Last weekend I decided to stage an Amazon Free weekend sale for my latest book. If you’re exclusive with Amazon they’ll let you do this for five days. You can split it up or do it all at once, I did it all at once because . . . well because I don’t know what I’m doing.

I went into it with no expectations. My sales of that book up until that day looked something like this:

I hadn’t promoted the book anywhere (although it was linked to from a few places, like my guest book review on SFsignal.com) and as you can see here I sold nine copies in twenty days.

Because I was enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program, which lets subscribers download books in the program for free after a monthly fee, I could see how many pages were read (by those in the program). This reporting is frustrating for authors because it doesn’t report how many pages read PER BOOK, just how many read in total that day (500 pages read could be 500 people reading your introduction and giving up… or one person devouring the entire book in one day).

On the pages read graph below you can see there were quite a few pages read before the promotion, and the third (smaller) spike is at the start of the promotion. Interestingly, while downloads went way up, after the first day nobody was really reading it on the unlimited plan. Then as soon as the giveaway ended, the pages read on kindleunlimited spiked to a new high.

Let’s take a step back to the beginning of the sale. Last Friday I anxiously opened the reporting in the morning to see under a hundred sales. I felt pretty good about that fifty people downloading my book. I hadn’t made fifty “sales” of either of my books before that. Probably never even had fifty unique visitors on this website. By the end of the day the number went almost to 300 downloads and I was feeling even better. At some point in the day I’d put out word on Facebook about the deal, this surely pushed some of these downloads.

On Saturday, I paid to be listed in one of the “free books of the day” emails. That seemed to push the downloads higher. It was exhilarating to watch the needle climb throughout the day, feeding some delusions of grandeur.  When you see it easily reach 1,000 downloads you start to wonder if it could double or triple or get into the tens of thousands.

But it didn’t. It topped out at 1,600+, which is still great according to other amateur bloggers who’ve written about their experience. During the sale the book went to #1 on the First Contact Sci-Fi (free) best seller list, in the top ten of the overall Sci-Fi & Fantasy category, and in the 70s of all best seller free books that day.

On Sunday downloads started to decline, but still beat Friday’s tally. Monday they dropped further still, and somehow rebounded on the last day of the sale. This was odd as I had my short story go up in SQ Magazine on Sunday, which I thought would spur downloads, but it apparently did not unless the small surge on Tuesday was a delayed reaction (folks returning to work and reading my story at work, maybe?).

When the book switched to the paid lists on Wednesday it dropped out of the best seller categories completely. Even in my sub category of First Contact.

The reason best seller categories are important is because that’s where people browse. If you’re not in the top 100 books for the chosen category Amazon won’t display your book at all unless the person searches for a keyword you’ve used or the direct link.

Runaway success stories happen when a book shows up in the top 100 best seller (paid) list and steadily grow. If you can’t hit that browsing list it can be tough to get anywhere, as you’re essentially dead to the readers.

If you’re dead, the only way to rise from the grave AFTER a free giveaway is to get good reviews and lots of them. Many authors hope to see this after a giveaway. Given that my book is 450+ pages, I don’t expect to see any reviews for a while.

So how do I feel about all this? Was it worth it?

Well, I did pick up four sales of my other non-free book during the giveaway. So, I’m not getting rich off any of this, but I may be increasing readership, which is a good place to start building a base.

If I could ask Amazon for just one piece of info it wouldn’t be sales or Unlimited pages read, it would be pages read per download – for ALL downloads. As a marketing professional, I have no idea why they do not share this information. They know it, and why it’s of value to them to keep this a secret from authors is mysterious.

Another interesting note: Although I’ve seen a purchase every now and then of my first book on Amazon, I have sold ZERO copies on any other reading platform. I left Kindle Unlimited and published Dawn of Two Stars six months ago on Nook, Smashwords, etc. and have seen zero interest. This is leading me to consider an amazon-only strategy. Especially since I can see that-at least for KindleUnlimited subscribers-people are actually reading the book. If nothing else I can use that information as a motivational tool to keep writing. It helps a lot more than the $0.70 royalty that arrives in my bank account once a month.

Now if I could only figure out what to write next…