I'm trying various promotional sites. Many Books cost me $29 to list it to their mailing list for a week. On the first day, September 9, I had 20 downloads. It doesn't sound like a lot, but getting anyone to download a book these days is hard work. I also like my Author listing on their site - I hate photos of myself, but a cute puppy on your lap always helps.
Books Butterfly was my previous promotion and they charged $80 for a guaranteed 1000 downloads. During their promotion and now some weeks later, I had 2 downloads, although one I am pretty sure came before their promotional period.
The people at Books Butterfly were very nice and responded to emails promptly, they said many free books have a long lag when recording books and claimed KOBO was notoriously bad in reporting their downloads of free e-books. I can imagine updating free book downloads isn't high on their priorities, but it feels like an excuse.
Inner City has downloaded 4200 times since I listed it - although this latest draft is a year's work to improve and proof the manuscript as best as I can.
The other really clear issue is the book is listed and published at Smashwords and not Kindle. Almost all the promotional sites work with Kindle and it's hard to find those who list Smashwords links. Inner City is listed at Kindle, but at the price of 89 cents - in Australia $1.03 - I think. This is because Kindle doesn't seem to allow a free book. It allows you to promote a book for free across a promotional period - and this only if you are enrolled in the KDP select program that makes it Kindle exclusive.
I am still debating whether to do this or not, as both Smashwords and Kindle are easy to use and publish, but there are reports of the exclusivity of Kindle drastically reducing any author percentage and once you sign, you sign to be exclusive, so I want to exhaust my experiment with Smashwords first.
The plan is to keep Inner City free until October 31st. The Kindle or Smashwords conundrum will be answered by how many downloads it gets once it's at a price.
Of course, you can also download the book at:
Barnes & Noble Nooks Books
Kobo
iTunes Books
Here are the links to reviews so far:
Goodreads
Barnes and Noble
Amazon
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