Man, it’s funny: I’m effectively unemployed right now, right?  I work one night a week at OtherJob and while I pretend that my full-time job is “Writer” right now, the fact is that without my own initiative “Writer” and “unemployed” look exactly the same and frankly at the moment are bringing in the same amount of income.  But hell if I don’t feel insanely busy right now.  I’ve hit my word count for the day as of 1:30, which is when I’m writing this, but I’ve got about ten thousand things to do before the wife gets home and SHIT THERE’S SOCCER TODAY.

Arrgh.  Anyway, point is, if I was ever worried about keeping my life full of stuff to do during the summer, I seem to be doing a pretty damn good job with that at the moment.  Granted, most of my “stuff to do” boils down to “read this” or “write this” (I have promised several people I’d take a look at manuscripts, work I enjoy doing, but… yeah, I probably ought to actually do it) so maybe I’m more of a grad student than an actual unemployed person but the point is damn, busy.

So let’s talk about this:

I’m gonna call this a success, I think, and I’ve learned something about Amazon.  With a minimal amount of promotion and a decent-sized audience (theoretically 3200 people subscribed here, although daily hits aren’t remotely that number, and around 800 on Twitter, with who knows how many seeing any individual Tweet, plus about 130 on Facebook who are likely mostly represented on other lists as well) you can hit #1 in a smaller sub genre for a couple of days.  I hit #1 in Short Stories and Anthologies, topped out at #4 in Space Opera, and maxed out at #1031 (that I saw, at least) in all Kindle free downloads.  In three days, I moved 311 copies of the book– 200 on Saturday, 72 on Sunday, and 36 on Monday, with three more that bled over into early Tuesday morning before Amazon officially shut the spigot off.  That kept me at #1 for all of Sunday and most of Monday, so I’m going to attribute those drops less to the dwindling effects of my own promotion and more to Amazon’s own ebb and fall of traffic on the course of a weekend.  I had not fallen out of the top 10 in Space Opera and was still #3 in Short Stories and Anthologies when I went to bed Monday night.

Suggestion: if you’re going to do a free day, do it on a Saturday.  Hella more hits.  This means that, combining this sale, the previous free days, and all of my sales, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 copies of my book in the hands of readers right now, which I feel pretty good about.  There are eight reviews on the site, another on Amazon.ca, a few on Goodreads, and at least one that is just on the author’s blog and to the best of my knowledge not posted anywhere else.  Three more are posted in the “Reviews” section in the mast up there because Amazon has removed them.  All but one are positive, and most of them are glowingly so.  I literally couldn’t be any happier with how the reviews have gone.

Now to see if the increased exposure over the weekend leads to any spike in actual money sales ($2.99 cheap!) this week.  I’ve not made any so far today, but the pattern thus far has been that since the first couple of days that the book was available I never make any sales in the morning or afternoon.  They’re always in the evening and sometimes very late at night for whatever reason.  So we’ll see tonight if I get a bump or not.  Here’s to hoping, right?

And let me repeat this one more time:  Thank you so, so much to everyone who downloaded/read/retweeted/told a friend/reviewed/hell, sent positive vibes regarding this book this weekend.  I appreciate it more than y’all could possibly know.

Now back to work on the sequel.  Well, after I finish murder-painting the bathroom and these ten other errands I have to do.  🙂