So this is what 38 feels like.

True fact: yesterday was not a big deal as far as the whole “birthday” angle went.  I have been telling people I was 38 for months for some reason, and in fact– this is not a joke, I swear– spent part of the year legitimately convinced I actually was 38 and not 37, a delusion that ended when I literally  lost an argument with my brother about how old I was.  So… no biggie.  40 might be a biggie, but I’ve kinda gotten used to being old by now, so maybe it won’t.  We’ll see.  We went over to my parents’ place in the morning to clear more detritus from the storm– they had a lot more than I did– had lunch over there, went and got my wife a new phone, and I pretty much spent the rest of the evening on the Internet cackling over numbers and hitting “reload” on websites.  My birthday dinner was Jimmy John’s, ordered when I realized that I hadn’t eaten dinner yet and legitimately didn’t have much time left to get someone else to bring me food.

At one point, I had been planning on cooking a decent meal yesterday.  Whoops.

As of right now, BA vol. 1 is still sitting at first place in the “Short Stories and Anthologies” genre for free Kindle books, and you best believe that as minor as the achievement is in absolute terms, the fact that I’m moving more books than an honest-to-God Grand Master of science fiction is pretty fuckin’ awesome.  I’m at fifth place in “Space Opera,” 50th in all free sci-fi, and #1052 in all free Kindle books.  I’m hoping to have that down to three digits by the end of today.  So far I’m continuing to move books faster than I did yesterday; I had 200 downloads by midnight and am at 25 right now– I think it took until after noon yesterday for 25 copies to happen, so I’m a couple of hours ahead.

Interestingly, the last time I did a free day and (I thought at the time) promoted it heavily, it moved 80 copies.  200 is way more than 80.  Several theories as to the difference:

• The book has several very positive reviews now, where during the first week it didn’t.  People who don’t know me from the blog or real life have several better reasons to try it out now.  Getting a couple of excellently-timed positive website/blog reviews during the sale that I could link to also really helped, I think.
• I have four times as many Twitter followers as I did last time.  I should have 800 followers within an hour or so.  While I’m still not getting a lot of clicks on individual posts, I’m getting a lot of help from other folks with retweets and their own messages and things like that, so a lot more people saw the book through Twitter than last time.
• There are about 2-300 more people subscribed here than there were in May, also.
• Facebook.  A bunch of my (real life) friends shared, and some of them actually wrote their own posts promoting the book.  Always good.  (And, again, thanks.)

Things that I don’t think have made much of a difference:

• Twitter recirculation from authors’ groups and free book notifier style Twitter accounts.  I spent probably two hours this week filling out applications online and making sure FreeKindleBooks or HeyHaveABook or whatever knew the book was going to be free.  If they retweeted or promoted anything, it never crossed my radar.  Similarly, the money I shelled out to join Self Publisher’s Showcase and the Independent Author’s Network doesn’t seem like it’s going to end up paying out.  It was grant money, so I don’t mind, but unless something changes I’m not planning on any renewals.
• Facebook.  I went ahead and dropped $15 to “boost” one of the posts on the Luther Siler page, just to see what would happen.  What happened:  Facebook claims that 10,964 people have seen that post as of right now, with $5.46 of my $15 left unspent.  The results:  five likes on the specific post, four from 13-17 year old girls and one from a 13-17 year old boy, who are not exactly my target demographic, and one general like on the Luther Siler page.  I have no reason to believe that there was even a single download from the boost.  I don’t think I’ll be doing that again.

The real interesting thing, to me, is that I only actually have 125 friends on Facebook, and the book moved 200 copies yesterday and has probably been downloaded a total of around 350 times by now.  This leads me to suspect that with very few exceptions everyone who I actually know on Facebook that has any chance of downloading the book has already done it, meaning that my own personal real-world reach is probably pretty close to exhausted and I’m into word-of-mouth and actual advertising now.

I promise, there won’t be nearly as much advertising here today either, although I’m still gonna keep doing a post every hour and a half or so on Twitter, because I feel like I’m getting a bump each time I do that.  We’ll see how day two goes.  (And, I note, I moved five copies while I was writing this.  Cool.)