I know you’ve all been on tenterhooks to hear the latest about permafree Sam and his progress. As you may remember, I paid for a 24-hour Freebooksy promo slot, and during that 24-hour period there were 1,232 downloads of “Fatal Forgery”. I think we can attribute all of those to the Freebooksy promo.
Flushed with success, I also applied for a free promo slot on the Best Book Monkey website, and that’s currently live. It started on 9 July, and I think it just sits there until they feel that interest has waned. You can see the Best Book Monkey listing here.
And – going a bit mad now – I also submitted “Fatal Forgery” for a five-day promo slot on the Bookangel website, and that’s now running until 14 July. You can see the Bookangel listing here (a bit peculiar that all the punctuation in the description has been replaced with question marks, but hey ho – it’s a free promo).
So what’s the result of all this mad promotion? Let’s ignore the 1,232 that we’ve already attributed to the Freebooksy day. Since then, there have been 429 downloads. Some of those will be Freebooksiers late to the party – because although the promo has ended, “Fatal Forgery” is permafree so anyone who finds their way to Amazon or Kobo or Nook or Google Play can still download it for nothing.
What I hope, of course, is that there will be more reviews, and more paid purchases of the next books in the series. Since I started this frenzy of promotion, I have accrued six more “ratings” on the Amazon listing for “Fatal Forgery” – not full reviews, but 4- and 5-star ratings. And sales of the other titles have increased – covering the promo periods on Freebooksy, Best Book Monkey and Bookangel, I have sold (mainly e-books, but a few of them paperbacks):
- The Man in the Canary Waistcoat – 8
- Worm in the Blossom – 7
- Portraits of Pretence – 7
- Faith, Hope and Trickery – 7
- Heir Apparent – 8
- Notes of Change – 17
And as for rankings on Amazon, well, “Fatal Forgery” is currently sitting at #83 in the Historical Fiction category on the Kindle store, and #156 in the much larger Crime Fiction category, which is not bad at all.
In short, I think it’s going well. My focus is on getting more people hearing about and curious about the series, and I think this is happening. If only 1% of the people who downloaded the free “Fatal Forgery” actually read it, that’s still sixteen new readers – and here’s hoping that it’s much more than 1%.
Susan Grossey 