Going Free

After enrolling Killing to Know in KDP select, I started a free three day promo that started yesterday and goes through tomorrow.  So far I have seen almost 6000 downloads and gotten my rank to as high as #43 in the free store and #3 free for hard boiled. I'm sitting at #50 in the free store as of this writing. 

The hope is that this will maybe lead to some sales put me in a better place then deep deep in the 100k in the paid store, and most importantly generate a few reviews. 

I shall update you my faithful readers in a few days as to how this all shakes out.

Update #1 (12:08 March 6)

Killing to Know is doing well, March has so far been the best month that I have had since I started publishing.  I have learned a few things though. When you go free the grammar people come out. Apparently there were still more error then I thought in the text and I have been called to take on it twice so far, and netting a one star review, pulling the book down to 2.5 stars.  I also had a single return.  So I might have to get another set of eyes to go across it. I don't want that to sound like I'm bad mouthing the people that did edit the book, I mostly feel that I should have delivered to them a cleaner script. 

That being said The Long Night isn't going anywhere near Select until it gets a good grammatical polish, people have given it a pass so far, but I don't want to get ripped up like that again. I would rather get a bad review because they hated the book not because I can't spell or use a comma to save my life. I have faith that that book can fly with six good reviews and a cover that keeps getting compliments left and right.  

I think marketing wise my one major mistake was that I assumed that Pixel of Ink charged for free books like they did paid books and thus missed out on trying to get in on one of their mailings, which might have netted me another thousand or so more free books.

So my plan going forward with Killing to Know is keep riding the wave, promoting, and hoping that it gets moved around and picked up, maybe gets a review from a person that is not as anal. Then I'll make sure that Breaking Overnight is is super strong condition, and launch it in select, so that I can do a free run a week or so after it's launch.  It sucks that I have to make the Nook people wait 90 days, but the freebee has given me more traction than I was going to get otherwise.  I got lucky in January with B&N being nice to The Long Night. That said I don't plan to stay in Select for more then the normal 90 days going back to being avalable for everybody, with hopefully some more momentum.