Another Promo and a Nice Boost

Yesterday was a good day. I ran a promo suggested by a fellow writer from a forum. The promo was specifically targeted at readers of shifter romances, but I hadn’t come across it before. As a result, Dragon Blue had 46 sales and 2K page reads, which was great. Good enough to vault it up into a couple of different top 100 subcategories and near 5K overall (5,008 was the highest rank I saw). So that’s pretty sweet. I was listening to a podcast yesterday where they talked about “stickiness” for books in the Kindle store, the ability to keep them from slipping in the rankings, without constantly having to bolster them with advertising. The problem was, I didn’t really get at what the author was trying to say. He seemed to be saying that just a really high-quality cover and blurb made the book sticky, but I’m kind of doubting that’s it.

I’m still thinking what’s mostly going on in this market, like so many others, is the economic phenomenon of cumulative advantage, defined in this source as an inequality ” in which a favorable relative position becomes a resource that produces further relative gains”. In other words, being successful makes you more successful. It’s the concept of the rich getting richer. In specific terms of the Kindle market, my intuition is that breaking into the top 100 in one or more subcategories confers some advantage in terms of free visibility. I’m also guessing that breaking into the top 20, the first page that readers see, is likely to confer an even larger advantage, leading to a lot of inertia for a title.

I mean, of course the quality of the cover and blurb are important. But I think the way the market is structured probably perpetuates success by disproportionately rewarding the successful. I’m guessing this author was finally able to punch through into the very top of the rankings, and that’s the primary factor in what made his book stick. Of course, I could be totally wrong. But I’m also guessing there are tons of high-quality books, with high-quality covers and blurbs, that only drift up to a certain ranking before plunging into the abyss.

Anyway, I was also a little stuck in the plotting on my giveaway novella, and I figured out how to plot the last half of the story. So yesterday was kind of a win-win. I’m going to try to knock out some more words on it today. Hope you all are having a swell weekend.

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