E-Book Week Promotion.

Our E-Book Week (March 6-12) promotion is going well.

It's pretty exciting to put out a link on Twitter or Facebook, and see that someone has actually taken a free book. I wish they would grab all of them while they're in there.

Some of the data (all of the data) is useful. For example, 'Core Values' has not been mentioned in any of my tweets, or recently on Facebook. Predictably, page views on the Smashwords site are running at about one per day. Even so, we've given away a copy of the book since the event began on Sunday.

On the other side of that coin, 'Heaven Is Too Far Away' has been getting over forty page views per day, at least today, and 'The Paranoid Cat and other tales' has similar results. As for 'The Case of the Curious Killers,' that book has had over fifty hits today so far, and it isn't even eight p.m.

Without going too 'spammy,' and bearing in mind I'm giving things away for free, the results seem pretty positive. If nothing else, customers are curious about what our product actually is, and now a few of them know. It shows that there is genuine desire for the product when I can give four or five books away in pretty short order, right?

The question is one of balance.

My early experience on Facebook is that even on the news feed, constant self-promotion can be self-defeating. At some point you have done your job, and the people deserve a rest! But honestly, on Twitter, there are people tweeting constantly about trivialities such as Charlie Sheen or whatever.

As long as I'm nice about it, and the humour isn't too outrageous, I think I can get away with it to a certain extent. A few times a day, not a few times an hour, and it seems okay so far.

Utimately it's not about me and it isn't so much about the books. It's about entertaining the reader. You can't do that if you piss them off and they go off to spend their time somewhere a little more pleasant.

It sure is interesting, though.