Seeing the Bright Side
I’ve been trying to juggle so many things in my life, it’s hard to keep focus. One week it’s the cuteness of school starting. The next week I’m learning from Eddie Bravo and Bas Rutten. This week it’s fiction and the pleasant surprise of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Program.
Back in August, I released Brightside free through Smashwords and at $0.99 at Amazon. I did almost no advertising outside of Facebook and found it was harder to give away the book than sell it. There were only around a dozen free downloads, and a little over double that in Amazon purchases. Besides those with the advance copy of the book, there were now another forty people possibly reading Brightside.
The slow as hell sales didn’t bother me. I’d already told myself I couldn’t worry about Brightside. Maybe it will take the release of Unlocking the Cage before Brightside picks up speed, but I have faith that it will do just fine. I think it’s a good story, hopefully the kind people will recommend to their friends.
Although the snail-like start wasn’t depressing me, something had to change. I’d done some research on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Program and thought it made sense. In exchange for selling it exclusively on Amazon for 90 days, Brightside can be borrowed by Amazon Prime members and I could give the book away for free on 5 days. I scheduled two of my free days for last Tuesday and Wednesday, spent a whole forty dollars on advertising, then forgot about it. I put up a couple reminders on Facebook that it was free, but didn’t want to get my hopes up and thought expecting twenty downloads would be too high. Who wants to read a first time author they’ve never heard of? There are so many books released every day, how would they even know Brightside existed?
On Wednesday, I was on the phone with my brother, and he mentioned how many times his children’s book Finding Gnomad was downloaded on their two free days. I was shocked at the number and guessed it was time to check mine, my lofty expectation of twenty all of a sudden seeming pretty damn low.
I got off the phone and went to Amazon. Since I’d enrolled Brightside in the KDP, I’d only sold an additional seven copies, just two of them at $5.99. My skin’s pretty thick, but wasn’t so sure I wanted to see how few downloads I’d received. I clicked on the link and stared at the number.
My wife had just come downstairs and asked me what was wrong. I told her what I was trying to find out and pointed at the screen. The number couldn’t be right.
She simply asked why couldn’t it be. I backed out of the page and clicked the link again. 4,332 downloads, three higher than it’d been a minute before. Holy crap.
I don’t know what the average downloads are for an eBook’s free days, but I was thrilled. Instead of hoping to get in front of 500 people with a print run, Brightside was downloaded 6,329 times in two days. My goal as a writer is to tell a story to as many people as possible so getting that many readers in such a short period of time is awesome. I want to thank everyone who downloaded it, especially those that wrote the reviews that made Brightside visible.
Reviews mean much more than improved visibility and an increase in sales, especially the ones from strangers. It’s easy to write off praise from friends and family, they have to say it doesn’t suck. It’s entirely different when someone with no ties to you says those same things, how much they liked Brightside and couldn’t put it down. Several finished it in two days, Shari still alone in first place, reading it in one. Right on.
That’s the real reason I wasn’t tripping on Brightside’s slow start. If Brightside could affect people enough that they would take their time to write a review, everything would be alright. And although it’s too early to say, I’m happy with the direction it’s headed. Over the course of the past four days (immediately following the free-days,) there have been 21 sales and 11 borrows, doubling the number of Amazon readers from the previous month and a half. Since then more reviews have trickled in and as long as they continue to be positive, I only see Brightside’s sales improving.
Brightside is finally off to the printers, along with my thank you list to the people that have been so supportive. This list includes those who’ve written reviews, sent me personal messages, helped share my work on Facebook, and just been great friends. My sincere thanks for the help at the start of this journey.
