An experiment in Free

Later this week I’m doing an experiment. Now admittedly  I’m not a scientist. I used to be but that was a while ago so my skills are somewhat rusty but let’s give it a go anyway. Last month I ran a promotion to give away Entangled Earth for free for 2 days. I popped this on a few promotion sites and blasted Twitter and Facebook. In the end, possibly due to a tweet by Rufus Hound (thanks Rufus and my wife who knows him on twitter), I managed to give away 377 copies.

Hypothesis – Can I give away over 1000 copies of Entangled Earth in 3 days?

Now this time there are a lot of variables:

The promotion is over 3 days instead of 2
Instead of zero, Entangled Earth has ‘some’ reviews on Amazon.com now
The notification has gone out early and to a lot more promotion sites, hopefully covering a broader reach of people.
It’s on Thursday-Saturday rather than just a weekend, so should catch a better buying time for readers (apparently weekends aren’t great, who knew?

So what do I get from giving away my book? I know, it sounds counter-intuitive to give a book away when you are trying to sell it, but bear with me. I get:

Reviews – hopefully, a percentage of those who download it will read it, and a percentage of those will review it. Even if it nets 2 or 3 reviews it’ll be worth it, that’s how precious those verified reviews are.
Rankings – With a big push it might rise high enough in its category to get some notice and then after the 3 days it’ll still be there and get promotion by the great Zon and sell a few copies. This noticeably didn’t happen last time as it didn’t get far enough up, but we’ll see if there’s a post-sale bump.
Readers – after all is said and done, I really just want people to read it, so there’s that.

Results: Check back in on Sunday for a preliminary report!