After the Promotion.

The free run for HELL’S GATE has now finished, and I’m waiting for Acclaimed Books Ltd. to let me have the download figures for the promotion. My results were encouraging judging from the information that was available on Amazon and Author Central. The title went up into the top ten (free) in the two categories, Historical, and Action & Adventure. Overall the title topped out at about 250 in all Kindle books. The important aspect of free promotions is the resulting sales figures that generally follow after a free run. It sounds like a contradiction, but it happens. When NORTH SLOPE went on a promotion earlier this year, it had almost 40,000 downloads and something like 6000 sales that followed. There was also a knock-on effect for my other titles. But unfortunately the Kindle bubble has burst, and now the results, for almost all the authors using the Kindle Select promotion, have tailed off dramatically. But unless we promote this way, we are unlikely to achieve any significant sales without spending heavily on promotion and marketing, which carry no guarantees anyway. What I’m after, apart from the obvious, is to establish a readership, which I can only do by having my titles permanently available on Amazon at a reasonable price, and hope to pick up good reviews. Even then, good reviews don’t always guarantee sales. The reason for this, I believe is that there are a lot of writers who cajole, persuade, and act duplicitously in conjuring up five star reviews in order to persuade potential readers to buy their books. I have fallen into this trap as a reader, downloading books that have had some sterling reviews only to find that the books are rubbish. But I have also persuaded friends, as a writer to put good reviews on Amazon for me. I believe in myself though, and I’m sure all writers do. So it behooves me to establish a readership through the slow process of building trust: trust that the reader has in my work.

Another title of mine that I have a great deal of faith in is THE BOY FROM BERLIN. This will be available on Amazon and other outlets as an e-book in November. It is being released by my publisher, Robert Hale, and will also be available as a Harlequin paperback in January. The hardback was published a year ago (2011) and picked up by Harlequin very quickly. They will also be publishing THE EAGLE’S COVENANT, but I will be releasing that as an eBook probably next year. So, there will be plenty there to form the basis of a readership, and I live in hope that the fruits of my labours will become apparent in the not too distant future. Wish me luck!