HOW DID IT GO?

Last week, I ran a Kindle Free Promotion on King's Warrior. This is the third time I've done this, but it's the first time I really, truly, worked hard at getting the news out and doing it "the right way."

Today's post is just to let you all know how it went.

First of all, a HUGE "THANK YOU" to all of you who posted, blogged, tweeted, downloaded, and told your friends about the giveaway. The success I saw could NOT have happened without your help spreading the word!

By the end of the day on Wednesday, King's Warrior was here in the Amazon Standings (U.S.)

And on Friday, we reached this  Incredible milestone:

And even got here on the Amazon U.K. site:

Total, King's Warrior was downloaded 3,315 times!

Which I think is not too shabby! :) I was sort of shooting for the 5,000 number, but 3,315 definitely breaks some kind of record for me, so I'm not going to turn my nose up at it. :)

Of those downloads, 3,136 were from the US, 75 from the UK, 86 from Germany, 14 from Canada, and a handful from France/India/Brazil.

How did this smashing success come about? There are five things that I can point to - and hopefully, if you are an author and are planning this sort of thing in the future, something in this list will help you out, as well!

1. I studied this page: http://www.sarkemedia.com/free-kindle-book-promotion/ and followed as many of their directions/advice as possible.

2. I emailed everyone who has ever had me over for an interview and asked if they would be willing to help me promote the giveaway. Not everyone responded, but a few did.

3. A month before the giveaway, I submitted my book's information and the dates of the promo to 15 different sites. (Any place from the above site that accepted submissions from books/authors with 5+ reviews (many don't accept submissions unless you have 18+ reviews) and were FREE). I'm not sure how many of those sites featured me, but I know that Freebooksy did - they even gave me this cool badge to display - (which, of course, is not working now... oh well)

4. The day of the giveaway I re-emailed everyone who had ever had me over for an interview and reminded them about the giveaway, and submitted my book's info to 9 additional sites that only accept that sort of info the day of the giveaway. There are quite a few sites on facebook that allow you to post about your free books. I facebooked about it a few times during the day (but tried really hard not to be terribly obnoxious), and only mentioned it on goodreads in one place (goodreads people are easily annoyed by too much promo stuff).

5. And I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who facebooked/tweeted/blogged on my behalf about this promo. Again, THANK YOU. This success would not have happened without your generosity.

My hope is that this helped get my name and my book's title "out there" so to speak. Hopefully Second Son will be ready to go soon, and this giveaway will have helped generate interest enough that readers might be willing to pick up a copy when it releases.

Since the giveaway, I've also SOLD 31 copies of the e-book, which is more than I've sold in the past 10 months combined!

(I'm doing a post later this week with more information about Second Son, so be on the lookout for that!) :)