Download data

Well, the numbers are in.  As explained in my last post (I can never write that phrase without thinking of a lone bugler on a parade ground) I ran a Kindle giveaway for “Fatal Forgery” for four days, from Thursday 3 to Sunday 6 January.  (When you choose the days for a giveaway on Amazon you can choose whole days only, which run on Pacific Standard Time and are therefore currently eight hours behind me in the UK, but it’s all done and dusted by now.)  I did my best to promote the giveaway by posting on this blog, putting daily notifications on Twitter and Facebook (including, on the latter, public posts) and mentioning it in all emails to friends and on Goodreads.  Thank you to all of you who shared, linked and otherwise promoted on my behalf – you did sterling work.

Over the four days “Fatal Forgery” was downloaded 572 times.  As perhaps expected, the rate fell off over the four days: 257 on Thursday, 186 on Friday, 67 on Saturday and 62 on Sunday.  At some point on Thursday/Friday the book made it into the Top 100 Free Kindle Books on Amazon, hitting the dizzy heights of number 96 in the ranking before dropping off again – it was a short but glorious reign.

As for who was downloading, of course I don’t know individual details but the KDP dashboard allows me to see which Amazon site was used for each of the 572 downloads:

(That’s 281 in the UK, 218 in the US, 52 in Germany, 12 in Canada, 5 in Australia, 2 in France and one each in India and the Netherlands.)

Of course that’s the Amazon sites that were used and not necessarily where the people actually are, but it’s the best we can do.  The biggest surprise for me is the German showing, so if you’re a German reader of this blog and you promoted the download to all of your friends, thank you!

The next phase of this experiment – and it’s a rather imprecise one – is to try and monitor whether these downloads turn into reviews and/or purchases of the other books in the series, which was the marketing point of the exercise.  I’ll keep you posted.