Let's Do The Numbers

I like to post a bit on Amazon numbers after a free launch and although Pinocchio, or The Stars Are Not Wanted Now’s free promotion has extended another day (more on that in a bit), I already wrote the bulk of this post before, well, more on that later.

So at around 11PM last night my new collection racked up just shy of 375 downloads and slowed to a crawl. That was a good number as far as I was concerned. Publishing exclusively to the Kindle via KDP cuts out your Nook and other eReader audiences and doing all of the panel magnification stuff in Kindle Format 8 cuts out a large portion of your Kindle audience so…I effectively cut out a very large percentage of customers. And even though I say, “You can read this book in the Amazon Cloud Reader!” which literally everyone reading this post has free access to, I still get a lot of, “I don’t have a Kindle!”

Anyways…so, yeah, I was satisfied. Sort of. The panel magnification thing is a pain in the butt and it took me about 30 hours to format an 11-page comic. That’s a whole lot of time. Now, granted, about 15 of the hours were spent figuring out how to do it, 10 were spent doing it the long way, 2 were spent doing it the short way, and 3 were spent debugging, testing, and tweaking, so future comics will be a lot easier but, still, this was time consuming as all hell. 

And I normally don’t mind time consuming, but I’m currently editing three books, teaching three classes, and have a day job. So I was getting extremely cranky.

So this post was supposed to be about trade-offs in time spent developing something vs. downloads but then, last night at 9PM, I made an almost-jokey post about the things I’d do if I got 400, 500, 750, and 1000 downloads which originally resulted in 3 new downloads. Then, at around 11:15 or so, mar-see-ah reblogged that post and a couple of minutes later inothernews reblogged it from her and, well, Tumblr loves a challenge. 

So far I’ve uploaded some old drawings (1 and 2, the 400 download unlock) and I’m scanning in some old poetry tonight (the 500 download unlock). I decided to run the promotion one more day in the hopes of getting some turnover. At the time of writing this, 12-hours after the reblogging began, we’re at 578 downloads. And I’ll keep my promise on 750 and 1,000 if it gets there by the 3AM EDT. 1,000, for super longtime readers, is a new Drunken Wine Critic video, something that people still ask me for. 

So, what did I learn? First, I learned that I have a pathetic bit of reach. I mean, truly pathetic. I thought I had some reach but one guy puts something up at a time when most east coasters are sleeping and it gets over 200 downloads in 12 hours whereas I push hard on blogs, websites, social networking and emails and get 375 downloads in three days. But that’s OK. I’ve been out of the game for about three years, really, and I just need to make new contacts is all. I got a year and a half before the first Colonial Book comes out so there’s plenty of time for that.

I also learned that all the reviews and pushing in the world from mid-audience social networking people can’t hold a candle to a superuser. I was talking to an editor friend yesterday morning and he’s pushing his own book and I just said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had just one reddit superuser in our back-pocket? No more contests, no more promotion to the point of begging…”

Well, looks like last night’s little burst proved that theory. 

I need to fill up some back pockets, I guess. 

I need new pants. I usually like small back pockets.