Katherine Pickett

For two days, I was sitting on top of the world. This weekend Debra Lee Won’t Break became a number one bestseller on Amazon in the Contemporary Women’s Fiction category for free ebooks.

That might sound like a lot of qualifiers, but it wasn’t easy to do.

I started by arranging two email campaigns, one with The Fussy Librarian and the other with BookBub Free Reads. Then I went about making the ebook free from December 11 to December 20 on all sites.

That too is easier said than done. Draft2Digital allows you to set your price however you like, with many tools that make it easy to run sales and give away ebooks. Amazon is more challenging. Unless your book is part of Kindle Unlimited, KDP/Amazon will only allow you to set the price as low as 99 cents.

But you can contact Amazon and ask them to price-match their competitors. And that’s what I did. This post from Indies Today walked me through it. It took a few days, but Amazon agreed to the price match.

The Results

The Fussy Librarian campaign netted about 665 free downloads across all sites (Amazon and D2D reporting). I was very happy with that. My book moved up in the rankings on Amazon, and I was reminded that it is always more fun to have people reading your books than not.

Then the BookBub campaign went out.

I had heard big things about BookBub — have been hearing big things for the past 10 years. I had never experienced it for myself, though, because I never had a novel before now.

BookBub sends out several newsletters, and all of them are competitive to get into. My book was not selected for a Feature Ad, the most coveted of BookBub’s offerings, but it was selected for the Free Reads.

The Free Reads mailer goes out to a smaller list than the Featured ads: 195,000 compared to roughly 1.5 million for the Features. (It’s more reasonably priced too!) With those numbers, I had no idea what to expect. I figured if a thousand people downloaded the book, I would be happy.

Moonshot

Turns out I could have set my sights a little higher.

The first hour after the BookBub email went out, 1,500 people downloaded Debra Lee Won’t Break. That was Friday afternoon. By the end of Saturday night, some 7,000 people had downloaded my novel and I was ranked 1st in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, 1st in Sports Fiction, 1st in Friendship Fiction, and 11th in the Kindle Free Store.

I don’t have final numbers yet, but I am expecting total downloads over the two campaigns and all markets (Amazon and D2D reporting) to be around 8,750.

What About the Money?

A friend asked me about income. As the screenshot shows, I’ve made $37.21 this month. Not nothing, but also not the $35,000 I would have made if these were paid sales.

That’s not the point of the giveaway. Rather, it is to reach readers I normally would not be able to access and get the marketing machine churning.

Now, more than 8,000 people have the book. As they read it, review it, and mention it to friends, their word of mouth will drive more sales.

And if they don’t? Well, it sure was fun sitting on top of the world!

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