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.