500 Downloads of Lucia’s War and Not a Single Tweet

I’ve been inactive on twitter for the last while. I just took the app off my phone 2 weeks ago and haven’t logged back in. I’ve spent that time cycling (a fair bit of that!), knitting, baking, writing and a fair bit of pottering about. I haven’t been promoting in a while either – I just found it too hard and exhausting to keep pushing my work.

Then last weekend, on a complete whim, I made Lucia’s War available for free on Kindle. I set the promotion from midnight Saturday to midnight Tuesday. Didn’t tweet, didn’t blog, didn’t Facebook. Didn’t tell anyone. Checked my dashboard a few times on Saturday night and Sunday morning and it was the usual small number. I forgot about it and we went to visit relatives. In the middle of the visit, I had a look at my phone and discovered to my considerable surprise that since that morning, I’d had 150 downloads. Throughout the afternoon the total continued to rise and rise. I updated family members as it increased – the eagerness to know on their part might not have been as much as mine, but still I was fascinated. Over that 24 hour period until Monday morning, I had 381 downloads, the vast majority being from the US.

To date, there are 500 free downloads – and counting.

What really surprised me was that all I did was drop the price to 0. No promotion, no services, nothing. By allowing generosity, I boosted my reader numbers. Who knows why it happened – could have been a longing on the part of an underserved readership, could have been luck, timing, whatever. Either way, it happened. And it forced me to realise that the rationale I had for using Twitter – that it helped me boost my sales – is, the data tell me, a pile of horse manure.

I’m looking forward to finding out what all these new readers will think of Lucia’s War. 🙂