Boom! Bookbub!

So right now, as of this writing, CHILD OF THE GHOSTS is #10 on the Amazon US free store. Not in Epic Fantasy, not in Sword & Sorcery, but #10 for the entire Amazon US free store. That takes something like 10,000 downloads in a day, which CHILD OF THE GHOSTS has done since yesterday.

So, how the heck did this happen?

I bought an ad on Bookbub. Bookbub is a newsletter service that sends announcements of discounted books to its readership. The idea is that you sign up for Bookbub, tick off what genres interest you (romance or fantasy or whatever), and then Bookbub sends you emails listing discounted books in your genre. I had heard other writers say good things about Bookbub, and the cost for listing a free fantasy book was $90, so I figured it wouldn’t cost too much (specifically, $90) to give a try. After CHILD OF THE GHOSTS got accepted, I filled out the form, send in the money, and forgot about it.

Then on the 15th, I got an email saying the ad was going out, and I looked and saw that CHILD OF THE GHOSTS had gone from about #2,200 in the free store to #170.

That was pretty cool.

Then, a few hours later, a very excited reader pointed out that CHILD OF THE GHOSTS had shown up on a blog called Hip2Save, which is apparently one of the biggest blogs on coupon-clipping. This was a bit puzzling, but upon investigation, I saw that Hip2Save hadn’t mentioned CHILD OF THE GHOSTS at all. But they had mentioned Bookbub…on the day that CHILD OF THE GHOSTS happened to go live in the Bookbub ad, which mean the book’s cover showed up on the Hip2Save blog. Given that Hip2Save is in the top 2,000 of Alexa’s web ranks for the US, I strongly suspect that generated the extra interest to kick CHILD OF THE GHOSTS up to #10 on the Kindle free store.

So that part of it was just dumb good luck.

Another big, big part of it was the new cover that Clarissa Yeo did for CHILD OF THE GHOSTS, which was considerably more attractive than the covers I did myself. That was a big help – a pretty cover goes a long way to getting people to download a free book.

So that is what it takes to get a book into the top #10 of the Kindle free store.

Now we’ll see if anyone buys the sequel to CHILD OF THE GHOSTS. 🙂

-JM