Adventures in free on a holiday weekend (Post-Select Update)

[smreine]

Death's Hand left the ranks of the free yesterday afternoon around 19:00. Its new sales ranking hadn't appeared when I went to bed, but I awoke this morning to it hanging out around #850 in the Kindle store. It seems to be slipping relatively fast (down to #890ish now), so I'm interested to see how long it takes the temporary boost to wear off.

Interestingly (but not surprisingly), I got a little burst of simultaneous refunds when it stopped being free but was still on the free ranking list--about 10 of them. I wonder how many people blaze through the "top 100 free" list and download everything without looking at it. 

For the number lovers out there, Death's Hand spent six days free on Amazon US and was downloaded around 12,400 times.

[Phoenix Sullivan]

Thanks for the milestones, from a fellow data junkie (who's still waiting for Apple to unfree her book)

Hope you get some long-tail sales from this!

[smreine]

DATA JUNKIE ALERT

An overview: Death's Hand was released on October 21st and wasn't doing well. I planned on starting it out at 99 cents as a promo, but it wouldn't sell. By the end of the month, I'd only shifted 20 copies, which is what I sold on Six Moon Summer's first day of release. And that was my first book, sold at $2.99. Despite having a book tour on some awesome blogs and nice reviews, Death's Hand flopped.



Realizing part of the problem was an ineffective cover, I changed it. Then I put it on the free train, because... well, what the heck, it wasn't selling anyway.

It went free for six days and was downloaded over 13,000 times. It went back on the paid lists on November 28th at 99 cents and sold about 250 copies. According to Metric Junkie, it peaked around #630 on the paid charts and slid to #4300 in about a week.

I enrolled it in Select as soon as the option was available without expecting it to change anything. Instead, it peaked at #875. It's taken six days for me to start sliding again. (I'm averaging at #1600 today.) For the record, lending has had a notable effect on my rankings.

Here's a little illustration:



In a little over two weeks since going unfree, it's been purchased over 1000 times, which is a milestone for me. It's out there on over 14,000 Kindles at the moment and has earned positive reviews and several subscribers to my mailing list. All in all, I consider this to be a successful experiment in free/Select, although free has obviously changed since then.

Hope you guys find this interesting.