The End of Marketing

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Sunday, it rained cats and dogs so no antique car show.  Now, maybe they had the car show anyway but standing out in the pouring rain to look at and photograph old cars isn’t something I’d do without a compelling motive.  So, I spent the day staring at my Amazon dashboard deciding whether day five of the promo would over- or under- perform.  As it turned out it was a very good day.  Here it is 8:40 pm and the order count for the day has already exceeded 600 and that drives the grand total for the five days well above 3,500 books.  Interestingly, these free books haven’t slowed down the Kindle Unlimited page sales.  In fact, the count so far today is 688 pages which is the best I’ve ever had.

I can assume that the final book count will be between 3,500 and 3,700 books.  And I think that is a very nice result.  I would say 3,500+ books will be a fair test of the theory that a large promo giveaway will provide a noticeable increase in the visibility of the book.  And the fact that my Kindle Unlimited sales have increased seems to be the first evidence of that.  The other hint I’ve seen is an uptick in the rate of Amazon reviews showing up on my book page.  And by the way, the latest three have been five star, which doesn’t hurt.

I’m assuming the sale ends at midnight and by Monday morning when I awake “The Sniper” will have sunk well below the top 100 in the Kindle Store.  But the fact that it reached 60 on that list and was seen by all kinds of readers will (hopefully) convince people that even $0.99 isn’t too much to pay for a masterfully crafted book.  And $0.99 is where the price will remain for the remainder of the Based Book Sale ending Wednesday, September 16, 2026, 12:00 AM PDT.  After that I’ll restore the normal $4.99 e-book price.

I’ll update this sometime tomorrow morning with the final numbers before heading into work.  But I will say that the promo by Written Word Media (the company that controls FreeBooksy and the other lists) went very smoothly and without a hiccup.  And that is a welcome change compared with the many complicated and uncoordinated activities associated with writing, publishing and marketing a book.

Well, it’s time for me to stop tweaking my first book’s sales and start writing the sequel.  You know, after all this marketing “stuff” I feel energized to start putting together the new story.  As I told Camera Girl I want to outline this story thoroughly instead of “discovering” the plot like I did with the first.  In fact, I might even outline more than the next book.  I have an idea that I’ll be pushing separate books in very different directions within my “universe.”  I’m going to need a book just for Cutter and Mel.  And I think Connors will need a book that allows him to start a social engineering program.  And I want to figure out where Grace and her kids end up.  I’ll have to discuss with Camera Girl whether forcing Connors and Grace onto a “date” makes any sense.  Also, I need to create a few new characters.  One of them will be an extremely high IQ type with the obligatory anti-social quirks.  And I need wise guy to make fun of things.  He’ll be like me but less diplomatic and better at fighting.  And last but not least I can’t forget Bogey.  Last we saw he was headed to a country music venue with a cute waitress.  I want to find out how that went.

 

Update 8:30 AM

FINAL RESULTS OF MY 5-DAY PROMOTIONAL GIVEAWAY:

Best Sellers Rank: #60 Free in Kindle Store

#1 in Technothrillers (Kindle Store)

#1 in Political Thrillers & Suspense

#2 in Military Thrillers (Kindle Store)

(all best seller ranks maximum during promotion)

 

Overall promo total 9/14/2026, 8”21 am, 3,632 e-books

Order total for 9/13/2026 (including 25 book overflow into 9/14/2026): 717 e-books

Today is the sixth day of the Based Book Sale https://basedbooksale.substack.com/p/the-2026-basedcon-based-book-sale

my 5-day Amazon giveaway promotion for “The Sniper” https://amazon.com/dp/B0G7WRJJPH

2026 Autumnal Activities

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So, Camera Girl and I are walking through our annual farewell to summer ritual.  Today I picked the very last string beans and the crops of raspberries and her beloved grape tomatoes are visibly shrinking down to the end.  She picked the last eggplants but they were too small to eat.  The pool has been closed for a couple of weeks and now I’m putting away all the chairs and tables and stuff for the winter.  Even the Japanese beetles are dying off and today I saw one of the preying mantids looking lonely for something juicy to eat.  Although he seemed to be making due on small red dragonflies.  These fliers are still prevalent but also seem to be running out of food.  The various flowers are almost all dying.  The only thing that hasn’t bloomed yet are the Montauk Daisies and the Wolfbane.  I guess there are still plenty of bees; bumble and honey, but there seems to be a desperation in the way they jump around on the goldenrod trying to get all the nectar and pollen before their neighbors get to it.

And with the kids all back in school, it’s a little too quiet for Camera Girl.  She takes it to heart when the grandkids aren’t around for more than a week at a time.  I try to cheer her by reminding her how exhausting it can be when the summer schedule fills up a couple of weeks with back, to back, to back kids’ events.  Well, that wasn’t a good idea.  It just got her mad at me!  So, I just sympathize with her grandmaternal feelings and remind her that a plethora of birthday parties are sure to be starting up soon and she’ll be satisfyingly exhausted before she knows it.

And Camera Girl has lived up to her name lately she has spotted a number of photographic subjects for me.  She let me know that there was a hawk perched on the back of the bench that we put next to her new pond.  I got a bunch of shots through the living room window with the 400-600mm lens.  The contrast wasn’t as good as I would have liked but when I download them, I hope they’re passably good.  She also spotted a big green (so she tells me) caterpillar on a walk we took in the park.  We took it home for photos and it turned out to be a type of sphynx moth (white-lined sphinx moth; Hyles lineata).  I was trying to keep it to hatch out the moth but the darned thing didn’t know it was supposed to like tomato plant leaves.  So, I let the recalcitrant larva go on its way.

Tomorrow we are thinking about going to an antique car show which is something that people around Dunwich seem to do a lot.  But we’ll have to see.  Tomorrow is the last day of my five-day promotional book giveaway and I’ve been like some kind of fanatic watching the dashboard tickers recording the orders.  I’m kind of obsessed.  But maybe I’ll tear myself away to see Henry Ford’s innovative horseless carriages paraded down the streets of various Dunwich environs.  Enjoy the day.

Book Marketing is Hard!

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Okay, so I’ve figured out how marketing books gets done.  You write what you think is a good book.  The first variable is whether it’s in a popular genre or not.  Currently the old genres like science fiction and crime are sort of old fashioned and neglected.  The popular sub-genres combine the old genres with romance or outright pornography.  Apparently, the largest segment of the book-reading population consists of frustrated women of various reading predilections but definitely needing, let us be kind and call it, “romantic” content.  Okay, that’s strike one against me already.

So, now that you have the text, you edit it or pay an editor to find grammatical errors.  Not fun but necessary.  I did it myself so it’s probably not 100% but as they say, good enough for government work.  But editors can do a lot more than find typos.  They can critique everything from character description to pacing all the way up to whether the hero rides away into the sunset with or without the beautiful girl.  I thought about hiring one of those but when I spoke to her, I didn’t really like the vibe.  I kinda thought she would object to my tone vis-à-vis blue haired antifa trolls.  So, strike two against me already.

And after that you have to set up your book page and your author page on Amazon and set up your Amazon ads and all that stuff.  I actually paid a marketer to do that stuff and I guess I got a professional result for all the money I spent.  But that doesn’t get you much in the way of visibility.  You’ll sell some hundreds of copies.  A couple of hundred would be disappointing. Six or eight hundred would be extremely good.  So I sold about four or five hundred copies.  Let’s call that a B- result.  No strike against me there.  But not the home run I wanted (if I may mix my metaphors for the moment).

After six months of dissatisfaction with the roll out of my book and viewing a multitude of YouTube videos on marketing books I had a plan to test the idea that book promotional giveaways would be a way to get the “visibility” I wanted.  So, I combined a five-day Amazon Kindle giveaway with a FreeBooksy five-day promo package.  This put my book in front of five different lists of book readers (one each day) who match up with the subject of my book.  FreeBooksy (and associated lists) claim that their lists have hundreds of thousands of readers.  So I plunked down about four hundred bucks for this plan and voila! halfway into the plan I’ve gotten over two thousand books given away.  So, I think this worked.

Now there are lots of caveats.  How many of the people who went to Amazon will end up reading the book?  How many would spend actual money to buy a sequel?  How many will bother to put up a rating or a review on Amazon?  So, the jury is still out on some aspects of this strategy but as of this morning (third day of promo) my book is number sixty (60) on the top 100 Free in Kindle Store list.  And before this I never got higher than 78,000.

Of course, once I write my sequel, I’ll have to do this whole thing over again so that people who liked “The Sniper” will buy (WITH MONEY!!!) the sequel.  But that’s alright.  Proof of concept gives me confidence that I can bring the horse to water.  It’s up to him to decide if he wants to drink (or read) Boy, these metaphors are getting really strained.  So that was what I did on my summer vacation.

The Lessons of 9/11

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Today is the twenty fifth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  Well, I’ll leave it to the professional pundits to try and wax poetic about the deep historic meaning of the day.  What I will say about 9/11 is where I have now found myself.  I won’t review my personal links to the New York attack and my visceral desire for revenge and justice against those responsible for the attacks.  All that is now ancient history and buried under the aftermath of the politicians and bureaucrats who reshaped our world using our support as a tool.

All that I learned from everything that was done by the American government is that politicians as a class are at best useless idiots and at worst our mortal enemies.  Almost without exception the Republicans proved themselves almost as awful as the Democrats.  Their embrace of globalism and the contempt for the well-being of their countryman is stunning and unmistakable.  The Democrats are only worse because they openly embrace the agenda that the Republicans pretend to abhor but follow in stealth.

9/11 and its aftermath are responsible for Trump and MAGA.  He looked at the betrayals and the contempt and he employed the naked truth to drive the likes of JEB Bush and the rest of the useful idiots off the map and then banished Hillary Clinton to the ash heap of history.  And then he learned how Washington works and he relegated Kamala Harris to the position she deserves village idiot.  Trump has made plenty of mistakes.  This Iran war is devastating our wallets with high priced oil.  Maybe he had no choice.  I can’t say for sure.  But honestly Trump is attempting to bring manufacturing back to this country and I respect him for the effort.

But very soon he will be leaving center stage and it will be time to find a new champion.  At this anniversary of 9/11 I think it is time to start looking at the next generation of MAGA politicians and have them start auditioning for the top spot.  I don’t expect Vance or Rubio or DeSantis to start doing a bad Trump imitation.  It wouldn’t make sense and it isn’t necessary.  Trump already smashed the fun house mirrors and let us see the Republican and Democrats for who they really are.  What is needed now is for the new guys to speak honestly and clearly about where we go from here.  Trump was the disrupter.  Now we need builders.  The next president has to communicate with anyone left in the middle who hasn’t picked a side and convince them it’s time to move forward.  We have to put in place a program to reduce government to a size that allows us to end the deficit and begin to reduce the size of the debt.  And hand in hand with this is a program to continue Trump’s efforts to reindustrialize America.  These two goals are the key to reinvigorating this economy and country.  And finally tying back to 9/11, the next president has to finish the work Trump has begun closing the borders and deporting all the illegal aliens.  That would truly be the best tribute we can pay to the victims of those attacks.