Dizzy Heights

What a weekend it’s been; straight into the stratosphere with my Kindle ‘free, unpaid’ promotion of NORTH SLOPE. It began on Thursday and within 24 hours I had registered 14,000 downloads, and went up to No.6 in all Kindle titles. By the end of the second day it had reached 27000 downloads and actually hit No.2 in all Kindle titles. By the end of day 3 it has reached a total of 37000 downloads, sitting at No. 3 in all titles and No.1 in the Kindle free titles. Then Amazon made a mess of things and left the book on ‘free’ for a further eighteen hours. This meant I missed out on possible sales. But once it had come off the free promotion it began to sell. The first count I received from Acclaimed Books was that it had reached 300 paid sales, and would probably continue to climb for a day or so before slipping back down the rankings. Me and Pat have been walking round with big smiles on our faces all weekend. To put all this in context, you need to realise that NORTH SLOPE was first published in 1980. It sold 2000 copies in the first year and then I was dumped by my publisher. Over the years it has simply been my ‘first novel’. When I put it on Amazon as a POD paperback and Kindle, the e-book version sold about 1 or 2 a month. Nothing spectacular. But now, suddenly a lot of people know about my work and can judge for themselves whether I am worth keeping an eye on or not. And the knock-on effect has been felt by my other two Kindle titles: A COVERT WAR and ROSELLI’S GOLD. ACW has gone up to 10,000 in the rankings from its usual, low position of about 120,000, while RG has simply rocketed up to 20,000 from 450,000; quite simply meteoric. I will be putting RG on promotion at the end of this month. Hopefully it will be another stellar time for Michael Parker.