How is your free run going???

I just finished a free run for one of mine. I barely got two hundred downloads, and no sales or reviews. Thing is, I contacted all the, about 50, sites you are supposed to inform when you do a free run. I advertised it everywhere I could, even here. I am going to take my books out of KDP as soon as I can. Maybe I just don't know how to use it, but KDP is not working for me. I haven't had a single borrow either. I know some people have had success with KDP, though. For me, the appeal of having books in more places is too much to resist.

I only have one "free" day left on my only Select book.  I thought someone mentioned somewhere that mid-week days were good for free days (although it sounds counter-intuitive), so I might have to pick a Wednesday to use my last free day.

I've got Emotionally Charged free at the moment, and it's the slowest I've ever seen! Even with little promotion normally it does better than this. Not sure if I've ever done a monday before. I should keep better track of these things...

I've had about 1800-1900 downloads on the 3 days I have ran my book free. I'm not terribly disappointed in the outcome but today is not going as well as even my first day did. I'm thinking about letting the book go free tuesday, and wednesday, then back for paid on V-Day.

I just went free yesterday and am now at 627 downloads. I feel great about that! I have only 1 review. I did no promo really. I just sort of went with it and I'm just happy for the exposure. It did slow down a little today but I figure that would be a Monday thing. Maybe it will pick up this evening.

Good luck everyone!

I think that over the course of my whole KDP experience, I have done free promotions on every day of the week. The success seems to depend more on who (blogs/sites/etc.) picks up the mention rather than what day of the week.

But worth noting: Avoid "big days" and holidays if you can.  "Big Days" like the Superbowl or game 7 of the World Series.  Holidays... Oops, I'm Canadian and don't always notice what days are stat holidays in the USA.  I think one of my worst freebie promos ever was on "Black Friday" after the American Thanksgiving.  Never occurred to me that  it was a special day. 

I did a 5 day promo early last year for my first two books and got over 17,000 downloads. I'm currently doing a 4 day promo (used up my first day a month ago) to promote the launch of my third book. I've had barely 250 downloads. The difference is depressing me! I don't know how to explain it. Also, my books, which have been selling steadily and satisfactorily for over a year now are suddenly NOT selling! I've sold one in the past fortnight. How do you go from 300-500 a month to 1 I wish I knew what was going on out there. Sigh.

I've recently been uploading some short stories under a pen name. I've enrolled four of these in Select. No one knows the pen name. No one knows the stories. I do not list the free days with anyone (basically, can't be arsed, and not advertising is part of the experiment). Free days are one or two per week, either on Tuesdays or Thursdays. They're always one day at a time, since I've never had any success with multi-day freebies. I usually get about 200 downloads. For absolute minimal effort, I'm happy with that.

cahocking said:

I did a 5 day promo early last year for my first two books and got over 17,000 downloads. I'm currently doing a 4 day promo (used up my first day a month ago) to promote the launch of my third book. I've had barely 250 downloads. The difference is depressing me! I don't know how to explain it. Also, my books, which have been selling steadily and satisfactorily for over a year now are suddenly NOT selling! I've sold one in the past fortnight. How do you go from 300-500 a month to 1 I wish I knew what was going on out there. Sigh.

Click to expand...

I had the bottom drop out of sales in Oct. Very odd. I was promoting a series one story at a time, watching the stories peak and slowly taper off, had a story headed right toward 1,000 sales that month, then sales dropped as suddenly as if the story had been pushed off a cliff.

I wrote a new series, published it, promoted a story that got decent downloads, but it's five days after the promotion and no sales. Very frustrating and enough to make me rethink my strategy of giving Amazon exclusivity to my work.

OK, so who tattled on me?

I have a perma-freebie, which normally gets steady but very low downloads of a handful a day. Today, I've had a spike in downloads. It must have been mentioned somewhere.

So far 141, since Sunday.

In the top 50 free books on Amazon UK

Generally comes to about 400 to 1000 downloads a day if you're interested

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Enchantress-Book-Evermen-Saga-ebook/dp/B0087HV5QQ/