The Results Are In

63 (free) copies in a week!

Hey! Did you take advantage of last week’s promotion?

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from making all the Kindle versions of my books free at the same time.

Last time I wanted to do something similar, I ran into an issue with the intricacies of how Amazon promotions work. In a complicated phrase, every book published via Kindle Direct Publishing can be enrolled into promotional blocks that line up to about once per quarter—and you can only enroll one book in one promotion once per quarter.

So, I was curious to see how having everything properly aligned would affect interest in my work.

The result is a decent chunk of people grabbing free copies! Note the immediate rise and fall before and after the dates of the campaign.

Equal Interest

Looking at the line graph and seeing those 63 books divided between my four titles then raises the question of which was the most “successful.”

Well, there are graphs for that too!

And to make it clear which color is which title:

There was a preference for Rhean, which isn’t exactly a surprise considering it’s my latest release.

The others are more evenly split and it makes it hard to really gauge what that could mean. I’ll chalk it up to my other promotional efforts across social media paying off in some small way.

However, there were a few people who asked me directly whether they should read Rhean or Maneus first.

Reading Order

I’ve mentioned many times now how Rhean is a prequel to Maneus.

I may have said nearly as many times that it doesn’t really matter which one you read first.

Both books are meant to stand on their own as self-contained stories, with most of their connections being more referential than directly influential.

Perhaps because I see their relationship that way, I feel a slight edge toward reading Maneus first. There are a lot of threads that weave together into an intricate web of “reveals” in Rhean that could be seen as more fun with the knowledge of what happens in Maneus.

However, I wrote them in that order and thus read them as well. I can’t know how it feels to read Rhean and then Maneus!

Maybe I am blind to the superior experience!

I would be very curious to hear what others think.

Crescent Clouds

Speaking of written words from others, the Sidereal Times deadline is coming up!

I’ve received a couple submissions, but I wanted to remind everyone that you can still send me something until the end of June.

One thing that has surprised me already is the variety of mediums people are using.

When I would hound people for short segments on Comatose, the limiting factor of recorded voice seemed to be a struggle for some. I wanted to avoid that by being open to a wider variety of mediums and that has—at least initially—proven to be a good choice.

Or those crazy enough to send me anything also happen to be those who like to work outside of the norms of a formatted MS Word document!

No matter which way to Sunday, I’m just happy to have a handful of submissions rather than a completely empty inbox.

And oh yeah, I’m in for another season of Buildspace, but hopefully not taking on such an intense project as the last few times.

I’ll let you know more about that soon.

Until next time.

—JMB