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.