Has this happened to you (KDP question)

[Patricia]

One of my sales today was listed as a free promo, but I'm not running a free promo right now. It was not a price match either. The same title had "money" sales today.

[Andre Jute]

I have two of those freebies charged to my account, when I haven't run a giveaway for several weeks.

Mrs Bezos needed something good to read.

[Patricia]

Isn't it enough she has Jeff? She needs my generosity as well?

[Katie]

I asked about these freebies that kept happening long after my free promotion and was told that people had 'bought' them, but not downloaded them at the time of the promotion or that they were simply a backlog on the computer. Not sure I believe them, but that's all the explanation I'm going to get, I guess.

[Andre Jute]

I'm not worrying about it. The whole Amazon/Kindle system has more holes than a well-moused gruyere. The other day I downloaded something from Katie and something from you. The story from Katie promptly appeared on my Kindle, the story from you I found days later sitting in the Downloads folder on my Mac. Nothing visibly different between the two files. Amazon just sent one to my Kindle (and my Mac) and one only to my Mac for no visible reason at all. I've noticed lots of little glitches like this.

[Katie]

Thanks for downloading whatever it was, Andre.

By the way, Patricia, I finally got around to reading your short story, 'Maria' the other day. Loved it! You managed to tell so much of her story without seeming to tell it. Very cleverly written.

[Patricia]

Thanks, Katie. That originally appeared in a literary magazine in Oz.

Andre, love the line about the well-moused gruyere.

Amazon's explanation about download times might make sense, but it has never happened before with my giveaways. Did thousands of people in the past all have their Kindles on, ready and waiting for downloads?

[Sharon]

Patricia wrote: "Thanks, Katie. That originally appeared in a literary magazine in Oz..."

Patricia, I love the way you just throw out a tidbit that Andre would dine out on for years...

[Patricia]

Kench...

[K.A.]

I get them trickling in for a week or more after the giveaway.

I'm crying in my beer (rootbeer) because after giving away thousands of copies of 'Swallow the Moon' it's back in the mulch layer - 600k after MONTHs in the top-50. The free rankings didn't count for a single point after all that time.

[Patricia]

But your book will show up in the "customer who bought this title also bought" listings. The freebies will be treated as sales in that regard.

[J.A.]

I noticed on my book once it went off free that it has tons of also boughts and now has steady (if modest sales) where before it had basically stopped with sales.

One issue I think StM has is not enough reviews. I've talked to a lot of readers on places on GR about reviews, and it seems like people often don't start trusting reviews until you accumulate 10-20.

Kat,

You might want to go here and giveaway some review copies. This group does an author requesting reviews program. You can specify that you want people to leave reviews on Amazon in addition to GR. When I gave away copes if my book, I had 14/15 people leave reviews (not all great, but hey, that's always the risk).

http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/6...

http://www.goodreads.com/topic/group_...

If you sign up and get a ARR thread, make sure you go and bump it every couple of days. There's hundreds of request so it can fall to the bottom quickly. They don't mind if you bump though. I think I had 15 people sign up within 3-4 weeks for mine and ten or so sign up in a couple of weeks. Not every left Amazon reviews (despite asking), but I'd say the majority did.

[K.A.]

I'll look into that. I'm going to do a Library Thing giveaway as soon as I get the paperback on sale.

I went to all the Romance Review sites with ARCS and though I followed all their guide lines, I never got a single review and it's been over a year.

So I decided to get the paperback out and push from there.

[Patricia]

The trouble with giveaways is that it violates the ground rules for KDP. As long as a book's enrolled, you're not allowed to do freebies.

[K.A.]

Good point.

I think you can do paperback freebies - just not e-books. Not worth getting into trouble over, not when your books are doing well in Select.

[Andre Jute]

Librarything reviewers are mean with their stars. A novel that would get four or five stars on Amazon on LT receives three stars. And they don't adjust the stars when they crosspost to Amazon, so that your Amazon average is dragged down.

[Patricia]

Kat, yes, you can giveaway your paperbacks and/or sell then elsewhere.

(I should have said "ground rules for Kindle Select," not KDP.)

[K.A.]

Andre Jute wrote: "Librarything reviewers are mean with their stars. A novel that would get four or five stars on Amazon on LT receives three stars. And they don't adjust the stars when they crosspost to Amazon, so t..."

What a bummer! I've had a shelfari review, too. They didn't like the book.