Right, gang: as promised, here is the immediate feedback from the Freebooksy promo that I ran. I mentioned it here, and basically I paid to have the (now permafree) e-book of “Fatal Forgery” advertised to the subscribers to book promo website Freebooksy, along with links to the rest of the series. I paid about £78 for this. The promo ran yesterday from about 2pm UK time (it’s an American set-up, so that’s 9am Eastern Time) for 24 hours. And during that period, this is what happened:
- 1,213 copies of “Fatal Forgery” were downloaded for free
- 4 copies of each of the other books in the series – all six of them – were downloaded for hard money.
Of course I can’t tell what drove those downloads – the Freebooksy promo or just a coincidence – but I’m guessing the former. And the 24 paid downloads have netted me about £66 in royalties, so that’s not too far off the £78 I paid for the promo.
What I am hoping, of course, is that a proportion of those who downloaded the free book will read it, like it, buy more from the series, and perhaps even leave a review. I appreciate that a fair number of them will do none of those – there are people who simply stuff their e-readers with freebies – but I won’t know until I try. As I always say, I’ll keep you posted.
And a thrilling side-effect of this spike in downloads is that, right now, “Fatal Forgery” is ranking at #16 in the Historical Fiction category on the Kindle store, and at #45 in the Crime Fiction category. It will drop as rapidly as it rose, as other authors run their promos and my download rate slows, but while it’s riding high it will be appearing in front of other potential readers browsing on Amazon, which can only help.
Susan Grossey 
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