. By using magical power to illustrate someone’s love, the true magic of loving is made clearer.

The same is true for the novel’s villain, Alexa Emory. The principal motivator of her quest for vengeance is the betrayal of her family, particularly her grandfather. In an early scene, she reflects on his skill as a magician, thinking of a favorite toy he made for her.

She thought of the toy he made her when she was only six. It was an intricately carved flower. When she spoke the command word, “dance,” the petals opened, and it transformed itself into a beautiful ballerina who performed for her.

Alexa missed her tiny dancer. Her grandfather was a powerful magician capable of crafting all sorts of potent magical devices, but it was this toy that impressed her most. He could have created doomsday weapons like the Red Dragon Project. Instead, he’d made a trinket for his granddaughter.

Again, magic illustrates magic, in this case even more literally. Her grandfather could have bought her a toy, but instead he made one for her. And he made it with magic to do magical things. This simple act of love — a gift for a child — not only was made with magic, it inspired more love. And it is that love for her grandfather and her rage at how he was mistreated that motivates Alexa to take the actions she does. Magic not only creates love, love is magical.

I think fantasy literature has a real advantage over other genres when it comes to revealing love. Whether it’s breaking a curse with True Love’s First Kiss, causing someone to fall in love with a potion, or just the power of love overcoming darkness, fantasy shows us love as it truly is: the most powerful force on Earth.

Click here to read the full chapter of Red Dragon Five wherein May casts her spell on Wolf.

Next week I’ll discuss with author Lynne Cantwell why she writes fantasy lit!

KDP Select Free Event Update: RED DRAGON FIVE

RED DRAGON FIVE is free through April 24!

The Red Dragon Five free event is in full swing! Here’s what I have to report so far.

U.S. Downloads Good

RD5 is doing pretty well in the U.S. at the moment. As of almost 11am CDT, it has 1154 downloads. Pretty respectable for a book that had disappeared after a promising launch. I don’t have enough reviews to be considered for promo giant BookBub, but I have paid for listings with several sites, including Kindle Book Review and Book Goodies, and that seems to have created some momentum.

U.K. Downloads Not So Good

Across the Pond, things are not going as well. When I did a free event for “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” last month, I managed 1500 downloads in three days, with between 700 and 800 coming on day one. Red Dragon Five doesn’t seem to have the same punch. I’ve only got 30 at the moment.

I paid for a listing with Free Books Hub UK this morning to try to stir up a little action, and I also listed it with The eReader House, a British-based indie authors support group. That’s kicked my numbers from 18 at 6.00am to 30 now, so it seems to have helped some. But if things don’t change soon, this is going to be a much less successful event.

That’s especially concerning to me because, while I got 2500 downloads in the U.S. versus 1500 in the U.K. for “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale”, I got more sales in Britain by nearly a two to one margin after the free event. Hopefully, things will pick up in the U.K. soon.

Rising Tide

When I planned this free event, my hope was that a successful run for Red Dragon Five would help raise the water level for the first book in the Wolf Dasher series, State of Grace. I hoped that, once RD5 started selling after the free event, some buyers would also decide they needed SoG.

To my delight, that began happening on the first day of the free event. In the first 24 hours, I sold seven copies of State of Grace. I also have sold two copies of “The Darkline Protocol”, which was totally unexpected. It seems my theory about one book in a series selling the others is correct. Hopefully, that trend will continue.

Numbers Game

Red Dragon Five started charting yesterday afternoon. It first landed on the charts at #1428 in the Kindle Free Store and #6 in Mysteries & Thrillers>Thrillers>Spy Stories & Tales of Intrigue. That seems a pretty narrow category, and, to be honest, I didn’t even know it existed. However, I’ve moved up to #1 in that category as well as landing at #16 in the much larger Fantasy category. Overall, RD5 is now at #202 in the Free Store.

Moving Forward

I’ve got about a day-and-a-half left on this free event, and I’d like to see if I can push Red Dragon Five into the Top 100 in the Free Store. If I could also get it up to #1 in Fantasy, that would likely create some momentum that would really kick sales into high gear once it comes off free.

You can help out! If you don’t own Red Dragon Five, click on the link below to download it for your Kindle-enabled device for free. You can also forward the link to friends and encourage them to get it.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AA4F1P0

I’ll report next week on the final results and how sales are going post-free. In the meantime, thanks for your support! Here’s to a strong finish.

People Like Free

My friend and former business partner had a saying, “Where’s there free, there’s me.”

It’s a sentiment that’s echoed by a lot of consumers. There’s nothing like a free sample or other little gift to interest people.

I know this from experience. Last month, I offered “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” for free on Amazon.com. By spending a little money to publicize that event, I gave away 4130 books in three days in at least seven countries.

People like free.

Shortly after that event, I blogged here about my results and how I got them. That saw me get the most number of hits and views I’d seen since launching “Pleading the Phyth” back in 2011. After all, free advice on how to get more sales is the sort of thing that draws attention.

Because people like free.

I do not claim to be a genius. However, I do like to think of myself as smarter than the average bear. I read a lot of other people’s experiences and adapt and apply them to my own business to see if they’ll work for me too. That’s how both the free event and the blogs about it were successful. Being, if not a genius, no dummy, I was able to draw a pretty easy conclusion.

People like free.

So as of today, I’m evolving my website again. I’m trying to drive traffic here, so I can sell more books. Thus, I’m going to focus on putting up more free content.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be putting up sample chapters. When I’m blogging about the writing of a book, I’ll upload some sample text. I’ll be blogging about characters, and offering sample chapters that demonstrate what I’m talking about. I’ll even put some website-exclusive content up.

For the next few months, I’ll be running free events on Amazon.com too. I’ll announce them here and put some teasers up to go with them.

RED DRAGON FIVE is free on Amazon.com April 22-24!

Starting Monday, you’ll be able to download Red Dragon Five for free from Amazon. This is the first time this novel’s been offered for free. The event lasts April 22 through April 24.

I have no idea what to expect on this one. I’d love to do as well as “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” did last month, but there are so many x-factors at play. The market is very different for Wolf Dasher’s adventures than for a re-imagined fairy tale, I’m not running a Facebook event this time (so as not to go to that well too many times), and I reduced the number of sites I paid for listings, since I could not directly attribute results to some of them.  I did add a couple of UK-specific sites to try to stimulate that market even better than I did last month, but we’ll see. Red Dragon Five also has fewer reviews than “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale”, so I’ll have to see if that has an impact. So maybe I’ll do better. Maybe it’ll be worse. Maybe, it’ll be about the same.

At any rate, if you’re the kind of person who likes free, you should check out Red Dragon Five the first half of next week.

In keeping with my new strategy, you can download a sample of the first chapter right now! Just click here, to get a .pdf of the book’s opening scene in which Wolf Dasher has penetrated a secret Sons of Frey base. It’s action-packed!

You’ll also be able to get that sample chapter and a complete short story, “The Darkline Protocol”, over on the brand new “Free Stuff” page. Check it often for new material!

There are millions and millions of books available through Amazon.com, and at least tens of thousands of authors trying to sell them. I’m all for readers getting a sample to see what they like, and I’m confident my material will appeal.

So keep following my blog (and start if you’re not following it now). I’ll let you know when there is more free material available.

Because people like free.

Why I Write Fantasy Literature: The Magic of Reading

There are moments you treasure as a parent. First steps, first days of school, music programs, sports games — all the precious moments that make you proud of your offspring.

What I like best about children is the sense of wonder they have. Children believe in magic. On some primal level, they believe the extraordinary is possible.

Seeing that faith in things unseen but understood always takes me back to my own childhood in the most pleasant way. It reminds me of being a kid and how much fun I had. It reminds me I too used to believe in magic.

This is an especially potent feeling for an author of fantasy literature. In a sense, the purpose of fantasy is to inspire that sense of wonder. In a fantasy novel, whether is it is set in a faraway land from long ago or on the mean streets of a modern, real-world city, there is an element of magic. Something inexplicable and wondrous occurs. My short story, “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale,” has the least amount of magic of any of my published works. It’s very much a modern piece. But there is a witch with a magic potion that causes the titular character to fall into a deep sleep from which only True Love’s First Kiss can wake her.

Monday night, I began reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s immortal classic, The Hobbit, to my stepchildren. They are just about the perfect age for it. They are old enough that they grasp most of the fancier language. Tolkien was, after all, a linguistics professor from another country living in a very different age. But my kids are educated enough that they get most of it.

They are also, though. young enough that the fairytale-style of the narrative appeals to them. Reading The Hobbit aloud has all the feel of cracking open a leather-bound tome and starting, “Once upon a time . . . “

Indeed, my edition of The Hobbit is leather-bound and fancy-looking. I found this green-leather covered version (in a slipcase!) first when I was in high school. My tiny little school of only 360 students had an awesome edition of The Hobbit, and, after reading it, I swore I would not own that book in any other edition. It took me years to find one — I was well into my 30′s when I did.

That book, with its leather cover and gold embossing, makes the feel of reading it that much more magical. I read this same copy of The Hobbit to my daughter years ago.

And so, as I cracked open the fairytale-looking book and read, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” two children sat on a bed enthralled. The youngest held her blanket to her chest. Like the grandfather in the film version of The Princess Bride, I wove a spell more potent than anything Gandalf could imagine.

Watching those children as I occasionally looked over the top of The Hobbit while I read reminded me why I write fantasy literature. I don’t write the kind of fiction that appeals much to children. My books are for adults. But that sense of wonder — that belief in magic — is real and palpable.

I write fantasy literature to remember how it felt to be young and reading it. I first encountered The Hobbit in the Ralph Bakshi animated version. That inspired me to want to read it. Finding a magical, leather-bound edition in my high school library burned it into my imagination forever.

My children have no inkling yet of ferocious trolls that turn to stone in the sunlight, of giant spiders that come down from the trees to capture sleeping dwarves, of riddle contests with horrid creatures that live under the mountains, and of greedy dragons lying on mounds of treasure.  But just reading them the first chapter over the course of two nights invoked all those memories in me. And seeing the excited looks of rapt attention on their faces tells me they will thrill to Bilbo’s adventures and perhaps — just perhaps — the spell I weave on them will leave them with the same passion for magic I have.

Magic is real. I write fantasy literature so I can keep creating it.

Three Weeks After a KDP Select Free Event

It’s been three weeks since the free event I ran for “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale.” That seems like a good time to have another look at how successful (or unsuccessful) the event was.

As you may recall, I offered the book for free download through Amazon’s KDP Select program for three days. To help get the word out, I spent $95 in advertising for guaranteed listings on various websites that announce free books. Over the three-day period, I garnered 4130 downloads across all Amazon’s sites.

Sales were strong the first weekend the book was back on sale, particularly in the UK. After having sold a total of only four books in the first half of the month, the final 10 days saw 151 total sales (101 of which were in the UK) and 24 borrows through Amazon Prime (10 of which were in the UK). That 10-day stretch alone was a monthly sales record for me.

However, since the first week, there has been a steady decline of sales. I didn’t get nearly as many in the last three days of that 10-day stretch as I did during the first seven. Sales in April have not been as impressive. In general, I’m getting one to three a day. A week ago, I had a no-sales day for the first time since before the free event. It picked up again over the weekend, but the pace has been snail-like.

So far this month I’ve got seven US sales and four borrows, 11 UK sales and two borrows, and a single sale in Canada. Nineteen sales and six borrows is pushing the now-second-best month I’ve ever had for sales. If the pace continues, it’ll be a nice month in terms of total units sold compared to any month prior to March 2013.

But that’s not a sustainable rate of sales, especially since “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” is a short story and only retails for 99 cents. At a 35% royalty, 19 sales nets $6.65. If the borrows come in at the average of $2.00 they have been, that’ll be another 12 bucks. Not exactly enough to pay rent.

I’ve spoken with a few other authors who have experienced similar dropoffs in sales numbers after successful free events (who were more successful than I). They believe this to be the normal pattern.

So it seems you do a free event, market it to make it successful, and that gives you a sales bump that steadily declines back to your pre-free numbers after about a month.

That’s pretty disappointing. If one has to manufacture sales constantly by doing free promotions, it makes it hard to see how to create a bestseller with any other method than total luck.

It also strongly suggests that short stories are not a viable publishing model (if indeed they ever were). Assuming the numbers hold, I spent $95 to gross $100.65. That’d be okay if the sales levels sustained for longer than a week. Because they didn’t, the ROI needs to be higher. That means the book has to retail for more than 99 cents, and the sales numbers have to be at least comparable.

Looking at it from the glass-half-full perspective for a moment, this model does favor authors with multiple books. If one were to run a free event for a different book each month, that could, in theory, create a regular cycle of strong sales without overexposing one title.

That’s a lot of work, though. It’s not that I’m unwilling to do it. I am in this for the proverbial long haul. It’s just disheartening to think one gets such a short period of benefit for the amount of hustle involved.

I’ll be running a free event for Red Dragon Five in two weeks. I’ll report the success of that here and further test the sustainability theories involved.

Why I Write Fantasy Literature: Jamie Marchant

The question of why one chooses to write fantasy lit over genres continues to fascinate me. What is it about magic and monsters that are so compelling they make for interesting stories?

I’ve decided to expand my quest for an answer. In addition to blogging about my own reasons for writing fantasy, I’m going to ask some other fantasy authors why they do it.

I’ll start with Jamie Marchant. A professor at Auburn University, Jamie is the author of two fantasy books: The Goddess’s Choice and Demons in the Big Easy. I asked Jamie to discuss her books with me and why she uses fantastic elements to tell the stories she writes.

Phythyon: You’ve got two fantasy novels out right now. Talk about them for a moment. What are they about?

Marchant: Demons in the Big Easy is an urban fantasy novella. Adventurous in her youth, Cassandra built gateways between Domhan and its parallel realm of Earth. Now she’s too old for that kind of thing. But something is making it easier for demons to pass into Domhan. Not only that, but their behavior becomes inexplicable: whenever Cassandra banishes one, it laughs at her rather than resists, and it promises it will soon devour her essence and that of every resident of her small village. Cassandra is certain such a thing is impossible, for strong wards protect her village.

But then Cassandra’s granddaughter Aine falls through an unstable gateway. Cassandra is the only one within a hundred miles capable of creating a gateway and bringing Aine back. Cassandra goes after her and lands in New Orleans. But something goes wrong with her tracking spell, which indicates Aine exists in four different places at once. As she struggles to find the true location of her granddaughter in the Big Easy, Cassandra discovers the source of the demons’ confidence.  Now, with an unlikely pair of allies—her timid granddaughter and a homeless man who may or may not be crazy—she has to not only save her granddaughter but also prevent both Domhan and Earth from being overrun by demons.

The Goddess’s Choice is an adult epic fantasy novel set in a kingdom called Korthlundia. The crown princess Samantha fears she’s mad; no one but she sees colors glowing around people. The peasant Robrek Angusstamm believes he’s a demon; animals speak to him, and his healing powers far outstrip those of his village’s priests.

Their gifts also endanger their lives. Royals scheme to usurp the throne by marrying or killing Samantha, and priests plot to burn Robrek at the stake. He escapes the priests only to be captured by Samantha’s arch-enemy, Duke Argblutal, who intends to force the princess to marry him by exploiting Robrek’s powers. To save their own lives and stop Argblutal from plunging the realm into civil war, Robrek and Samantha must consolidate their powers and unite the people behind them.

It is loosely based on a Norwegian fairy tale, “The Princess and the Glass Hill.” Though my favorite fairy tale as a child, it disturbed me that the female character has no name and no role other than being handed off as a prize. My novel remakes the crown princess of Korthlundia into a strong heroine who is every bit as likely to be the rescuer as the one rescued.

Phythyon: Who’s the goddess? It sounds like you’ve got a pretty well developed religion in the book.

Marchant: The goddess is Sulis, who is based on the Celtic goddess of healing, but the religious structure is mostly my own invention. Priests (and priestesses in the Northern kingdom) exist to heal both body and soul. Ideally, they have healing magic, similar to Robrek’s (although not as strong.) In reality, most of the Northern priestesses have such magic. The Southern priests do not. Magic requires mixed blood, and the Southern priests do not accept this fact and have been preaching about the importance blood purity for centuries. This has mostly killed magic in the Southern kingdom. The Southern church has become corrupt and exists mostly to serve themselves rather than the goddess’s children.

Phythyon: Why did you decide you needed elements of the fantastic to tell these stories? They both seem to feature a lot of magic. Why was that an important component of the plots?

Marchant: I think the fantastic is an important element of almost every plot. It gives us an escape from our mundane lives. It appeals to us at our most primitive. Neither of these books would have a story without the magic. Both plots revolve around it.

Phythyon: You say all plots have an element of the fantastic. How do you distinguish between the fantastic and magic?

Marchant: Truthfully, I don’t distinguish between magic and the fantastic. Magic is one element of the fantastic that I enjoy in the books I read. The real world has too little magic in it, so I want it in the books I create.

Phythyon: Is that what made you want to write fantasy novels?

Marchant: I’ve been fascinated with fantasy since I was a very young child; my older sister would tell me fairy tales. They were an escape from the mundane world while teaching important lessons about life. Good fantasy fiction is like that. It brings in the magical while illuminating the importance of the simple things of life and human relationships. My love for fantasy was nurtured in my teen years by Piers Anthony and Roger Zelazny. It was while I was in high school I attempted my first fantasy novel. I’ve never really wanted to write anything else.

I’ve also liked magic for the possibilities it opens up for the imagination. With magic, the world contains infinite possibilities. It allows us to reach beyond the mundane into a realm where no one has gone before.

Phythyon: Do you have any particular influences?

Marchant: Besides my sister’s fairy tales, my strongest influence is probably Mercedes Lackey. Her Valdemar books have become my favorite as an adult. I want my fantasy realm of Korthlundia to be as rich and varied as her world.

Besides Lackey, my favorite writer is Jim Butcher. I don’t know if my favorite authors inspired me to want to write. I’ve always wanted to write. I started writing stories about the Man from Mars for my older sister when I was about six. But they inspire me to write my best, to not give up until I get it right.

Phythyon: What do you hope to emulate from those writers? What about their work inspires you?

Marchant: Both their characters and their world building. Both authors create complex, believable characters that you can love and love to hate. Their worlds are also rich and complete and allow you to suspend your disbelief. I want Korthlundia to be as compelling as Lackey’s Valdemar.

Jamie Marchant lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband, son, and four cats, which (or so she’s been told) officially makes her a cat lady. She teaches writing and literature at Auburn University. Her first novel, The Goddess’s Choice, was published in April 2012 by Reliquary Press. She released Demons in the Big Easy in January 2013. She is hard at work on the sequel to The Goddess’s Choice, tentatively titled The Soul Stone. Her short fiction has been published in Bards & Sages, The World of Myth, and Short-story.me.

Creating a Successful KDP Select Free Event

Yesterday, I discussed the success of the free event I ran for “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” through Amazon.com’s Kindle Direct Publishing Select program. I looked at what I did and what the numbers were. If you missed yesterday’s blog, read it here.

Today, I’ll analyze my strategy to determine what worked, what didn’t, what needs revision, and why I think it’ll work again (and how you can recreate it for your own book). My baseline assumption is this: giving away a lot of free books through KDP Select raised my profile in Amazon’s search engines, so that people looking to buy would be able to find it. Because I was selling barely a whisper before the event and am now averaging 25 books sold and four borrowed a day, I conclude the causal force in that change was the successful free event I ran. That conclusion colors everything I below.

The Right Book

Before I could run a successful free event, I had to have a book enrolled in Select. Of my five titles available for sale, three of them are in Select. So which one did I choose?

The one with the clearest indication of quality. “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” had six positive and no negative reviews when I began. Five of them were four-star, and one was a five-star for a 4.2-star average.

I believe this was a critical piece of my overall success. By offering a book with a 4.2-star average and more than one or two reviews, I sent the message to both the people I was offering it free to and the ones I hoped would buy it later that this was a product they could trust to be worth their time. I made sure they knew this was a good book.

To get the number of downloads I did (4130), I believe you need to make sure you have reviews in place. As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, a colleague got 30,000 free downloads for his techno-thriller. He had 15 five-star reviews. I’m convinced that made a difference.

I also chose the book with the best cover. Some of my covers are better than others, but “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” is easily better than any other I have. Because a good cover is critical to sales anyway, it was naturally important to have one for a giveaway. With an excellent cover and a strong review average, I essentially told prospects this was a professionally produced, high-quality book and worth their time.

Laying the Foundation

More than a month ago, I started tinkering with the story’s SEO language. I knew I needed to make it more visible to shoppers. If it was landing more than two pages back on an Amazon search, it just wasn’t going to be found.

I made changes to the title, categories, keywords, and book description to try to make it rise up the charts on Amazon. My methodology for that can be found in an earlier blog post here.

The important part about this aspect of my approach was that I positioned “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” to capitalize on the downloads it got. People found it initially because of the advertising I did (see below), but, as it began to rise up the ranks in the Free Store, its own success started feeding it. The higher I could get it in a category and the higher I could get it overall, the more people would find it in a search, and the more Amazon would push it. To maximize this effect, I made sure I had the story as search-engine optimized as I could get it.

Advertising

This was the most important part of the plan. Like it or not, if you want people to download your book in game-changing numbers, you’re going to have to pay for it. There are just too many free books (hell, there are too many books, period) for you to get noticed in significant fashion without some help.

Fortunately, aid is available, and it’s not expensive. I only spent $85 paying for guaranteed listings, and I was able to hire seven different websites to get the word out. I verified that each did indeed list me as promised.

The problem is that, since Amazon changed its policy on not paying affiliates for referrals for free book downloads above a certain percentage, there are fewer sites that are listing them. But I don’t seethat  that changes anything. Most of the sites already asked you to pay for a guaranteed listing. If you didn’t, they might list you, they might not. I’ve run a number of free events, and Pixel of Ink, for example, has never listed my book, even though I inform them. So I don’t see this as much of a change.

I have no means of tracking results. However, The Kindle Book Review has an inexpensive package where they will tweet your free event several times a day in addition to listing you. And Author Marketing Club did include me in their daily free email every day, despite my not buying a sponsorship.

You have to plan in advance for these. Many require notice. It also took some time. Not only did I have to research which ones had a service I wanted I could pay for, I had to spend the time signing up. That took several hours.

But I firmly believe that this was the key to getting the word out about my book. Prior to this event, I was completely unable to crack the UK market. Because some of the sites I advertised with serve UK readers, I got 1500 downloads in Britain alone, and I am now selling books in the UK at a rate of two to one over the US. Too late, I learned about some UK-specific sites — ebookdealoftheday.co.uk, indie-book-bargains-co.uk, and freebookshub.co.uk. I’ll be using them in the future.

Social Media

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, I’ve promoted previous free events via Twitter and Facebook groups of which I’m a member. I also put it in my Facebook status on the day of the event.

But this time I tried something I saw work for a colleague. I created a Facebook event and invited all my friends to it. I gave them sample FB updates and tweets they could cut and paste. Then, on the days of the event, I asked them to not only download the book themselves but to push it on their social media networks.

Several of them did. Of those people, almost every one had at least one friend comment they had downloaded “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” and thanked the person for the recommendation. I’ve no idea, of course, how many more just downloaded it without saying anything.

This really helped push momentum, particularly on Day 1, when things went really well. It also helped a bit when the momentum had stalled on Day 3.

The thing is, as much as this part of the plan was an important piece of the event’s success, it still amounts to calling in a favor. I asked my friends for help. You can only do that so often. As much as I want to, I probably won’t use this tactic for my next free event. I’m saving it for a book launch for later this year.

You can only go to the well so often on this sort of thing before you become a pain in the ass to your friends. Use it for the ones that really matter to you.

The Future

I believe what I did gives me a pretty decent blueprint for how to handle future free events. My next one will be for Red Dragon Five, my fantasy-thriller mashup novel that has struggled to gain attention after a promising launch in November.

Before I can do that, though, there are some things I need to do first. RD5 has only two four-star reviews at the moment. I need to get it at least one more and preferably a couple more, so it will have the same potential lift. It also needs to have a new description that will do more to sell it and contains SEO-rich language. It may need to be re-categorized too. There’s a lot of that SEO work I haven’t done for it yet that needs attention before its ready.

As I mentioned above, I won’t do a Facebook event for it, because I don’t want to over-ask my friends for help. I’m launching a book in May I’d much rather have their support for. However, I may modify how I post links on the Facebook groups of which I’m a member. In the past, I’ve just noted that the book is free and offered a link. Next time, I believe I will actually ask for help in getting the word out.

The biggest question is the number of days for the event. For the first time, I ran my free event for three days instead of two. The numbers were disappointing on the third day in comparison to the first two, especially the first. So was it worth it to run for three days, or should I have come off sooner?

I have read that what really matters most is the total number of downloads, not your ranking at the end of the free event. If that’s true, then perhaps it would be better to actually run the event for five days instead of three. I had planned, if the numbers were only rising, to add extra days to this event. Since they kept falling, I elected not to.

But was that wise? I’m really not sure. This matter will require some further thought and research on my part.

Conclusion

Based on my results, I believe that scratching out decent sales at Amazon requires a good cover, a number of good reviews, SEO-rich language in the book description and carefully chosen categories and keywords, and a well advertised free event. Short of getting lucky or having a solid marketing engine, this is the current path for the indie author. It’s hard, it takes some money and a lot of time. But if you work hard and execute it correctly, it will work.

I’ve only done this successfully once, so that may lessen the authority with which I’m making my claims. But I adapted my strategy from other indie authors who have used the free event to change the game for their own sales, and they’ve done even better than I. At least for the moment, I think this is how to kick sales into gear.

Prior to running my free event, I had four sales this month. I had eight the month before that. In the five days since the free event ended, I’ve sold 127 books and had 21 borrowed through Amazon Prime. That certainly doesn’t make me Stephen King. But if all my titles could sell 25 books a day, I’d be well on my way to a sustainable living from self-publishing. A well orchestrated KDP Select free event is what put me on the path.

Cracking the Code: How I (Finally) Ran a Successful KDP Select Free Event

I think I’ve actually done it. At least once, anyway.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been trying to crack the code on making KDP Select work for me in the same way other authors have reported for themselves. Select, if you’re not familiar with it, is the Amazon program that allows you to participate in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library (wherein readers can borrow your eBook instead of buying it) and offer it for free for up to five days in exchange for granting Amazon the exclusive right to sell the electronic version of the book for 90 days.

I’ve experimented with KDP Select free days, SEO-rich language, and advertising (both free and paid) to raise my sales on Amazon. Until last week, my results were not significant. But last week I ran the most successful free event I’ve ever held, and it translated into record sales (for me, anyway).

Below, I’ll discuss my methodology for setting up the event and the resulting numbers. Tomorrow, I’ll write about why I think it was successful and how to recreate it.

The Product

For reasons I’ll cover tomorrow, I don’t think just any book can have a gangbusters free event. Not all books are created equal, and some genres/categories just have more potential readers.

I ran my event for “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” — my re-imagining of the classic story. This book has been my go-to guinea pig in working with Select. It was the first piece I enrolled in the program, and I’ve done most of my experimentation with it.

It also had five four-star reviews and one five-star review for an average of 4.2 stars when I began the event, thereby telling potential readers it was worth their time, and it has been my bestselling book since I published it last summer, indicating it was the most marketable piece I had.

Finally, ABC’s Once Upon A Time remains popular, and that’s inspired a wave of modern retellings of classic fairy tales. I figured that would give me a marketing angle my other books wouldn’t at this particular moment in time.

Goals

I really had no idea what a reasonable goal was, so I picked a number based on others’ results. A colleague had achieved 24,000 downloads for his free event for his memoir regarding his love affair with his wife. A second colleague had 30,000 downloads for his techno-thriller about cyber-terrorism. Both of those works were full-length books as opposed to the 8000-word short story I was offering, so I figured they were going to do better than I could. (Short stories just aren’t as popular as full-length novels.) I also thought that true-love memoirs and techno-thrillers sounded like more popular categories than re-imagined fairy tales.

I therefore set 10,000 downloads as my goal. I had no idea if it was realistic, but it was 40% of one result and 30% of another that I considered phenomenal. So if I could get numbers like that I had to be doing really well.

Advertising

One of the things I’ve discovered is that to get the kinds of numbers that make a difference, you have to advertise. I’d done some experimenting with this for previous free events, and where I advertised and how much made a difference to my numbers. I also had read from several other authors that their ad efforts helped them get significant returns.

I set an advertising budget of $100. Many of the advertising services for free books are pretty cheap, running between $15 and $25. I also knew that many of the sites that have mailing lists about free books offer guaranteed listing options. You have to pay for these, but the site promises you will get listed if you do.

Using Author Marketing Club’s list of free sites as my guide, I went site by site looking for guaranteed listing options. When I found one, I signed up for it. I chose the following sites:

Book Goodies
Bargain eBook Hunter
Free Kindle Fiction
Kindle Book Promos
eBooks Habit
Author Marketing Club
The Kindle Book Review

With the exception of Author Marketing Club, I paid for listings with each site. Every other free-book site I could find through AMC I signed up to be listed with, but I didn’t put much hope in them, since I was not paying for attention.

Social Media

In the past, I’ve tweeted my free event to the moon, listed it on Facebook groups of which I’m a member, and created a Goodreads event. I repeated these steps this time, but I added something else. I created a Facebook event for the giveaway and invited practically my entire friends network to it.

Through the event, I asked people to help. I created some sample tweets and Facebook updates they could cut and paste. Then, when the event went live, I posted in the event asking people not only to download the book but to push it on their friends through their own social media networks. I sent updates to the event periodically, telling people how it was going and thanking them for their efforts.

Results: Downloads

I ran my free event Monday through Wednesday of last week. I’d read three days was a better number than the two I’d run in the past, and my research indicated the early part of the week is more effective.

Monday started with a bang. My best free event ever had been 650 downloads. I exceeded that number in the first 12 hours. Because I’d rearranged my categories and used SEO-rich language several weeks ago to reposition the story, I started charting in the Top 100 of categories almost immediately.

Better, for the first time I did something I’d been trying to do almost since I began publishing in 2011: I gained traction in the UK. Brits buy more books per capita than any other nation in the world. I’d been trying to figure out to penetrate that market for over a year. In only 12 hours, I landed at #5,201 overall in the UK Kindle Free Store and was charting in the Top 100 in two categories. In late afternoon, the UK numbers exploded. I rocketed up to #1 in three categories and broke into the Top 100 overall, peaking at #24.

Over on the US side, I made it to #110 overall on the first day and was in the Top 50 of two different categories. Between the US and UK I had over 1500 downloads on the first day alone.

The momentum started to slide on Tuesday. I didn’t get as many on Day 2 and even fewer on Day 3. I had anticipated this possibility before the event, and I’d staggered some of my paid listings to have me featured on the latter days. It didn’t seem to help, though. Despite pleas for help to my Facebook event and staggered advertising, I couldn’t sustain the momentum I built on the first day.

Still, when the free event was over, I’d given away 4310 copies of “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” — short of my goal but still a staggering number in comparison to my previous best. I spent the first two days firmly entrenched at the top of the British charts and making a very respectable showing in the US. It was clearly a successful event.

Results: Sales

The goal, though, was to increase my sales. The benefit of a free event, if it is successful, is not so much to attract readers but to raise the book’s profile in Amazon’s search engine. Because Amazon prioritizes books on how well they sell, having a successful free event raises the visibility of a book, making it easier for potential buyers to find. Then, if you’ve done your marketing well, you can start making some conversions to sales.

So would 4130 downloads be enough to get me in front of readers who would actually spend money on my book?

Yes. After laboring for awhile in the 300,000 range, “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” starting climbing the ladder over the weekend. This morning, it ranked #16,042 in the Kindle Paid Store and is #51 in Children’s eBooks>Fairy Tales, Folk Tales & Myths. It’s doing even better in the UK, where it is #2166 overall, #3 in two categories, and #6 in another.

Over a four-period, I saw 30 sales in the US and 66 in the UK. The US numbers surpass my best month to date in both number of copies of “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale” sold and total books moved. The UK numbers blow all previous months out of the water in either market.

I also garnered 11 borrows in the US and 5 in the UK through Select’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. And I sold a copy of “Passion Play”, another short story for which there is a prominent ad in the back of “Sleeping Beauty.”

By the time the weekend was over, I’d sold 99 books and gotten 16 borrows. Thus, I used my free event to change my sales numbers from one sale every three to four days, to 25 sales and four borrows a day. It’s too early to know for sure, but I am hoping charting in the Top 100 will create more sales, thereby establishing a sustainable level of momentum.

I consider this to have been an extremely successful event. Not only did my downloads well exceed any previous numbers I’d established, I cracked into the UK market and generated sales at a previously unseen rate.

Tomorrow, I’ll look at why I think my strategy worked, so that I (and you) can recreate it.