We made a great run at the top 30 for July, but we didn't quite make it. I almost wrote "but, sadly, we didn't quite make it" but it's not actually sad at all. I was amazed by the flood of support from all of my readers. It was lovely to witness and be on the receiving end of, and I'm not the least bit sad about how Blade's Edge is doing.
In other news, today is the last day to get Rain on a Summer's Afternoon for zero dollars and zero cents! As of tomorrow it will return to being $0.99 on amazon. Of course, if you have Kindle Unlimited you can read it for free at any time, and if you have amazon prime you can find it in the Kindle Owner's Lending Library, also for free.
This whole offering it up for free amazon thing was a test run to see what that kind of thing does for exposure. The results are very promising.
*Warning: if you have no interest in the back end of book sales please skip to the bottom of this entry.*
As you can see from the chart I'm not selling a ton of copies of the book regardless (as I did virtually no marketing leading up to its release and haven't spent a dime on getting it reviewed or anything else this is not surprising). But here we can clearly see that there was a large spike in purchases on the day the book was released (those were all people I know -almost guaranteed). Then we have two hits on the KU/KOLL bar over the next week. Those purchases may or may not be from people I know. Then a week of nothing. Then another few purchased copies between July 21st and 24th. I'm almost certain that most of the paid copies went to people whom I know personally or who are friends of people I know personally. However, on the morning of July 27th I woke up and saw that four free units had been 'sold.' I am 99% sure that these went to people I don't know for a few reasons: 1. I forgot about the five day free sale that I had set up on KDP so I hadn't told anyone that I know that it was happening at that point. 2. When kindle starts a free sale it tells people about it so you get a quick boost of free marketing. 3. Most of the people I know who have ebook readers had already purchased a copy by then.
Then I posted the free sale to social media and more copies were 'sold.' As you can see, since the day that the free promotion started I have not gone a single day without selling a copy. I also used this free promotion as a chance to get some reviews and more exposure and I posted the link to some groups in goodreads that I have recently joined.
I did get a review from an actual human that I don't know personally on amazon. Yay! It was a four star one at that. :-)
So, I deem that experiment a success, and I will now be curious to see how well it does when it returns to the $0.99 price point. As you can tell, Rain on a Summer's Afternoon is not a money maker, and that was never the intention. It is however, an excellent test drive of the whole self publishing model, and I have learned just as much from my mistakes as I have from my successes.
What of the paperback edition, you ask? I've sold a few copies of that too, but not nearly as many. For those of you who prefer the paperback format don't forget to order a copy here. International friends: you can find it on amazon.co.uk, amazon.es, amazon.it, and amazon.de as well! Just search the title Rain on a Summer's Afternoon, or my name.
Whew. Sorry for the flood of technical information, but I felt like that might be useful to some, interesting to others, and hopefully not too hard to skim past for everyone else.
To lighten things up here is a picture of a crazy marmot in a tree that I saw on a walk with Artemis the other day.
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