I’ve previously written about the Indie Authors Sales curve and using Free Promotions to your advantage. I wanted to provide a quick update on the download numbers for Getting Lucky so people can have a baseline for their own experiences and also see the results of both of these concepts in practice.
On a few writing forums I stumbled across people that made their book free and got thousands of downloads in a matter of hours. When I made Getting Lucky free I watched and waited for this landslide of downloads that never came. Initially I was discouraged, but then I noticed the numbers were trickling up every day. When I wrote my free promotions post I had reached 90 free downloads in just shy of a month (May). I was pleased with these results and was just happy that my story was getting onto peoples devices and helping to improve my exposure.
Something really interesting has happened since then. The first week of June my daily download numbers jumped, reaching around 14 a day. That meant from June 1st-7th Getting Lucky was downloaded an additional 100 times on Kindle (get it free here), as much as the entire previous month. Even more exciting, I’ve hit another 100 downloads between the 8th and today (the 12th) so the daily download numbers are still increasing. If that trend continues for the rest of this week I’ll get to almost 180 downloads. I know these still aren’t huge numbers, but to me it certainly feels like they are!
Getting Lucky Free downloads to date
I understand this is not a sustainable growth pattern, which is all the more reason to enjoy it while it lasts. Annoyingly I have no concrete reasons as to why the downloads are increasing at this pace. I’ve been hovering around the tail end of the top 50 free downloads in the humour category all week, so it isn’t a sudden run up the charts that is driving the increased downloads. The number of reviews has slowly trickled up, but in my opinion not enough to make this kind of difference. Perhaps it’s word of mouth, or Getting Lucky appearing on more ‘also purchased’ lists that’s doing it, or some other thing I haven’t even thought of.
How about you guys, how do your numbers compare? What impact have you seen free promos have on your downloads, and what happened when you started charging again?
This is a wonderful story. I posted a review (I am not a professional writer, so it may not amount to much) on Amazon, and I look forward to whatever follows on The Adventure!
Thanks Tom, I am glad you enjoyed it and thanks for taking the time to write a review – much appreciated!