The week yielded 83 free downloads. At the start of the week I thought 100 made a good target but really I had no idea. I had 30 on day 1 so am slightly disappointed this rate wasn't maintained but if any of those 83 lead to some good longer term results then that's fine. Would I split the 5 days next time? Probably.
2 reviews. Again this is pretty low I think considering I was asking for them. The two that came were nice and 5* but I hope the ones that didn't come just mean the book hasn't been read yet rather than readers were sparing me a 2*!
Facebook? 40 page likes, 5 shop now clicks. Again a bit disappointing as I targetted genuine friends and asked for a favour which was pretty free! But writing, even short reviews, is a challenge to many, and a facebook post is so fleeting. I'm very unconvinced of the value of a FB business page.
Twitter? Lots of posts and retweets. I gained alot of followers in the week with now around 250. It's easy and fast. Some retweet accounts did a good job. The best I'd say was askdavid.com which you can use free and I expect most of my amazon.com sales came through them. Next time I'll consider some paid promotions. Some of their tweets which reach 40k followers were retweeted 6 or 7 times by other users who in turn had 20k followers so I reckon tweets could have reached potentially 100k followers! Having realised that 83 downloads is fairly modest again indicating the transitory nature of a tweet. Timing is everything. On day 1 Stephen Hawking was trending so I tagged him as a relevant reference to my story.
Google + I found this very frustrating. It takes an age to find your way around and hook up with conversations, and I don't think I'll be using it much in future. There are some writers' communities with tens of thousands of members but the downside of this is it's hard to find your way through the forest of information. However I did make 3 meaningful connections including one review swap and a potential blog mention.
Goodreads - a great platform which links well with your website/facebook/blogger etc but no interest generated directly.
Authors pages on amazon. Again impressive webpages - I particularly like the twitter feeds. Can't tell how much engagement there was through these but I suspect what there was would have been positive. Would definately recommend indie authors set these up.
Discussions instigated on goodreads/amazon etc - no interest.
Blogger - initially impressive page views (near 100 day 1) but now insignificant.
Amazon bestsellers lists - enjoyed checking my movement in these and reached respectively no. 4 and no. 6 in the UK and US in suitably obscure categories at various times in the week. It evidently doesn't take alot of sales to make these charts. As a buyer I think this is potentially useful as I found myself browsing the free charts and downloading stuff willy nilly (mostly based on the cover). It can be difficult to choose the categories for your book if it spans a few genres. I would imagine being high (ie. on the front page) of an obscure chart is better than being pages down a more mainstream chart.
Emails? They say an email list is more valuable than all the social networking you can do. I emailed about 300 contacts. I had about 10 replies and only 1 disgruntled person accusing me of spam (which I was) - I had the impression not many sales came through this. The offer was free and easy but it just shows most emails of this type are ignored even if from a friend you know.
Will the free kdp week and associated marketing lead to any real long term sales? I doubt it, but certainly not doing it would not have helped.
Anyway an excellent experience overall and one I will learn from before next time. But that's enough of that for a while, time for some writing now!
