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Saturday, May 14, 2011

Fifteen Minutes of Fame.

c2011Shalako


On Sunday, I got an e-mail notification that Amazon had dropped the price of 'The Handbag's tale,' a highly-satirical short story involving the murder of portly playboy banker Emile Danton in Paris, 1924.

That was because I was giving the book away on Smashwords and they have a price matching policy.

Okay, that's fine, but on Sunday night my computer went down. Somehow I turned off the POP settings or something incredibly stupid like that...imagine my surprise to open up my account Tuesday morning and see that I had given away about 1,700 copies at that point.

The reader may imagine what I was thinking: 1,700 x $1.00 - 35%, right?

But then I decided to let it ride. That was because a quick calculation showed that I was giving away 400 copies per day, and that is an achievement in anyone's book.

Right now we stand at about 3,800 copies and it's only Saturday night. But I am wondering if I can give away 5,000 copies of 'The Handbag's Tale,' in one week.

Right now it's at #19 in the Amazon UK Kindle Store, under the site's free crime>thrillers>mystery category, and at #63 on the overall free fiction list in Amazon UK. This has actually dropped down from #15 and #41 respectively just yesterday.

Also, the book is at #272 in the US Amazon Kindle free fiction rankings, down from a high of #251 observed yesterday or this morning. As you can imagine in the cyber-world of e-comemrce, the ranks are pretty fluid, changing even over the course of an hour.

The temptation to meddle and to extend my fifteen minutes of fame is admittedly there, but after not having my computer for a week or so, it's almost like I need retraining...I don't even really know what to do next.

Hopefully I will think of something.

Rankings: Boom or Bust

c2011Shalako

My computer blew up last Sunday night, which was a little bit traumatic. I went to my sister's house on Tuesday, just to check my e-mails. Going to my Kindle Digital Text Platform dashboard, I started clicking around and was startled to see that I had given away quite a few copies of 'The Handbag's Tale,' an 11,000 word short story featuring Inspector Maintenon and a murdered banker.

'Murder at its most French,' as I am calling it. 'Murder at its most sardonic.'

That price change only took effect Sunday or Monday and they were just flying off of the shelves!

Right now, (Saturday, May 14, 2:30 a.m.,) that book stands at #15 on the Amazon UK Free E-Books Crime>Thrillers>Mystery rankings, and is #45 in the UK Free Store. It stands at #256 in the US Free Kindle Store, and I watched it drop five places in the space of five minutes...interesting feeling.

In less than a week, I have given away over 3,500 e-books on Amazon US and UK.

Just to put all this in perspective, I worked my, er; 'butox' off during e-book week (Mar 5-12,) on Smashwords, and gave away a total of 130 copies of my five titles. Since my computer was out of service this week, I only used a borrowed machine for an hour a day, and put out on Twitter and Facebook no more than half a dozen links at best. They were not all for this title.

Also to put this in perspective, my best selling title is 'Heaven Is Too Far Away,' which now stands at around #55,000 in the Amazon UK store.

What's the big difference between the two books? About a buck, or approximately 0.71 Great Britain Pounds last time I checked. Some of my other titles are down in the three hundred thousand rankings! But down at that level, all you have to do is to sell two books and you rocket up the charts into the low two hundred thousands.

Have a pleasant morning, or evening, or day, or whatever.

(It's not like we don't earn it.)