THREE FREE DAYS - THE AFTERMATH

The last of my three free days (for HOT STATUS) was Sunday. Here's what I learned.

I had listed my book on fifteen sites. Five of them put the information up for the weekend.

Of the sites that declined, several appear defunct, on closer look:

Armadillo Ebooks loads up on the Web with a listing for April (2013) as the latest.

Book Deal Hunter shows March as the most recent post.

100 Free Ebooks kept giving me a 404 error: Page not found.

Free Book Dude is relatively current, but when I checked on Friday, the last posting was Wednesday. They didn't mention books going free over the weekend. (But I didn't go back and check Saturday.)

Frugal Freebies is current, and packed with all sorts of free items, including books and including HOT STATUS.

That Book Place turns out to be a Website for a book store in Madison, IN. No book listings, just information about a Book Fair from last month sometime.

The five places that listed my book were Book Goodies, Ebook Lister, Frugal Freebies, It's Write Now, and Sweetie's Picks. You can find links to those sites here.

Sweetie's Picks put up the most information: Book cover, description, my bio and photo, plus a link to this blog. They were the only one to request a photo.

One glitch I discovered at another site: When I submitted my book description to Book Goodies, the text showed up double-spaced. I was pasting into the form from Notepad, and this was only site to have the text go double-spaced. I decided it was just the way they did things, on their form. Wrong. The description came out double-spaced on the site, too. I'll have to watch that in the future.

So what happened during the free period?

Not a whole hell of a lot, it turns out.

A number of the listing sites refused to even consider a book with no reviews, and apparently ten of those who DID consider my un-reviewed book, said no.

Maybe that goes for picky readers, too. Folks not willing to click their mouse for a free book with no reviews listed.

Or maybe they just hated the very idea of the book. Hard to tell at this point.

By the end of the first 24 hours, I'd had 47 downloads from Amazon.com, five from UK, five from DE, and one from CA.

Fifty-eight total.

That went up another twelve over the next two days.

Maybe it's the weekend effect going on here, folks off doing other stuff, not haunting Web sites looking for freebies.

Or maybe you always get about 83% of the total on the first day, 14% the second day, and 3% the third day.

Law of Diminishing Returns?

I guess I need to try again, with the same book, during the middle of the week. I have two more free days for HOT STATUS coming.

Maybe a Tuesday/Wednesday combo. That would at least eliminate the weekend factor from the equation.

Time will tell.

Onward and upward, or something like that...