FREE!

In the past weeks I conducted a bit of an experiment. Periodically I give away Kindle copies of my books. I think early on I once gave away thirty-some books over a two-day period; a couple months ago only three books were given away in a one-day promotion for Bonus Man. Three stinkin' books. For free.

Then I stumbled into a list of sites that'll promote your freebies for free. I signed up for eight of them. I also promoted the free dates on Facebook and two writers' forums, like I always do. One freebie site sent me an email that they had tweeted my free promo to 42,900 of its followers. Others sent emails and/or flooded my Facebook with their ads. With all this help I gave away 21 copies of Alice and Her Grand Bell. Five days later, using the same marketing plan, I gave away 15 copies of Bonus Man.

Unimpressed, I had another promo a week later, this time I used only Facebook—ignoring all the freebie sites and the writers' forums—and gave away 16 copies of No Happier State. Hardly worth the effort of dealing with all those freebie sites, though their ads are still all over my email and Facebook. Thanks. (Maybe I need to be on Twitter...)

On a related note, the good people at Cracked Walnut shared a review site called Emily Reads Everything. Seems she has a regular feature called “Awesome Indies.” Signed up, hopefully to get a review. Not sure about the term indie. It used to pertain to small, independent presses but lately has been taken over by self-published authors who don't wanna be called self-published. As a self-published author I hope I qualify. Seems like a great site. We'll see how it works out...