The folks over at the Based Book Sale did something different this time: they opened the sale to short stories. It’s rare to see opportunities to promote shorter work, be that stand-alone short stories, collections, or anthologies. You’ll find all of the above in this sale, and the organizers asked for the pricing to be set to $0.99 for the duration, to give readers an inexpensive way to explore new-to-them-authors. It’s a great idea, and I am very pleased they tried this out. I decided that I would include my space opera romance short, Djinn, in the sale, and set it to free for the window of time Amazon allows, as it’s regular price is only $0.99.

Above is the results of this little experiment, three days in. I’ve given away 345 copies of Djinn, and about two percent of those readers went ahead and bought the whole series. This is why I put Djinn in the sale, and set it to free. I was curious to see, with this little experimental series of short stories, what would happen. It cost me nothing, and perhaps it’s gained me a half-dozen new readers. We’re not talking a lot of money, here, those are each priced at $0.99 and I get about $0.34 from each sale. However, if those readers then go on to read through my backlist, I’ve got a lot of books for them to enjoy.

This really only works when you do have a backlist. Also, freebies like this are… not always effective at getting new readers. I don’t actually recommend putting a book to free, because there are people who will grab all the free books they can lay hands on and then never get around to reading them. We value what we’ve paid for. Setting a lower price rather than free means the reader will pick up the book they are interested in, not just looking at the price tag. In the above image, you see some of that, where hundreds of downloads translates out to a tiny percentage of read-throughs. I’ll report back next week if the numbers change after the sale is done. The first day of the sale was the day I got the most downloads by far, which is fairly normal for a sale in my experience.

The interesting thing was that some of that spike may not be due to the sale. The impetus of the sale downloads pushed the book really high in the free book rankings.

I was surprised, and pleased, to see this happen. There are readers who haunt the freebies, what are sometimes called whale readers. Voracious readers with more time than budget, they are what drives Kindle Unlimited, too, and most of my books are available to them. So! It will be something I’m looking for, an uptick in KENP reads.

Once I topped a couple of categories, I shared a screenshot around on social media to create a little buzz. I didn’t link to the book itself, but to the whole sale, because that’s how you support the sale (generally they use affiliate links to finance the huge amount of effort these things take to pull together. I used to do sales here on MGC so I know) and I didn’t want to skew the data with my fanbase alone.

Was it worth doing? Absolutely, because it was book one in a series, it was created in the first place to collect data (don’t get me wrong, these were fun to stretch and write, and I will likely revisit these again), and it shows me what may be working, or not, so I can adjust on current information. Marketing methods change, constantly. Part of this series is me talking about what I’m doing, what works, and trying to give all of you tools you can use with relatively little effort and expenditure.