Greetings, fellow humans. I’m Caroline and I write fantasy and horror—my debut epic fantasy novel, The Obsidian Druid was released in April 2024. This is my newsletter.
The Grand Free Experiment
When I published The Obsidian Druid in April, I enrolled it in KDP Select. This means that in return for publishing exclusively through Amazon, among other things, I can schedule a free book promotion for a total of five days every three months. I wasn’t planning to use this feature for a long time. If you’re writing a series, the popular advice is to hold off on doing this until you have a second book to promote. The hope is that readers will pick up the first book for free, love it to death, tell all their friends, family, neighbours, and distant acquaintances about it, and then immediately hand over real cash money for book two. This is a sensible, logical plan.
Then I read about other authors' experiences—renegade authors who set the first book in a series to free without having anything else to promote. They literally gave the work they’d sweated blood over away, for nothing, gratis, with no inkling of a hope that readers would then buy into the rest of a series. It sounds counter-intuitive. Readers who pick up books for free are often accused of simply storing books on their Kindles and never reading them, but the renegade authors argued that it increased reviews and tickled Amazon’s inscrutable algorithm, resulting in more sales. I was an author who desperately wanted more reviews and sales. I was an author on the edge. I decided to join the renegades.
Renegade Life
I used all five promotional days (go big or go home, right?) and I paid to promote the giveaway with Freebooksy and The Fussy Librarian. I’m not going to lie, parting with hard-earned money to convince people to read my book for free felt strange. The results were staggering, though. My paid promotion only lasted for one day, and after that, the amount of free downloads dropped off a cliff. I didn’t set the promotion to start until the second day of my book being set to free. Before that, downloads promoted through social media had been below 10. On the day of the Freebooksy/Fussy Librarian promotion, 2,119 books were downloaded.
Yes, you read that correctly—nearly two-thousand-and-freaking-twenty books.
This far exceeded my expectations. It was even a little scary. Over two thousand people now had a copy of my book sitting on their Kindle—a book it took me a decade to finish—and they hadn’t paid me a penny for it. I did calm down, though (I’ll get to that in a bit). On the third day, downloads dropped to 328, and by the fourth day, they were down to 202. When I wasn’t busy being scared, watching my novel climb the Amazon Free charts was insanely exciting. I took these screenshots because I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing:
Proof that I scraped into the top 100 😲
How did this even happen?
I also managed to hit number 1 on Sword and Sorcery Fantasy, and number 1 on Dark Fantasy Horror. There was a period of time on that promoted day when I could refresh my Reports page once every few seconds, and the downloads number would jump higher every time. “Imagine if this was happening with paid downloads”, I kept wistfully saying.
Calming Down and Lessons Learned
So, I had one very exciting weekend, gave away thousands of books, and paid for the privilege, but was it worth it? To be honest, it’s going to be a while before I can provide a definitive answer. In the short term, I did make a couple of sales once my book was back to its usual price, and I have seen some Kindle Unlimited page reads (I’d had no page reads at all prior to the free promotion). I’ve seen a modest uptick in people adding The Obsidian Druid to their “currently reading” and “want to read” on Goodreads, and I’ve had a handful of new ratings on Amazon. This is all encouraging, but it’s not world-changing.
The hopes I had for this promotion are long-term. The book is currently sitting on thousands of Kindles. I hope some of those people eventually shuffle it to the top of their TBR list. I hope they enjoy it, and I hope the author’s note I wrote politely asking them to review it will encourage some of them to do just that. I hope some of them will subscribe to this newsletter so I can keep them informed about future releases, and I hope they’ll be keeping an eye out for book two.
As experiments go, I wouldn’t call this one a failure. If nothing else, it was exhilarating watching my novel snake its way up the Free chart. I also learned that I would definitely use sites like Freebooksy again to promote my work. I’m going to wait until I’ve published book two before doing anything else like this, though. Another piece of popular advice is that you won’t see much traction in indie publishing until you’ve built up a backlist, and that’s where my focus is now. My renegade days were fun, but it’s time to get back to work.
Micro-SPFNO - Week Five
Shining a light on some excellent indie fantasy novels that weren’t chosen to compete in the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off by reviewing their first chapters.
Upon the Darkest Mountain by Rachel L. Tilley
The author describes Upon the Darkest Mountain as an epic/dark/YA fantasy blend set in a world where magic died out 100 years earlier. Sounds interesting! Here’s the blurb:
A curse lying over the land, seen by none but felt by all. An imposing mountain hidden in plain sight.
The world is no longer as it once was.
In place of prosperity, there’s famine and drought. Magic has all but disappeared.
At Ember House, Adria exists inside a sheltered bubble, until she's tasked with carrying provisions up a mountain for the rest of her life, and her happy world begins to fall apart.
Entirely alone, a kinship builds between her and the mountaintop's sole occupant, but what secrets does he hide?
Claiming to have lost his memory, the man locked away in a small room is a mystery, even to himself.
Can she set him free?
Should she?
Adria’s resolve will be pushed to the limit, but there’s no going back…
As thirst for power is pitted against the desire for revenge, find out which will triumph in this compelling, dystopian fantasy tale.
Upon the Darkest Mountain thrusts you headlong into a mystery within its opening paragraphs. Three generations have endured drought and famine, but the world wasn’t always so bleak. “An unexpected darkness had taken hold” that no one understands, and now magic is never talked about. I like this as a beginning. It’s too brief to become an infodump, but it pulls you into the world with language that verges on the cinematic, as though these opening lines are a voiceover (I imagined Doug Cockle—a.k.a. the voice of Geralt in The Witcher 3—narrating it, but I’ve been a bit Witcher obsessed lately so maybe that’s just me).
Then we meet our heroine, Adria, and I could instantly tell that she’s a young woman after my own heart, preferring to daydream about the previous week’s Yule Ball rather than focus on the Royal staff work allocations. She describes herself as a “well-liked” member of the staff who’s “never felt any marked curiosity about the world outside.” At first glance, she doesn’t seem like the sort of character who will become the hero of her own story, but there are small clues that point towards the hero she will become nonetheless. She is “proud of her own ingenuity” at never getting lost, and when the Steward approaches her and begins discussing a mysterious secret duty, she silently wishes he would “get to the point already.”
The brief first chapter ends with Adria looking out at a mountain with a name she can’t recall. Why can’t she grasp the mountain’s name from her memories? What is her secretive task, and will the Steward ever spit it out and tell her? The first chapter of Upon the Darkest Mountain is tightly written and full of tantalising questions to pull you into the next chapter and beyond.
Favourite line: “A layer of disquiet hovered, unseen, yet felt by all… as though a spell overshadowed the land. Warning that even now, there was something out there to be afraid of.”
Upon the Darkest Mountain is available in paperback, ebook, and on Kindle Unlimited.
Midnight Metropolis is a sci-fi/fantasy novel about daemons, hallucinogenic mushrooms, and the neon megacity sprawled on the blackened backside of a sunless planet. New chapters are posted every Friday and you can read all available chapters for free.
That’s it for now.
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Interesting experience. How much does it cost for a KDP Select 5-day promotion?