So, after making two books with fewer than five reviews available for three days over Christmas – and hitting several pages with announcements about the books – here are the results:
Eye of Darkness – 239 books given away.
Spilled Milk – 656 books given away.
As of this writing, I haven’t sold any additional copies. My only hope now is that I’ll at least garner the missing reviews I need for the books to do a proper giveaway. But even that is questionable at this point.
Post-Mortem:
1) When doing a Christmas sale, it’s probably better to do it either before Christmas, or immediately thereafter. Almost no one appeared to download much of anything on Christmas Day (duh), which means that whatever momentum I hoped to gain was lost.
2) There is definitely something to be gained by having five reviews instead of just three or four. Spilled Milk has one more review than Eye of Darkness, and it sold almost three times as well. While that may be a function of a better cover, better title, or just a genre with a broader audience, it may also have to do with the fact that the reviews on it are more trustworthy for the simple fact that there are more of them. And this is particularly frustrating, because I had promises from three people that they would post reviews for Eye of Darkness, and yet nothing happened (and for the guilty parties: I still love ya, and I hope you will eventually leave the aforementioned reviews).
3) It’s probably better to promote one title at a time, rather than more than one. I think doing two at once diluted my efforts. Rather than one book getting 895 downloads, and thus rising higher in the rankings (thus incurring more downloads), I inadvertently made the two books compete with each other, thus diluting the results and probably bringing the numbers down as a whole.
4) Evidently, I’m missing a crucial step in promoting my books. I don’t know if it’s due to my unfamiliarity with Twitter and Pinterest, but those are two tools I know I’ve underutilized. I wish sometimes that I wasn’t such an internet immigrant (I was born on the boat), so that I understood some of these things a little more intuitively. Alas, I’m gonna have to play catch up along with the rest. I probably don’t make half as much use of Goodreads as I could. And drive-by posts at the various message boards don’t help much. There are many people who are quite active and involved on these sites, and I know they sell well – and they all give the same advice: be involved in the forums. My complaint is that a) this takes away more time from my family, b) I’d rather be writing, and c) I’m so much more of an introvert that relating to people I’ve never met is a little counter-intuitive for me. And I can make all those complaints, and none of it matters, because those who participate sell better than those who don’t – no matter what the excuse.
All of which is to say: there’s definitely value in using a publicist than trying to do it all myself.
All right. Enough whining. I’m getting back to writing now. In the Widening Gyre has about 65K words written, and I’ve already started work on the sequel to Eye of Darkness as well as the next Jonathan Munro Adventure: The Music of the Spheres. TTFN!