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Today was the final day of a 3 day promotion where The Reborn – the first part of my technothriller novel series – was free on Amazon. After fantastic results on Day 1, then declining (yet still pleasing) results on Day 2, I expected Day 3 to continue the waning trend. But that’s not what happened.

Here are final numbers from the end of each day, with some sales and rank comparisons to just before The Reborn went free. Note that none of the books were ranked in any lists before the promo, aside from the all-inclusive “Kindle Store” rank.

*Green numbers mean they are significantly better stats than the previous day.

The Reborn: 8,553 (free)
Of Mice and Hitmen: 114 (includes 3 lending library borrows)
The Spiritual Singularity: 52

Rather than slowing down, Day 3 was a minor uptick. Day 2 and 3 combined did slightly better than Day 1 by itself. And since Day 1 went great, I see Days 2 and 3 as a success. I’m glad to have chosen a 3-day promo rather than cutting it off after Day 2.

So what changed? Why did Day 3 go better than expected? Here’s my speculation:

I’m writing this at 11:00 PM the night after the promotion ended, so I’ve been able to observe its short term after-effects, which have been good. Rather than fading back to obscurity, sales and discovery remained solid.

Here are the numbers:

The Reborn sold more copies in a single post-promo day than it had sold in the past two months combined, it gained spots in the regular best seller lists for technothrillers (as opposed to the free best seller lists), and borrows from the lending library rose. Also, sales of the sequels remained bolstered.

All in all, these free book days have been fantastic. I'm supremely happy with the results.

Looking forward, there’s clearly plenty of room for growth. When will I be (more) satisfied? I’m not sure, but it involves a lot more people reading and enjoying The Day Eight Series. (And maybe an, “I told you so,” when the story in the books comes true ; )

I’m wrapping up Day 2 of a 3 day promotion where The Reborn – the first part of my technothriller novel series – is free on Amazon. Today, I’ll compare the results of Day 1 with Day 2.

Overall, Day 1 was roughly 2x as successful as Day 2, but Day 2 started with a bang (see the brag-sheet I made above... sorry, I got excited, you'll have to forgive me). Let’s look at some numbers. 

Day 1 exceeded all my expectations, with over 4000 downloads, plus a #1 and #2 ranking on two Best Seller lists, and a detectable ripple effect to books 2 & 3. (For the full details about Day 1 and running the promotion, see my previous post.)

I first checked Day 2 stats at 9:00 am, and it was the strongest position yet:

In the late hours between Midnight and 9:00 am Pacific Time, The Reborn had jumped from #49 to #34 on the Kindle free Best Seller list, and hit the #1 slot for free Kindle Technothrillers. Yet it did this with slower sales – roughly 78 sales/hour early on Day 2 versus an average of 173 sales/hour across Day 1. This points to a momentum that Amazon calculates behind the scenes to slow movement in these lists. That’s a good thing – so books take many hours to traverse the lists rather than bouncing all over due to hourly whims of the market, which would create an unintelligible mess (a 7-year-old’s Christmas list comes to mind, where it happens to be composed of everything he saw a commercial for in the past 200 seconds).

The ranks of Of Mice and Hitmen (book 2) and The Spiritual Singularity (book 3) had similarly continued to climb in their paid categories of Technothriller.

After 9:00 am, the momentum began reflecting the slower sales rate. Here are the numbers from the end of Day 2:

In total over 2 days, The Reborn has been downloaded nearly 6200 times. I’m incredibly pleased with these numbers, though I’d be happier if the sales numbers were swapped between Day 1 and Day 2. It’s funny how the mind works – the results would be exactly the same, but who wouldn’t prefer to be on an upward trend rather than downward?

I question the slowdown because tribal wisdom has said “2-3 days works best,” usually because Day 1 is a ramp-up to faster sales on subsequent days. Here are my speculations why Day 2 was slower in this case:

It’s probably a combination. Let’s see how tomorrow, the final day, goes.

What I’m most curious to see is how the trends for Of Mice and Hitmen and The Spiritual Singularity move. How many of the 6200+ downloaders will read The Reborn? How many will even open it? And then how many will finish it and like it enough to get Of Mice and Hitmen? How long will that take? How long will the next books feel the influence of this giveaway? I had 42 combined purchases of Of Mice and Hitmen and The Spiritual Singularity today, and I can’t help thinking that a handful of those purchases were from readers who had already finished The Reborn from yesterday.

But most importantly… how many readers will smile, be excited, or wonder about the world and the universe because they’ve read these books?

Time will tell.

Read about Day 3 here.

Today – Friday, August 31st – is the first day of a 3-day free promotion for The Reborn, the first novel in my technothriller series about raising super-intelligent simulated humans in computers. (You can get it here.)

This is the first time I’ve used Amazon’s free promotional days, and I’ve gotten some great results. I’d like to share what I’ve learned along with some numbers.

(Quick history: In April, I published a 3-part novel series which I had been working on for a handful of years. It’s called The Day Eight Series. Read about it here.) 

I had no idea these free day promotions existed until recently, because they’re a bit hidden. For any book enrolled in KDP Select, you get 5 free promotion days every 90 days.

In your bookshelf, you need to check the box next to your book, then click on Actions:

Most great novels have a message – some feeling or idea for the reader to take away. Great novels perform inception, changing the reader by the turn of the final page.

Setting goals for your novel helps you explore your novel’s message. And I believe that sharing these with your readers will help you find your audience more quickly.

Writing Goals Helps you Focus
I design video games for a living. When I write a game design, the first thing I do is list out my goals by answering these questions: What am I trying to accomplish with this design? What problems does it solve? How do I want the player to feel?

Because I was used to this, and because it works well, listing my goals was the first thing I did when I gathered all my brainstorm notes for The Day Eight Series and sat down to start outlining.

Goals for The Day Eight Series
Here were my first goals:

You need goals because without the constant reminder of what you’re setting out to achieve, you will meander and write a story with less meaning. (I also recommend learning about Controlling Ideas, a concept Robert McKee explores in his incredible book, Story.)

Goals Evolve
My list of goals grew and evolved as I wrote, because I would find new, stronger purpose as I drove toward the existing ones. I also began writing goals for each chapter. Inevitably, they became more specific, taking the form of discrete realizations and feelings I wanted readers to have. For example, a chapter with Nicole, the hitwoman, had this as one of its goals: 

Choosing Books to Read
Sometimes, when I’m browsing novels, I’m just looking for a fun or exciting story. But there are other times when I want more than that. I want a deeper experience from a great novel.  The problem is, when I want a deeper experience, there is little indication of such promise when grabbing a book from the shelf.

To get even a hint of a sense about it, I need to dive in and read for twenty minutes. But there are well over 100,000 books published every year in the US alone. That’s a lot of twenty-minute trials.

To help, authors could share their goals just like they share a description of their novel. Non-fiction books do this all the time! For example, my favorite game design book, The Art of Game Design, says in its description: …this book gives the reader… one hundred sets of insightful questions to ask yourself that will help make your game better.


A Promise: The Author’s Statement of Purpose
Sharing your goals is like making a promise to the reader. “I promise that if you grant me your valuable time, I will change you in this way…”

This promise can be made easily digestible by condensing your list of goals down into a summary sentence. I’m calling this the Author’s Statement of Purpose. For The Day Eight Series, it would be:

The Risk
My fear is that telling this to the reader outright may remove some of the meaning because they don’t have to do as much work to figure it out on their own. It dampens the great feelings surrounding epiphanies from the story. But the tradeoff is that you will get readers who wouldn’t have given your book a shot in the first place, and these readers are more likely to be in-tune with your writing.

So my proposal is this: authors should share their statement of purpose in a way that those who care can find it, but is otherwise hidden to those who don’t. A perfect spot would be under the “About the Author” section on a book’s rear flap.

I am considering adding this next time I update my novels and Amazon description.

I’m curious to hear what you think. Is this useful? Does it give too much away to the reader, or would they appreciate it?

On the other hand, often you write not only for yourself, but for your readers. Or you write solely for them, especially after you grow a loyal following. You want to tell the story that they want to read, the one that will surprise and delight them, and make them swear at you between chapters when you leave them hanging with an event that couldn’t possibly have just happened (oh, but it did – you made sure of that!).

Part of writing for your readers is having a dialog with them so you can improve your craft. It shouldn’t be a one-way street. Blogs are great for this, but you’re not capturing some of the most valuable feedback: feedback about how your readers are reading, and exactly how they’re reacting to your book as they read it. 

And as a bonus:

If I want to do any of this right now, I need to get a hard copy of one of my novels, give it to a reader, ask them to make notes in it and mark if & where they stop reading, and then take it back later on. Or I need to borrow their Kindle so I can download their notes file. This doesn't scale!

YouTube, on the other hand, gives content creators amazing tools to understand how people consume their media.

The Kindle should be able to do this stuff.

Amazon: it is time for Kindle Analytics. Bring us to the future. Empower us. Again.

For my first post, I figured it would be elegant to write about great openings to stories. The best ones capture your entire attention, often in a single line. And those lines sometimes tell an entire story themselves.

Some accomplish greatness with an exquisite description and delivery of emotion that cradles the entire novel:

Some catch your attention with juxtaposition of matter-of-fact statement with a shocking visual or a striking absurdity: