BOOKBUB EXPERIMENT 3: STORM DAMAGE by John A. A. Logan
After
two successful Bookbub promotions for The Survival of Thomas Ford earlier this
year, which resulted in 70000 free downloads, and a combined profit of $2300 from
1300 Amazon sales/borrows when the book returned to its $2.99 price (followed
up by 100 new Amazon reviews), I decided to reinvest a little of this profit in
a third Bookbub promotion.
The
third promotion, which ran from October 26-30, was not for The Survival of
Thomas Ford, though, but for its “little brother”, my story collection, Storm
Damage.
Storm
Damage had won the award for Best Short Story Collection in the eFestival of
Words Best of the Independent eBooks Awards 2013, and, ever since, I had been
looking for an opportunity to get the ebook out to more readers.
Storm
Damage was sent out to the Bookbub literary fiction subscription list on 26
October.
There
were only 6 or 7 books selected by Bookbub to be sent out to that subscription
list that day, and Storm Damage was the only one of the books which was free.
I
was happy to see that one of the other books in this small list was A Fair
Maiden by Joyce Carol Oates.
On
the first day, there were 10000 free downloads of Storm Damage, which took it
to Number 13 ranking out of all free Kindle ebooks on Amazon US.
It
also charted in three other literary fiction categories:
Number 1 in Mystery, Thriller &
Suspense
Number 1 in Psychological
Number 1 in Short Stories
By
the end of the five day free promotion, 20000 new readers had a copy of Storm
Damage, a healthy wee stream of post-promotion $2.99 Amazon sales/borrows had started
to come in, and I was very happy to have another positive result to allay that chattering
Goblin voice in the back of my mind, put there over the years by certain others, that
story collections are of very little interest to readers out there (“just can’t
shift them”…“editors say they like them but even when they do take them they
pay peanuts”…would be the exact off-putting phrases told to me over the years,
from 2000-2011...when I stopped listening).
Thanks
very much to everyone who downloaded, and helped to silence the Goblin Voices!
Comments
I'm intrigued by Bookbub, and have tried it myself. That is, I've tried to try it, but haven't yet managed to get them to list my ebook. That seems another Catch-22; it seems one needs a certain level of success before they'll consider it. So you're into the old world of submissions and rejections again. I suppose the only thing to do is to keep trying them and hope that one day they agree to promote my book. Plus ca change, I guess...
Hunter