Jake Barter, the Great Promoter

So, I ran the promotion from September 9^th to September 13^th. And I gave away over 3,600 e-books over those five days.  So, there are 3,600+ readers who won’t be buying my book.  Sounds like a pretty terrible business model where you give away your product to the people who are most likely to enjoy it.  Are you mad, photog!

So, time has passed and I decided to see if there has been a meaningful up-tick in sales.  Here are the results:

These are impressive changes and they seem to be accelerating.  And one of the things I didn’t expect is that most of these sales are not happening through the Amazon Ads that I have been running.  In addition, the number of ratings I’ve gotten on Amazon has increased dramatically.  So, I have to say that the experiment was a success.  Of course, I’ll have to rerun it again when I have the second book ready so that those who buy “The Sniper” have a chance to buy the sequel while they’re primed and ready.

But it hasn’t been all gravy.  I did get one really bad review by a reader.  He gave it two stars and entitled his review, “Pretty Terrible.”

Here is his review in its entirety:

“I could barely get through this one. I’m not sure how to describe the plot other than ridiculously bad. All the underground society nonsense was just dumb and the ending was laughable. There were also multiple typos and specific parts of the story that don’t add up at all. I’m totally confused by the good reviews.”

¡Ay, Chihuahua!

I’ll be honest.  That stung a bit.  But the customer is always right so I have to defer to his judgement that this book is not for him.  But luckily for me, four- and five-star ratings represent 83% of the total while one- and two-star ratings are only 6%.  That will have to be my consolation.

So here I am.  The book seems to be gaining traction and sales are increasing.  I’m especially happy about the Kindle Unlimited growth.  It’s been very steadily increasing (see chart) and this month will soon represent an average of at least a book a day.  So that’s becoming a significant source of sales.

But now more than ever I have to outline the story correctly and it’s a combination of too many ideas going in too many directions on the one hand and real doubts about the mix of action scenes versus everything else.  Information dumps, character interactions, political, social, economic and let’s call them “philosophical” plot items all have to compete for space with the more dynamic scenes that grab the most attention.

But things are progressing so I’m satisfied with the effort right now.  I’m sure I’ll run into some road blocks once I try to flesh in some of the more complicated scenes.  But there should be some effort in figuring out the balance between components.  So, there it is.