I posted the following graphs earlier but realized I hadn’t collected them here. I compared the number of ratings and reviews my nine books have received to the number of total downloads those books have received. Because most of my books are available exclusively on Amazon (in order to access the Kindle Unlimited program, which represents between 60%-80% of my revenue), it’s pretty easy to assemble sales and downloads numbers.
Here’s the strongest correlation I found. Roughly 1.7% of my book sales turn into reviews on Amazon, 1.1% of sales on Goodreads. Correlation is strong (R2 = 0.95). “Sales” include giveaway events (95% of my total downloads, because I do a lot of free promos). I left out my three-book box set, because its reviews often accrue to the individual books rather than the set.
Here’s a look at reviews and ratings compared to publication date. You might expect the books that have been out for longer to have more ratings and reviews, but that trend isn’t visible here. Therefore, I think it’s safe to say that marketing success is much more important to number of ratings/reviews than time since publication. The most effective marketing I’ve had is BookBub Featured Deals, and all the books that have the highest numbers of reviews/ratings have had featured deals except Flames Over Frosthelm (my book that’s been out the longest, and for which I’ve run the most non-BookBub free promos).
Here’s a comparison of written reviews vs. star ratings for all nine books on GoodReads and Amazon, sorted by total ratings. Written reviews are always fewer than ratings (that’s obvious – writing a review takes more effort than clicking a star), but the ratio doesn’t seem to be consistent over all my books.
You could potentially argue from this chart and its rough upward trend to the right that my less popular books have a higher percentage of written reviews. That may mean they’re getting those written reviews from fans or eager readers. The outlier to the upward trend is Flames Over Frosthelm, but that book has been out the longest, so it may just have had more time to accumulate written reviews. It also hasn’t had a BookBub featured deal, while the other three on the left have, and one interpretation of that is that BookBub readers are less likely to write reviews.
I’ve been doing monthly business posts, so here’s my first of 2025.
Revenue
Here’s my revenue from Amazon:
I had nine audiobook sales through ACX, which will be about another $25, and I sold two books in person at an author event at my local library ($30 in revenue). So, put me down for about $315 in revenue.
Kindle Unlimited page reads are in the table, but here’s how it looks in a bar graph. Kenai is the light blue at the bottom of the columns, by far my most-read book, making up more than half of page reads and 1/3 of sales.
Expenses
I turned off my Facebook ads in mid-November and haven’t started them up. I have a few Amazon ads running, but the bids are so low that I seldom get them placed. I invested in a sponsorship for Dr. Who Online that’s still running, but I paid for that back in November, and it’s not doing much. The two books I sold came out of my home stock, which cost me about $6.50 each, although I paid for them back in mid-2024.
All of that is to say, I’m not running many promotions now and haven’t since the middle of November. What that means is that my revenue now is probably my current baseline – what I bring in if I don’t spend anything on promotion or advertising. It’s great that this seems to mean I can still pull 40K page reads and $300 in a month without spending anything, but I’d like to be reaching more readers than that, and some of my books aren’t finding an audience without help from ads.
Upcoming strategies
I have a BookBub promoted free deal hitting in a few days for my three-book box set of Inquisitors’ Guild books. If it works as they have in the past, that will probably lead to thousands of downloads and a whole mess of page reads, and it may lead to read-through on my other books and a bump in the Amazon rankings that lasts for a couple months. That’s what’s happened for most of my other BookBub featured deal promotions, so I’m hopeful it keeps up.
I’ll have some expenses in the next month for new covers in preparation for a mystery book release in February or March and an updated cover for Got Trouble. I’m also probably going to start up some advertising again. I’ve been trying to do some reading on how to make my ad dollars go farther, so we’ll see if I can apply anything I’ve learned.
I put together a progression of 60 days of my page reads in Kindle Unlimited showing good growth from 2019-2024. I stuck with the same date range each year, Sept 1 to Nov 29. Pretty happy with what I found.
Data Notes:
— I rescaled the default vertical axis for the graphs to be comparable year over year.
— I was advertising my first book pretty heavily the first year (2019) which I assume is why the numbers were stronger than 2020.
— I had a BookBub promotion for Kenai in late October 2024 which shows up on the final slide.
I’m doing a summary of my October book business. That turns out to be a tricky month to calculate precisely. I’ll start with the basics and then get into the complications.
Basics
Sales
The total orders graph is stupid, because I had a BookBub fueled giveaway for Kenai in the last couple days of the month which wipes everything else out on the graph.
If you take out those zero-revenue giveaway books, I still have pretty robust sales through Amazon:
The top sellers by far were my fantasy books, with the other four books (sci fi and thriller) making up only 38 of the sales. The peak around October 10-11 is artificial – about 70 of those are free books I gave away as prizes as part of the Indie Fantasy Addicts Summer Reading Challenge (see discussion below).
Page Reads
74K is a lot of pages for Kindle Unlimited for me – a very good month. The top books were What Grows From the Dead and Flames Over Frosthelm at about 18K each, the Inquisitors’ Guild box set at about 13.5K, and Lady Isovar at 7K. All of those were books I advertised at various points, and I think the advertising (mostly on Facebook) helped them find readers. You can see a bit of a spike in dark blue on October 31 – that’s the echo (in page reads) of Kenai rocketing to the top of the Amazon rankings during the massive giveaway (14K books given away so far). That should persist into November if it follows the pattern of past promos I’ve done.
Income
Item
Sales
Value
Amazon Paperbacks
14
$31.08
Ebooks
234
$557.26
Audiobooks
48
$115.90 (estimated)
Web shop paperbacks
11
$144.57
Total Book Sales
307
$848.81
KU page reads
74107
$337.08
Total revenue with KU
$1,185.89
And here are my monthly expenses, at least the ones that relate to this month’s sales:
Expenses
Type
Expense
Advertising
$1,131.44
IFA free book prize codes
$323.76
Web shop book shipping
$25.32
Cost of paperbacks & reviewer copies
$101.68
Overseas IFA prize shipping
$50.65
Total
$1,632.85
Summary
OK, that’s a loss of about $450 with these numbers. Not great. However, some of that is because I ended up sending a lot of free books as prizes for the Indie Fantasy Addicts Summer Reading Challenge. That event is about $200 of my losses this month – a marketing expense that may pay off later as reviews and word-of-mouth comes in, and not something that happens every month.
One thing I tried deliberately this month is doing some Facebook advertising, something I haven’t done much of this year. It always has a response, but in the past, it’s rarely made back its cost, sometimes only a depressing fraction of its cost. I was closer to break-even this time, but I’m not there yet. I will probably slow that down in November, although it’s been gratifying seeing the (much) increased sales and page reads and reviews come in.
Complications
I said there were some complications, and boy are there. Here are some, just to give a fuller picture of what expenses I run more broadly:
Audiobook revenue estimates: I’m not sure I have that right. This has been the biggest month for Audiobook sales I think I ever had, not for any reason I can explain. Most of the sales are not the new Kenai audiobook – it’s mostly Daros and Flames Over Frosthelm which have been out for a long time. I did the estimate here based on the average revenue per book from October 2021-May 2024, which is only a couple dollars. That might be low, though, because a lot of those “sales” were actually free reviewer codes, and I didn’t give out any free codes for the older books this month. I won’t know the truth of it until ACX releases October revenue numbers, which probably won’t be until December.
IFA reading group prizes: I took part in the Indie Fantasy Addicts Summer Reading Challenge this year (check out their Facebook group). I was on a reading team, but I also participated as a sponsoring author, which means I got to send out my books as prizes to the winners of the summer challenge. I also put some of my books up as unlimited prizes, and a LOT of people chose them. Because nearly all my books are in KU, I’m supposed to be Amazon-exclusive for such things, which means when I give books away, I’m supposed to buy redemption codes for other people. This is only possible to do for the Amazon you’re local to (in my case US Amazon), but I tried to do it for all the winners who could take part. That was a lot of books this time, and it cost me the full price of the book, so I ended up spending about $435 on all the codes. However (even more complicated!) – (1) not everybody redeems the codes, so I can return the unused ones after a couple months, and (2) I get royalties for the redeemed codes, so I make back about $2.80 out of the $3.99 + $0.27 tax I spend on my own books. With 76 copies redeemed so far (out of 102 bought), that means I spent $323.76 but got $212.27 of that back in royalties. That’s included (both as books and dollars) in the tables above.
Other IFA prizes: The IFA SRC also included two paperbacks which I shipped internationally. That’s about $6.40 per book (which I spent months ago to build up my home supply) and about $25 in shipping for each of two overseas deliveries. I also gave away four audiobooks, but I could do that with reviewer codes from ACX with no additional cost to me.
Audiobook: In October, I started an audiobook project for What Grows From the Dead, so there’s another $700 there to get the narrator the first half of his money. I didn’t count that in this month’s expenses, because it’s a future project. I’ll certainly count it in my annual reckoning, although I’m sort of feeling like the audiobooks I do (three now, with a fourth on the way) are so far from making their costs back, and so slow to do so, that I’m doing them more for fun with extra cash than I am to make money. If I were making the decision strictly on profit/loss concerns, I wouldn’t do the audiobooks, at least not after the first one which took so long to recover. Alternatively, I’d do them with revenue-sharing only, but I don’t feel comfortable having the narrators do a bunch of uncompensated work for me, or I could self-narrate. But I’d rather have quality audiobooks out there. Maybe someday when I hit it big, they’ll make their costs back, but it’s a losing proposition now.
Restocking my web shop supply: I have been selling from my home supply both over my web shop (recently revamped), with books for reviewers, and at in-person events like Crash City Con. I have another couple events lined up soon, and I was running low on some of my books, so I spent another $368 restocking my home supply, which is about 120 books when fully stocked. I didn’t count that in this month’s expenses, although I’ll include it in my end-of-year, because it’s not really a monthly expense. I did count the cost (in bulk) of the paperbacks I sent out this month to customers and reviewers (about $6.35 per book) for this month’s expenses.
My end-of-month BookBub promo: I am in the middle of a giveaway for Kenai via BookBub and other stacked promos. That’s having a big impact, but nearly all of the revenues will probably be in November, so even though I paid for all of it in September and October, I’m leaving that $701 or so out of this month’s expense summary.
Expenses for next month’s free promo: I scheduled a free promo for The Glorious and Epic Tale of Lady Isovar for November. It’s not a BookBub one, so it’s a lot cheaper, but there are still a couple hundred dollars of expenses there. I’ll put them in the November summary (and the end-of-year reckoning also).
I landed a BookBub featured deal about a month ago for my mystery novel, What Grows From the Dead. I’ll abbreviate the book as WGFTD for ease in typing from here on out. BookBub featured deals are competitive – I’ve been applying for them for five years since my first novel came out, and I only started landing them last year, despite applying with most of my books every month. This was my sixth, my second world-wide (as opposed to just non-US markets), and my first free deal (a giveaway). Because it was a deal for free books, I wasn’t sure it would be worth the hefty price tag, $712, because I wouldn’t earn any direct income from the books being claimed and downloaded.
Still, every other BookBub has either made me a positive return on book sales or come close, and they’ve all had a big response, so I decided to try it out.
Costs
I had five days I could set the book for free. I decided to use the BookBub promotion as my first-day promo and then add other book newsletter announcements afterwards. This is called “stacking” – doing announcements on successive days to keep your book being downloaded by new people, to make the most of your promo. I’ve seen a number of people recommend this, although I have no way to test if it’s better or worse than just one big announcement, or putting all your announcements the same day, but I figure I’ll listen to people smarter than I am. I set up the following announcements with the following costs:
Day
Site
Cost
1
BookBub
$712
2
FreeBooksy
$100
3
Book Adrenaline
$30
3
Book Cave
$49
Total
$891
These are all promo sites I’ve had some luck with for giveaways in the past. I also ran a set of smaller free newsletter announcements through KDROI, a Firefox plugin I bought a while ago that submits to about 30 smaller newsletters for free.
So, let’s go with an $891 total cost.
Results: Downloads
The results of my five-day free giveaway period were way beyond what I expected. I’ve done free giveaways before, promoted with FreeBooksy and other stacked promos, and I’ve had never more than about 5000 downloads, often more like 2000 or 3000. For this one, with BookBub, I had 20,000 downloads on the first day, and a little over 30,000 overall over the five days. Here’s how it looks for that one book with the others stripped out (they weren’t free, so they don’t show up here even though it says All 10 books).
To put that in context, for all my books, over five years, I had about 47,000 downloads. In five days, I got another 30,000, all of one book. Here’s how that looks on my Amazon history graph, with the blue bar at right being this five-day giveaway.
Note: The vast majority of these “units processed,” 93% of them, are free giveaways run at various times over five years. I only have about 5500 actual sales, and a good chunk of those (maybe 3000) are from $0.99 promos.
So, I definitely moved a ton of books. A crap ton, if I might be so bold. And that earned me precisely zero dollars. However, there were some other benefits to doing this. These are benefits I expected, but I had no idea what the magnitude of them would be.
Results: Page Reads
The primary way I was going to make a return on this promotion was through page reads in Kindle Unlimited. I’ve chosen to put all my books but two (my children’s book from 1998, which is traditionally published, and my promo novella, which I use as a reader magnet) in Kindle Unlimited, and it generally makes up about 2/3 of my total income from the books any given year.
The page reads for What Grows From the Dead soared as the promo got going. This has happened for me in the past with other free promos. I’m not entirely sure of the mechanism for this, but I think it’s an algorithmic response within Amazon’s system and/or with readers. My book certainly jumped to the top of the main Amazon rankings for free books (see below) and to the top of its categories (mystery/thriller, cozy mystery). So, anybody searching for a book like this (or, actually, for any book at all) probably had a much easier time finding it while it was famous from all the downloads.
Here’s what’s happened with the page reads. I included a good chunk of June to show a before and after. The teal blue is the promoted book. The growth in page reads starts up on June 28th (the first day of the giveaway) and then peaks from July 2-8, and then starts to drift down.
There’s a little bit of read-through to my other books as well, although not a ton, which you can see if I take out WGFTD:
The book that gets the clearest boost is Got Trouble, in red on the bottom graph, which makes sense – it’s the closest match in genre to WGFTD, so the next logical one of my books to read. I think it’s fair to say that nearly all of my other books (epic fantasy and sci fi) do a little better following the Jun 28 promo.
Results: Rankings
When you do a promoted free giveaway, you’re looking for a jump in rankings. WGFTD got that, reaching as high as the #2 overall free book on Amazon, and the top mystery and cozy mystery, a status that lasted for a couple of days. Once your book is no longer free, it blinks back to the paid book rankings, which don’t include all the free downloads, so your sales rank plummets back to about where it was before the promotion, maybe boosted a bit from follow-on sales after the promotion from recommendations or other readers who notice it.
However, the Sales Ranks listed on the book’s public-facing Amazon page aren’t the whole story. On your Author Central dashboard, you can go to the Reports + Marketing tab and see your book’s sales rank history. This is clearly some kind of amalgamation between free and paid sales, plus maybe KU page reads, because it doesn’t have a sharp drop-off after the book switches back to paid. So, it’s a kind of overall ranking, although I have no idea what the math behind it is. Here’s what WGFTD’s sales rank looks like over the past four months since publication:
You can see the clear and sustained spike at the right side as the promo begins, staying high for a while afterward.
One problem with these graphs is that they don’t have a consistent Y axis scale, so it can be hard to compare one book to another. WGFTD has a broad scale, going to 1.25 million at the bottom. You can see a bit of a response following the June 28th promo in the rankings of my thriller, Got Trouble, but note this graph only goes down to 1 million at the base, so it’s a bit more stretched out than the previous one.
None of my other books show a clear June 28th inflection, so the carryover ranking effect for them is likely small, maybe within the noise of individual sales for those books. That’s what I think those sharp peaks are on the graphs – individual sales, or maybe page-read clusters, that peak and then get smoothed back to baseline.
One thing to note here is that I haven’t promoted these two mystery/thriller books in many other ways this year. I’ve done essentially no promo for Got Trouble, and I’ve done a GoodReads giveaway (which seems to have had no effect on sales rank or on much else) and a small LibraryThing giveaway for WGFTD earlier this year, plus some promo for the release on March 9th, but no ads or anything else. So, whatever’s happening on the right end of these ranking graphs is almost certainly from the BookBub free promo.
Results: Sales
There was a little bit of sales activity for the book during and following the giveaway, probably in response to the high ranking, or maybe some word-of-mouth from people who read it right away. As you can see below, where WGFTDis yellow, I only had one sale in June prior to the promo, and afterward, I have 16, two of them paperbacks that were bought during the promo itself. This isn’t a huge return cash-wise, as I only make about $2.75 per book sold, but it’s definitely a bump. Call it $40-45.
Results: Ratings and Reviews
The other big boost from having so many books out there is that people actually read them and offer reviews. This isn’t a cash return on my promo investment, but I think it’s still important. I should have made better notes, but I think WGFTD was at about 35 ratings on Amazon before the promo with maybe 15 written reviews. On Goodreads, you can go back and track those stats on your author dashboard, but they don’t match the page exactly, and it’s hard to know why. I think I had about 30 ratings on GoodReads and 25 reviews.
As of right now, I’m at 334 ratings, 29 written reviews on Amazon, and 226 ratings, 38 reviews on Goodreads.
So, if we’re willing to assign all of these new ratings to the promo, which is probably not exactly true but is mostly true, it looks like this:
Site & Type
Before promo
After promo
Change
Amazon ratings
35(?)
334
+299
Amazon reviews
15(?)
29
+14
Goodreads ratings
35(?)
226
+181
Goodreads reviews
25(?)
38
+13
So, there’s been a tremendous increase in ratings on both platforms and a smaller but still significant increase in written reviews, both of which offer reader testimony as to the book’s quality. The readers you reach in a free giveaway like this aren’t likely to be as attuned to your work as the fans who find your books as they come out, so you’d expect the ratings to drop with this wider, less die-hard audience. That happened a bit, although not by a lot – WGFTD was about a 4.6 on each platform before the promo, and it’s now down around 4.5 on each. Interestingly, most of the new responses were ratings-only, not written, which is different from the readers I generally attract, who are more likely to write a review when they rate.
As a bottom line, in under three weeks, WGFTD has now exceeded the number of ratings for my most popular book, the epic fantasy detective story Flames Over Frosthelm that’s been out since 2019.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
As I’ve shown above, I have some degree of economic return on my investment in this promo from page reads and increased sales. I also have intangible returns in the form of higher sales rank and more visibility on Amazon, more ratings and reviews, and more readers who’ve now experienced one of my books and might get a nudge when I release another (or, if I’m lucky, might follow me and eagerly await a next release). It’s very hard to put a dollar value on those intangible returns, so let’s skip that and see how the world of cold, hard cash looks.
To do that, I’m going to attempt to figure out what my baseline book income was before the promo. Using KDP’s Royalties Estimator, that looked like this for about three weeks prior to the promo:
That averages out to about $6.94 per day, composed of sales and KU page reads.
After the promo, it looks like this:
That averages out to about $37.17 per day, with the majority of it being KU page reads of WGFTD.
If I subtract out the $6.94 per day baseline and multiply by 22 days since the promo started, I get $30.23 x 22 = $665.08.
By that math, I’ve lost $891 – $665 or $226 on the promo. A net loss. However, the revenue hasn’t stopped – I’ll bet my page reads stay elevated for a bit longer, although it’s hard to know how long. That will help close the gap, as will sales from word-of-mouth recommendations or the higher sales rank I now enjoy.
Also, the intangibles – the sales rank, the visibility, the (I hope) new fans, the glut of new ratings and reviews – all of those are things I’d gladly have paid a couple hundred bucks pursuing. So, I’m going to call this a clear win, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.
I did a financial wrap-up of my indie publishing efforts for 2022 that garnered some interest from other indie authors. The bottom line for 2022 was that I made a little over $2000 in revenue in 2022 compared to about $6700 in expenses, for a loss of around $4700. Not great, but growing in some good ways, and $2000 of the expenses last year was for production of the audio version of Daros, a big one-time investment that won’t repeat. I thought I’d do the same for this past year.
Revenues
So, let’s look at 2023 revenues. Here’s the Amazon revenue picture:
Here are the results for 2023 for individual books:
Markets
Amazon reported revenue from 11 countries, although many of them were negligible, including my three-cent totals from Brazil and India. Here is the breakdown by country – you can see the seven smallest markets fit into less than 1% of total revenue.
Formats
Here’s the revenue breakdown by format:
For me, Kindle Unlimited is a huge piece of my income. A lot of indie authors feel like going “wide” and getting rid of Amazon exclusivity helps them, but that move would have to more than double my sales revenues to make up for the lost Kindle Unlimited revenue to be worth it for me. I’m not ready to take that risk yet.
Audiobooks
There was another approximately $218 in Audible payments for Flames Over Frosthelm and Daros. At that rate, it will take a good many years to recoup my expenses (about $3200) for creating those two audio books, making it not a very good investment, but if I am able to grow my audience and increase audio sales, that analysis might change.
There’s also a small amount of revenue for paperback sales through my online store (and also in person). The profit and volume on those is pretty negligible, but it’s probably another $50 for the year, give or take.
That total revenue, maybe $4750-$4800, is a whole lot better than last year’s $2000 or so, more than double. Yay! But why? I would hope some of it is just from having more books out (I released two this year, Got Trouble and Kenai), and also from having reached more readers as I continue to work to expand my audience. But it’s also because of BookBub.
The role of BookBub featured deals
My first four BookBub featured deals were key revenue events this year. I’ve been applying for these competitive opportunities since I started publishing back in 2019, but I didn’t get any until this year. I’ve heard that BookBub is less willing to feature an Amazon-exclusive book, so that might be part of my difficulty, but it’s hard to say.
I had four features in total this year, each of which produced results big enough to be visible in the revenue graph above:
March 2023: (the big one) A global featured deal for my 3-book Inquisitors’ Guild compendium (light blue above) for $0.99. This cost me $712 plus a bunch of other advertising I stacked with the BookBub, but I made the BookBub cost back in sales and then had improved Kindle Unlimited page reads for several months afterward, making it a definite win for me.
September 2023: Another featured deal for the 3-book compendium, this one non-US only. This cost $196 plus other stacked ads and had a much smaller impact, although I still think it was a net positive.
November 2023: A non-US feature for Kenai (yellow above) for $167, which I think had a significant impact, although Kenai was doing well all year since its release.
December 2023: A non-US feature for Daros (green above) for $167. This also seemed to do well, reigniting interest in a book that had a great 2021 but which has slipped a bit since then.
I’m really hoping that I can continue these featured deals in the coming years. They’ve had by far the best return on investment of my advertising efforts. However, I have no control over when they are granted vs. rejected, which is a little frustrating.
Expenses
I didn’t do any audio books this year, which was a significant savings compared to last year. I did continue routine advertising, mostly on Facebook and Amazon, but also including blog tours for Got Trouble and Kenai. I spent a lot on some probably ill-advised expensive ongoing ads for Got Trouble on Amazon, too. Here are my expenses by category:
Promos (paying services to advertise free or discounted books) and Ads (general ads for my books) are similar, but I broke them out so that I could see what was happening. The BookBub featured deals mentioned above are a major component of the Promos category.
The “Giveaways” category is a GoodReads giveaway I did there for Got Trouble. I’ve done a few of those for other books. I’m not sure how much return there is for those, although it does get your book added to people’s “To Read” lists.
Summary
Last year, I had $2000 in revenue on $6700 of expenses, or a loss of $4700 or so, or -235% of revenue. That sounds bad, but of course I’m in this for the long haul, and I expect to lose money for a while until I get more established and figure out what expense choices produce useful results.
This year, I have $4800 in revenue on $7200 in expenses, or a loss of $2400 or so, or -50%. That’s progress, although it’s still not positive. But it’s headed in the right direction.
I have the ability (and true privilege) to be able to sustain losses like that for a while to get this going – I don’t need my book revenue to pay my mortgage or put food on the table, which is a huge advantage. And profitability is of course not a great way to measure the value of art. But it’s still interesting to keep track.
A loss of $2400 sounds bad, though. If I want things to look better, I can focus on revenue and readership, and for those categories, 2023 looks like a really good step in the right direction.
The good news about 2023
I had a huge number of paid orders compared to previous years (although many of them were at $0.99 for the BookBub deals, which made me only about $0.30 per book):
Light blue here is the Inquisitors’ Guild compendium, red is Daros, light green is Kenai, yellow is Flames Over Frosthelm, and purple is Got Trouble.
I also broke a million total pages read on Kindle Unlimited, with over half of that million coming this year, much of it buoyed by the BookBub promotions:
Light blue here is the 3-book Inquisitors’ Guild compendium, light green is Kenai, purple is Got Trouble, red is Daros, and yellow is Flames Over Frosthelm.
Conclusion
So, 2023 was a banner year in a lot of ways, but not yet a profitable one. The year-over-year trend is terrific, but it’s probably not sustainable – there are only so many BookBub featured deals I can get, and they’re not certain. But, if I keep writing more books and reaching more readers, I might even get this thing to work.
I’m having a lot of fun, and it’s great to see people responding to my books, and that’s the most important part.
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.
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.
