Well, it’s finally over. Three days of stress, near-constant twitter and Facebook exposure and constant statistics checking (I think my laptop gave me a tan on my face) are done. I’m relieved. My wife is ecstatic. My kids get to see their Dad again. I think even the hamster feels a little less stressed-out.
Here’s a bit of a recap about how things went, in case you haven’t read my other posts, and I’ll finish up with the final results.
Preparation for my Friday-Sunday free promo began on the Monday before with sending notifications to a number of sites that list free books (see this post for links). During the week before I also redesigned my cover, changed the content of my book (I added previews for two of my other novels) and uploaded both to Kindle. That was a bit stressful in itself as, when you change the content, Kindle automatically generates a message telling you it may take as much as five days for the new content to become available! My book disappeared while the update happened. As I did this on Wednesday, I nearly pooped! But fear not, everything worked out. It was back up again by noon on Thursday, shiny new cover and all, ready to be ravaged by the crowds hungry for my writing.
12:01am Friday morning came around and, as the focused individual I am (some might say obsessive…I disagree, honey), I watched and waited. It didn’t drop in price. 12;15? No price change. That’s okay, sometimes it takes a bit. 12:25? No. 12:37? 12:43? 12:47? 12:50? 12:52? 12:53? No. Screw it, I went to bed.
Remember the focused (not obsessive) comment earlier? I woke at 5:35 am and couldn’t keep myself from checking…it had been marked down to free and already had 45 downloads. Not bad. Go back to sleep, you obsessive bastard.
By the end of day one, the book had been downloaded over 4300 times. I attribute the bulk of this to being picked up by some of the sites that list and tweet free books, including E-Reader News Today, one of the two biggies in the world of free ebook promo. There were about 450 downloads between 9am and 10am on Friday, my biggest hour which, I suspect, lines up pretty closely to ENT’s listing. I did make an attempt to jot down hourly totals, intending to have reams of data for any writers who might read my blog, and I got lots of them, but not enough to do a thorough analysis. Plus it would bore most of you. Suffice it to say I averaged over 116 downloads/hour every hour of the 72 hour promo. By the end of Saturday, without being picked up by any other listings, I hit about 6400 downloads, a slower day, but still good numbers.
Which brings me to the final tally… ‘On Unfaithful Wings’ was downloaded 8248 times from Amazon’s U.S. site, 69 times in the U.K., 10 in Germany and 1 each in France and Italy (no one in Spain, Kindle’s only other store, wanted me). That makes a total of 8329 people who now have copies of my little book on their computer or other e-reading device. During the 3 days, I reached as high as #46 on Kindle’s free Bestsellers list, sat at #1 in Fantasy for more than two days and #1 in contemporary fantasy for the better part of all three days.
Nice.
My main promo through Sat and Sun was on Facebook and twitter (and some might say I did that too much. Sorry, Jordan). My links were shared and tweeted many time; thank you to everyone who did. Here’s something I didn’t know: I used bit.ly to shorten my links for twitter, and they keep track of the number of times a link is followed, so I can tell that my twitter campaign was successful. As of this morning, the link they created that goes directly to my Kindle page has been followed 51 times. Other links I posted (to reviews, rankings, etc.) were followed and additional 48 times for a total of almost 100 click-throughs from twitter alone (though truthfully, some of those are likely from FB, too, as my tweets post to my FB page as well).
All in all, I’m extremely happy with the results. Now comes the true test… does all this effort equate to an increase in sales? I’ll find out in a couple of days and let you know.
I considered thanking everyone individually for the help they gave during my campaign, but I’d probably forget someone and hurt their feelings, so let’s go with bulk appreciation. Thank you so much to everyone who helped out by sharing my posts, tweeting and re-tweeting. Thanks to all who offered assistance and advice in how to run a free promo, and to everyone who encouraged and supported me. Special thanks to everyone who downloaded a copy. I hope you enjoy it and make sure you go back and leave a review when you’re done.
In the meantime, check out an interview I did for Fiona McVie at Inspiration Forum.
And, once more, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Bruce Blake 
That is fantastic news, my friend! I’m so glad to read your final results. I read each blog everyday eager to see how well you were doing, and I may have pestered you a few times for an update. Sorry about that, but it’s exciting to be able to participate and help out a fellow author. Congratulations on such a great promo run. I will post a review as soon as I find time to finish the book as the writing bug has attacked me.