We started a blog tour for Alchemy this week. If you click here, you can see all the blogs that will be reviewing or featuring Alchemy.
I like this review. The author has great taste in characters. :)
To go along with all our lovely publicity, we decided to make Alchemy free, hoping to hook as many readers as possible.
And then... we started giving a way a lot of copies. I mean, a LOT. By noon, we were up to 500 copies. I think we've sold, what, a total of 100 so far? So that was pretty significant.
But the numbers kept going up. And up.
As of writing this, we've given away 1855 copies.
EIGHTEEN HUNDRED.
Oh, and these rankings of the top-selling free books on Amazon:
For YA overall free, we're #11. For free fantasy - contemporary... we're #1. That's new as of me editing this post at 11 p.m.
I'm still somewhat in shock. I had prepared myself pretty well for the fact that we probably weren't going to get much exposure for the first book. And I think the other reason this is so huge for me is though I've had short stories published several times before, all were in small and rather unknown zines. Some of them even paid me.
But that many people who could read what I helped write... that's new. And it feels pretty awesome.
Of course, I know that free doesn't always equal readers. But hopefully a few will love it, and those people will spread the word, and buy the sequel. And maybe a few more people will read it.
And that's all I want.
Keeping you posted, we're currently #88 overall. We broke the top one hundred without a bookbub add...so...yeah, that happened. Amaahzing. and we've at 2000 downloads. In 24 hours. It's insanity. That's what's happening.
ReplyDeleteIt might not seem like a big deal, and it might not even be a big deal. This is us giving away our book that we've spent so much time and money on, but it's exciting nonetheless. I think going free is a great way to test if a cover or a blurb is working.
We've actually sold a bit more than a hundred books, and on average we sell about a book a day, which at .99 cents means we get about 30 cents a day...divided by three. So for us, going free means losing about 10 cents, but I think that's worth it if 2000 people now have ALchemy on their devices. They may eventually even read it. Craycray. And if only half of those people read it, and half of THOSE people like it, that's still a force of people who might just talk about the book to a friend, or click a button on goodreads, or better still review it.
Anyway it's exciting. We'll keep you posted.
That is amazing and exciting. Hope it all pays off big time. I'm betting it will. Alchemy is awesome.
ReplyDeleteBest of luck!