The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
It’s May the 4th! The Sanctum of the Sphere and Skylights are both free for a couple of days! Go get ’em! And May the Fourth be with you!
(IN OTHER NEWS: laid out by a sudden-onset migraine last night. Right now my left eye is trying to convince me that it can’t see. It can. It’s a really weird feeling.)
…sooner or later.
So since last weekend was Valentine’s Day, and Skylights … has a red cover? Sure, let’s go with that– we’re putting it on sale for a week, starting just as soon as Amazon decides it’s 8:00 AM. One of these days I’ll figure out what time zone Amazon is on. We’re doing one of those Kindle Countdown dealies, so it’ll start at just 99 cents (a full 80% off!) and every so often the price will go up a buck until it’s back to regular price sometime on February 22nd.
I’ll keep y’all posted. But for now, or at least for soon, Skylights is 99 cents, and you really ought to get on that deal.
In other news, the first Prostetnic Publications newsletter finally went out yesterday, and not only did those folks get advanced warning of the sale, but they got an excerpt from Sunlight, due out … sometime! Wow! You should sign up for the mailing list; I really don’t send out a whole lot of emails and I’ll make sure when I do they’re worth reading.
My teaching memoir Searching for Malumba is free today! So, if that implies any action on your part, go for it.
Luther M. Siler’s long-awaited book about teaching, SEARCHING FOR MALUMBA collects nearly 150 of the best of his essays and blog posts from 15 years of writing about American urban education. Alternately hilarious, sad, furious, horrifying, and touching, as well as frequently profane, Siler’s writings shed a light on the reality of teaching in America’s urban schools during the reign of the No Child Left Behind Act and the rise of standardized testing. Available as an ebook and in print.
Hey. HEY.
It’s 6:30 in the morning where I am. I’m asleep. It’s also Cyber Monday. I’ll keep this short and sweet:
Every single one of my damn books is free today. Go get ’em.
Skylights is free today, in case you haven’t picked it up yet. Go. GO NOW!
August 15, 2022: the Tycho, the most advanced interplanetary craft ever designed by the human race, launches from Earth on an expedition to Mars. The Tycho carries four passengers, soon to be the most famous people in human history.
February 19, 2023: The Tycho loses all communication with Earth while orbiting Mars. After weeks of determined attempts to reestablish contact, the Tycho is declared lost.
2027: Journalist Gabriel Southern receives a message from a mysterious caller: “Mars.” Ezekiel ben Zahav isn’t talking, but he wants Southern to accompany him for something– and he’s dangling enough money under his nose to make any amount of hardship worth it.
SKYLIGHTS is the story of the second human expedition to Mars. Their mission: to find out what happened to the first.
…Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is free today, if you haven’t taken advantage of one of those yet.
tl
;dr version: That didn’t go poorly at all.
Slightly longer tl;dr version: Best free day in a while, followed by the best sales day in, also, a while.
Longer version, with numbers: 49 free downloads on the first day, two of which were not through Amazon for various reasons. 5 free downloads on the second day, because Amazon never actually keeps these things to a single calendar day and I’m not sure what time zone they’re actually on anyway. Seven sales the second day, all of Benevolence Archives, and one new five-star review. Also, I had my thousandth book download of the year.
All of that’s good.
We topped out at #4 in subgenre:
There was one more update where we were at #28 in Space Opera and maybe the 4100s somewhere overall, but the best ranking didn’t move from this. The interesting thing: I’ve been at fourth place in Anthologies and Short Stories before, during my birthday free day in 2014. And that day it took a hundred downloads to reach #4 instead of the probably low 40s that it took this time. Conveniently, July 5th 2014 was also a Saturday, so I’m not comparing across days of the week. I ended up with exactly 200 downloads that day with more or less exactly the same amount and style of promotion for the free day– a couple of blog posts and tweeting about it once an hour or so, and it got me four times the downloads for the same amount of trouble.
My reach on social media, incidentally, is way longer now than it was back then. What does this tell me? It tells me that Amazon is a lot busier in July than it is in September. This fits with previous anecdotal evidence, but it’s nice to have some confirmation.
What I’ll be looking for this week: I’m crossing my fingers to see if I get some movement from The Sanctum of the Sphere, now that 40 more people have Benevolence Archives. A sale or two on Skylights would be nice too but it’s not a sequel so I wouldn’t necessarily expect it. I was kind of hoping to get a Searching for Malumba preorder or two, too, but it didn’t happen.
Next weekend, Skylights, which has never been free before. It’ll be real interesting to see how it does.
Starting tomorrow, every Saturday for the next 90 days I’ll be doing a free promotion for one of my books on Amazon. Every Saturday. This Saturday, for the first promotion, my book The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 will be free at Amazon all day.
(It’s currently just 99 cents, in case you feel like spending money…)
Here’s the rest of the schedule for September and October:
November’s up in the air a bit because I need to decide what to do about Black Friday/Cyber Monday, neither of which is on a Saturday. We’ll see.
Will this hurt sales? Yeah, it could. We’ll see if it makes up for it in volume and, eventually, some reviews. #SilerSaturday! It’s a 90 day experiment!
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