The fault is not in our stars

It’s been a while since I made the e-book of “Fatal Forgery” permafree on all sales platforms, and I have run a couple of promos to highlight it to people.  It’s too early to tell whether it is the right decision – i.e. whether it introduces more people to the Sam series and they then turn into buyers of the subsequent books – but I have got over my horror of giving away my work!  It’s a tricky one, because it’s certainly true that people often don’t value what costs nothing, but with the series stagnating I felt I had to do something drastic.  After all, we all know that one definition of madness (sometimes, but perhaps wrongly, attributed to Einstein) is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

So how’s it going?  Since it was made permafree, there have been 2,356 downloads of “Fatal Forgery”.  On Amazon (the only place I can track this with any certainty), the number of reviews has risen by one (to 48), and the number of ratings by 21 (to 70).  (A rating is a simple 1-5-star score, while a review is anything written.  Readers can leave just a rating, or a rating and accompanying review.)  And according to the Amazon sales rankings in the UK, “Fatal Forgery” now sits at position 88 in the Historical Fiction category in the Kindle store, and at position 138 in the broader Crime Fiction category.  I’m delighted with both of those positions – apparently the fact that a book is free does not count against it when Amazon tots up which books are “selling” most frequently.

There are people who make a living from teaching us how the Amazon algorithms work, but the nub of it is that if a book (a) “sells” well, and (b) gets lots of generally favourable reviews, it will rise up the rankings.  This means that it appears higher up when people are searching, and (I think) has a better chance of being shown to them in the “Products related to this item” carousel that is displayed on each product page.  And the net result of all that is that more people see and are then tempted to download the book.

So if you have read “Fatal Forgery” – no matter where you bought it or in what format – and have not left a rating or review on Amazon, please could I ask you to do that?  Amazon does occasionally move the goalposts, but at the moment the situation is very clear: “Provided the buyer has made at least one purchase using their Amazon account they can review any product on Amazon, regardless of where they purchased that product.  However, if a reviewer did not buy the product on Amazon, their review will not be marked as an Amazon Verified Purchase.”  (The same applies to all my books, of course – please feel free to rate them all!)  And now I must immerse myself in the Cambridge University audit books from 1825 – this sorry tale of bursarial corruption won’t write itself, you know.

Digesting download data

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%.

Downloads and rising rankings

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.

Everybody’s free (to feel good)

Now that I have completed the Sam Plank series, and now that I have stopped the day job and am reconfiguring how I spend my time, I decided that I needed to do something significant to mark these events and to signal my intent to be a more professional author.  I considered a tattoo (no, not really) and commissioning my likeness in dark chocolate (yes, really), but in the end I have plumped for this: a permafree series opener.

For those of you (I hope all of you – it’s a horrid word) shuddering at the term “permafree”, I should explain that it means free forever.  In other words, I am making the e-book of “Fatal Forgery” free forever on all the sales platforms I can find.  My reasons are these:

• Several successful indie authors of series have already done it and highly recommend it
• A free book entices readers to take a punt on an unknown author – and once they’ve had a taste of Sam and Martha and the gang, I’m sure they won’t be able to resist buying the next six books in the series, for themselves and all their friends and every member of their extended family
• It’s scary and exciting – and at my stage in life, something scary and exciting is good.

Of course, it’s not that simple to make something permafree, unless you do it right from the start.  All of the Sam e-books were enrolled (there, you see: I’m putting it in the passive to deny responsibility, but it’s entirely my fault) in the KDP Select programme.  This means that they can only be sold on Amazon, and in exchange for this exclusivity I get a higher royalty rate (70% as opposed to 35% for e-books that are published “wide” – i.e. other places as well as Amazon).  And Amazon does not – for obvious reasons – allow you to price a book at free.  So I needed to get the books off KDP Select, and there is a three-month notice period.  That expired last week, and I had a giddy couple of days publishing the e-books to other platforms such as Google Play, Kobo and Barnes & Noble (formerly Nook).  They do allow you to price books at free, which I did for “Fatal Forgery”.  And once you have a book priced at free on a couple of reputable competitor sites, you can request Amazon to price match to zero on their site – which they have done (it’s not a given, and there’s no guarantee they’ll keep the price at zero, but we can try).  It’s as simple as that…

I have plans for world domination with permafree Forgery, and – again on the recommendation of much more successful indie authors – I have booked a series promo on Freebooksy.  This site promotes free books to its “over 150,000 voracious readers”, and with a series promo they highlight the free opener and show the rest of the series.  That’s booked in for 30 June, at a cost of US$95 – about £78.  Given that I get about £1.40 royalty per e-book sold (nothing for “Fatal Forgery”, of course – I mean the other six), I have to hope that the promo will result in at least fifty-six additional sales.  The true value of a series promo, I am told, is its “long tail” of sales, which will be hard to monitor, but I feel excited that I am trying something new.

And here’s something interesting…  Since “Fatal Forgery” went permafree a couple of days ago, I have told my friends on Facebook, and Sam’s audience of 23 on Facebook, and his 17 followers on Twitter.  (I know, I know: I really need to get a grip on his social media presence – or, more truthfully, his absence).  So not many people have been told.  And yet the word is out somehow: since yesterday, there have been 322 downloads of “Fatal Forgery”, pushing it to sales rank 54 in the historical fiction e-books category on Amazon.  And sales rank really matters on Amazon: if you rank high, they jump in with their own promotion and then, well, watch out Tanya Anne Crosby (current holder of position one in the historical fiction e-books category)!