Tuesday, October 5, 2010

What a Ride! Adventures of a free Kindle book

I'm sure many of the independent authors out there are asking themselves right now how I managed to offer my erotic novella STEAL ME for free on Amazon Kindle for 4 days. The answer is: I haven't got the faintest clue.

On Friday October 1, around 10am STEAL ME was suddenly available for free on Kindle. Sales skyrocketed instantly. Within a day over 2000 readers downloaded my little erotic short story and propelled me into the top 100 Free Kindle Books. At one point my book was as high as #15 in the bestseller list.

I can't even begin to describe what kind of feeling this was. Over the four days that my short story was available for free, it was downloaded over 9000 times. So, potentially 9000 people will be reading my short story. Of course, not everybody will like it. Somebody's already left a 2-star review complaining about the sex - apparently there was too much of it and it was too explicit. And it read like a XXX movie. Well, I do warn readers in my blurb that this is an erotic novella with hot and steamy sex scenes. Maybe I should have been more explicit? Or maybe not.

Why Amazon did this with my book, I have no idea, but I will forever be grateful for this wonderful opportunity to get my work in front of readers who might otherwise never have considered me. It appears that it is already paying off.


In the back of STEAL ME the first chapter of Samson's Lovely Mortal was offered as a teaser, and low and behold, my sales for Samson's Lovely Mortal nearly doubled starting two days after STEAL ME was first offered as a freebie. At the same time sales of some of my other books also saw a small uptick. It looks like I might have picked up a few new readers.

Many thanks to whoever out there at Amazon.com decided to pick my book for a freebie, and also many thanks to all the readers who've downloaded my short story and are reading it. I hope you'll enjoy it for what it is: a short erotic ride that doesn't take itself too seriously.

And, since this might never happen again: I've just been bumped into #14 of the top 100 Paid in Kindle. So, I had to take a picture of that.

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