Last week, I wrote a post about how I prepared for my Kindle Select freebie weekend, so this week, I figured I’d update you all on the results.

   The book was free for on Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th February.  With the time difference, that equated to around 6pm Saturday to 6pm on Monday over in Seoul. I’d left the preparation to the last minute as the decision to run the promo was a little impulsive. Despite that, I was more than happy with the results.

   Journal of Sin was downloaded a total of 1,112 times. Due to the time zones (or some other mystical Amazon reason that I don’t understand), the results came in over three days. 229 on Saturday, 788 on Sunday and 25 on Monday. I don’t really have a point of reference to say whether that’s ‘good,’ ‘bad’ or average, but I’m definitely happy with it. I’ll discuss this a little more in another post where I’ll talk about my feelings. For now, on with the facts…

   It ranked really well in the charts. It hit #155 on Amazon UK and #428 on Amazon US. It also did very well in the genre charts – #3 English Crime, #5 Murder and #7 Woman sleuths. All very unexpected. General trends seem to suggest that Sunday’s are one of the best days for book downloads. I think having the promo start on Saturday and allowing them to take a strong position in the charts going into Sunday may have really helped.

   Paid sales have increased since the weekend. It’s at $2.99 (£1.99) for February as I’m trying to find it’s optimum resting price. There are so many ways of looking at how to price an ebook and I’ll no doubt write a post about it in the future once I know a little more about that side of things. The average daily sales have gone up from two or three to five or six. A small change I know, but for someone who wondered if he’d ever sell a single copy, every sale feels like hugging a just-shampooed Wookie.

   It’s hard to know what worked and what didn’t. In my last post on this topic, I mentioned how I promoted the free days including the sites I submitted to and the tweet ‘clubs’ I was a part of. Coming away from the freebie weekend, it’s really hard to tell what worked and what didn’t. Identifying how many times links were clicked and who went onto buy the book is hard to really know. If anyone can help me out with that kind of thing, I’d be very grateful.

   I’m very happy with the numbers and I am deeply grateful to everyone willing to take a chance on a debut author. It may have been free, but you’re spending your time reading it and time’s the most precious commodity we have.

   I’m going to write a final piece about the promotion where I’ll discuss the various thoughts and feelings that popped up throughout the process. Take care ‘till then.