Report on Third Day of Kindle Direct Publishing Free Promotion

I am going to commit a little bit of heresy here, but I want to give you the numbers first, in case you’re curious. The Saturday numbers are actually over a little shorter period of time – 11:30 last night to 9:45 tonight.

Country
Number of Giveaways – Thursday
Number of Giveaways – Friday
Number of Giveaways – Saturday


United States
7723
3995
1784


United Kingdom
41
48
37


Germany
5
4
0


France, Spain, Italy
1
1
2


Canada
9
7
2


Japan
0
1
0

So the numbers are down a little. No big deal. Nothing to worry about.

Here’s the heretical part. I am thinking maybe this is a good thing. Maybe giving away too many books, at least this early, is a bad thing. This is what I’m thinking:

1. The promotional stuff that I have been doing so far has been, as far as I can tell, mostly ineffective. I put in for free slots on a bunch of the promotional websites, and the majority of the sites didn’t so much as list the book. I have been hitting Twitter hard and heavy (slacked off a little on Saturday, which shows in the data), but that hasn’t generated that many hits on my tracking system. (Unfortunately, you can’t use the Amazon affiliate program to track free sales because it doesn’t record free sales.)

2. Having said that – yeah, something is working. But what? Why? I don’t have the first clue what I did right (other than, you know, write a good book and get a good cover). And I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t know how to figure out how to learn it.

3. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing. I am not really trying to just give away a lot of books here. I am not really trying to get more reviews (only gotten one additional review so far, although it was very nice.) I am not really trying to get a lot of Goodreads additions (although I have). I am trying to have this book do well enough to get me excited about writing the next one, and finding a traditional publisher for the current one or the next one, however that works out. The free numbers are a mean to an end, not an end in and of themselves, and maximizing those numbers may not do quite as much for me as you’d think.