Aloha from Hawaii!
I thought I’d give you a brief update on how the Kindle promos are going and the exciting developments since the last update!
First, Let’s Talk Numbers
You may not be aware, but the Kindle Select program lets me give away my book for 5 different days within a certain range of time. These days can be consecutive, all split up, or somewhere in between. And in February, I ran the first single-day promotion, giving away The Truth Beyond the Sky, completely freely, for 24 hours.
The result? Counting all countries, 322 copies of the book were given away on February 21. Not horrible, but not great. I knew we could do better.
Then in March, the Kindle community blew my socks off!
In March, I did my first 2-day promo wherein I gave away The Truth Beyond the Sky for an uninterrupted 48 hour period, and in that time, I was stunned to reach over 3,400 downloads (and that’s just the US Kindle store).
I need to stress how unprecedented this is. To have the chance to touch over 3,000 people’s lives in just 2 days is incredibly humbling to me. And even though I didn’t make a dime on those two days, I noticed (just as many other authors have remarked), that my real sales increased afterward, and March was by far my best sales month.
I no sooner saw this in action than the very next month. During April, I didn’t do any free days (partially because I was on the road for nearly the entire month), and I saw my overall sales drop to less than one-fourth of my March sales. Now, I don’t claim to understand the wisdom of the masses (and other factors may have been at play), but what’s happened this month really drove the point home. Once again, I saw a clear spike in sales after this month’s promos.
The correlation between promos and real sales is undeniable.
Which brings us to Now
This month, I’m pleased to announce that I had my best ever single-day promo yet, reaching 814 people in a single 24 hour period. And the 2-day promo which happened a couple weeks later reached over 2,300 downloads. While it’s not the 3,000+ I had the first time, I’m still incredibly humbled and grateful to reach so many people.
And remember, another great aspect of doing ebook giveaways is that by reaching more readers, it really helped fuel my book to get more reviews as time went on. In fact, I’m very pleased to report that the book now has 19 reviews, averaging 4.5 stars!
TLDR: free downloads increase real sales. The Truth Beyond the Sky is living proof of this.
Coming Soon…
I’m also excited to announce that reviews of The Truth Beyond the Sky will be showing up at SF blogs around the web in the coming months. (i.e., I almost went batty last week preparing dozens of review submissions to various blogs, each of which insist on their own special submission formatting.)
The practical upshot of all of this, is that the amount of eyeballs on the galactic myth that we all love continues to rise exponentially, and I continue to make progress on the sequel.
In fact, I just may have created a little teaser page about it.
And I just may have featured a photo of a lava lake in the book cover.
You can draw your own conclusions, I’m sure. 
