Doug BrotherofCats Dandridge

This last weekend I promoted my urban fantasy vampire novel The Hunger over KDP select. It went well, and I gave over a thousand copies away (1,115 to be exact), not as many as the 3,800 I gave away during my promotion of The Deep Dark Well. Still, a thousand copies into the hands of readers is an accomplishment. Now I just have to hope that some of those copies get read, and that some of those readers post reviews. TDDW has been doing very well since the promotion, between fifty and seventy books a week. Not bestseller numbers, but I’ll take them for now while trying to gain more readers. I learned from TDDW promotion how to get the word out, and I contacted even more of the free ebook promoters than the last time. I figured the word got out to over a million people through these outlets. I will probably be doing a promotion a month from here out until I go through my entire list, and will be using these same methods, with some tweeking here and there, to get the word out. I truly believe these promotions were so successful because I used the social media to get the book out there. I think a free promotion on KDP Select is a wonderful opportunity. In fact, I am eventually going to move all of my books over to KDP Select, and have started removing them from other sales outlets like Smashwords (and while I like the idea of Smashwords, I am not getting much traffic there, and think it will serve me better when I am more well known). I also think that it is a real mistake to do a promotion that only makes the book free on Kindle for so many days without using other outlets to get the word out. Then the only way anyone will find out about the book is if they stumble upon it during a search of Amazon, which is very unlikely to happen.
On Monday I received my first review of The Hunger. Five stars, with the title The Anti-Twilight Vampire Story. That made me feel really good, because it was supposed to be different from the newer tales in which vampires are just like your neighbors, only with fangs and a quirk for drinking blood. The reviewer went on to say that I had “crafted an Old School vampire story in the setting of a modern day thriller.” He also said “I found Dandridge’s thematic play on the very term “hunger” more than enough to ponder,” which made me happy I had stuck by my title despite some flack I received from internet trolls and friends alike. Always great to get a review that makes you believe you did it right. Not sure if I’ll ever write another vampire book, but if I do, Lucinda Taylor will be ready to strike again.