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Category: Sales

Do free promotions on Amazon help boost Kindle Unlimited?

In short, yes.

I’ve done two free promotions now, and both of them have been followed by bumps in Kindle Unlimited page reads. Here are the page reads in graph form. The green arrows show the timing of the five-day free promotions.

The first promotion resulted in over 3000 free copies given away. The other one was more modest, I think in part because of the time of year (after Thanksgiving), with about 1600 books given away. In both cases, the ranking of my book shot up in the categories it is in, reaching #1 or #2 in some cases. That is supposed to impact discoverability on Amazon, even for free books, so I think it really helped.

I also got some more reviews on GoodReads and on Amazon after each promotion, which was great, and what I was looking for.

Unlimited readers

The past two days were the first tim in the month or so since the release of Flames Over Frosthelm that I’ve had Kindle Unlimited readers read more pages than the book is long. They report 746 pages on Friday and 718 on Thursday, both more than the 587 length of the book in Kindle’s page equivalents, which are a little smaller than regular book pages.

That’s really neat! It’s possible somebody read it all in one day, but it’s more likely that a few people read parts of it. I suppose it’s even technically possible that 746 people read one page each, but that would be silly.

Readers in the past two days were from Canada, the U.K., and the United States, but I had some pages read in India earlier this week, nearly enough for the whole book. I feel a little weird spying on the reading habits of others, but it’s pretty fascinating.

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