Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

As I posted in a recent blog, last weekend I did a KDP Select promotion for one of my books, The Deep Dark Well. The promotion went well, with over twenty other sites joining in and over a score of other authors tweeting. My Twitter followers grew from 499 to 538 in five days, a steady increase. I was also on several book blogs that I did not contact, proving that word was getting out. It was quite a bit of work to get everything set up, but with automatic tweets through Hootsuite I was able to attend both a soccer match and a football game last weekend. I hoped for good results, but the aftermath (and aftermaths can actually be good) were beyond my expectations.
The Deep Dark Well had been hovering between 130,000 and 190,000 on Amazons Kindle sell list. I was selling some, I estimate about 70 since I put the book online. Not what I expected for a book the quality of The Deep Dark Well, which missed major publication by a hair. The problem was getting exposure, and I had been working hard to get as much as possible. With little luck. It was amazing how many people showed some interest in the book but wouldn’t buy it. On Friday, 9/07/2012 the book was offered for free. On Monday I looked at the book on the Amazon page and was amazed to see that it was ranked 105 in the Kindle free list. And was the number 1 High Tech Scifi book on that list. Wow! Now of course that was for a freebie, but there are anywhere from 3-5,000 books listed for free on Kindle at any one time. So 105 is huge. On Tuesday, 09/11/2012, the day before my birthday, the book was offered free for the last day of the promotion. The next day I checked the book page and saw that the Kindle Sales rankings were in the 360,000s. What a let down. I figured that since it was in the 100,000s before the promotion it would at least be there after. But then again, it hadn’t been for sale for five days, which could knock it down.
On Thursday, 09/13/2012, around noon, I checked the book page and my eyes almost popped out. I thought it must have been an error. But The Deep Dark Well was listed on Kindle sales at eleven thousand and something, and for High Tech Scifi in the nineties. So it jumped three hundred and fifty thousand spaces in one day. I still wasn’t sure it wasn’t a mistake, but checking the page that night showed the book to be ranked at 10,647 in sales, and this morning it was 6,838, and in the 53rd ranked book in both Kindle and all of Amazon High Tech Scifi. Talk about beyond my wildest dreams. I hoped that it would eventually get into the top 1,000, but not that quickly.
Still not ready to retire from my daytime job, still hoping to someday before I hit 60. But I would recommend the KDP Select program to everyone thinking about publishing an ebook, or with an ebook already out there. The five free days of promotion are a Godsend. I will be putting another ebook on free promotion in October, and if it does anywhere near as well I may be putting the rest of my books on the program, at least over time.