Thursday, January 12, 2012

A Wild Ride!


Last week on Friday, January 6th, the Kindle ebook version of Deadly Currents, the first book in my RM Outdoor Adventure mystery series, was the Amazon Kindle Daily Deal, on sale for 99 cents, a $9.00 discount from its normal Amazon price, for the short space of 24 hours. Man, was it a wild ride!

How did it happen? Publishers can submit books to Amazon for consideration for the Kindle Daily Deal in a three month period. Amazon selects which books they are going to feature on each day during that period and selects the price they are going to sell the books for: $.99, $1.99 or $2.99. My Midnight Ink editor asked me if I was willing to have Deadly Currents submitted to the program. My answer was, "Heck, yeah!"

After a few weeks wait, my editor notified me that Amazon had selected Deadly Currents for January 6th. We didn't know what price they would put on it, and wouldn't know until the actual day. So, I prepared myself to help promote the sale. Most of the promotion, of course, would be handled by Amazon, but I could help by alerting my personal contacts.

I sent out an email newsletter to my subscribers the day before, telling them about the sale. I spent a couple of hours on the morning of January 6th alerting my Facebook and Goodreads followers, other social networks, my yahoogroups, and my Goodreads and Facebook groups. I also notified my critique group and book club and personal friends, though many of them already had copies of the books. I asked everyone to help spread the word to their mystery-reading friends.


Then I sat back and watched the book soar through the ranks throughout the day. When I first logged on in the early morning, its rank was already in the low five digits. Soon the rank was down to four digits. When it dropped into the hundreds, I started to get really excited. But the wild ride was far from over!

By the time I went to bed that night, Deadly Currents had reached the rank of #3 in the Kindle Store, #1 in Amazon's Mystery, Thriller & Suspense list (ahead of The Girl With A Dragon Tattoo), and #1 in Amazon's Literature & Fiction list (ahead of The Help). What a sale!

At the end of the next day, Deadly Currents was still in the top ten of all three categories, and lingered there for awhile before starting a slow slide. Also, Google Alerts started popping up, showing all of the websites that had announced the sale. The exposure that the sale brought me was worth much more than the royalties I gave up, I'm sure.


All I can say is thank-you, Midnight Ink, for making such an astute move! Both my publisher and I hope that once readers read Deadly Currents, they'll develop an appetite for the RM Outdoor Adventure mystery series and line up to purchase copies of the second book, Wicked Eddies, when it is released in May.

10 comments:

Morgan Mandel said...

I'm happy it worked so well for you, Beth! It's good to see someone's name I actually recognize get some recognition!

Morgan Mandel
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com

EileenHamer said...

Hearing this kind of news makes my day!

Eloise Hill said...

Beth, delighted for your results and thanks for explaining this process! I did a 5-day freebie kindle promo at about the same time and was confused/amazed by the results. Now I'm going to buy a copy of Deadly Currents.

Beth Groundwater said...

Thanks, Morgan and Eileen! I won't know the definite monetary impact until I get my spring royalty statement, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I actually made some money from the experiment.

Julie Golden said...

Such an exciting time... so glad that you got a ticket to ride. Thanks for sharing the story – looking forward to more of your news.

Beth Groundwater said...

Thanks for your comments, Eloise and Julie, and I'm glad the explanation of the process was useful to you, Eloise. And Julie, I hope to have some new cover art to show off soon, so stay tuned to Inkspot and my personal blog. ;-)

Jessica Lourey said...

Congrats, Beth. What an exciting opportunity! I hope it garners you thousands more readers.

Robin Allen said...

Congrats on this incredible exposure, Beth. I hope it keeps paying off with more sales and more fans!

Alan Orloff said...

Now that sounds like a rollercoaster worth riding! Congrats, Beth!

Beth Groundwater said...

Thanks, Jess, Robin, and Alan, and I hope you all get your turn on the rollercoaster soon. :)