Very successful free promotion!

My first free promotion for my novel "Travels on a Greyhound Bus" finished at eight o'clock this morning, and it was a good one.

I had over 3,000 downloads, the book stormed into the Amazon.com free charts at #2 in the Family Life genre, and someone who had downloaded the book during its free period read it immediately and gave it a five star review! Throughout the free period, "Travels" fluctuated between #2 and #5 in Family Life, and #7 and #18 in Women's Fiction. Result!

Having been sceptical at first, I have to say that I now really enjoy the whole independent publishing scene. I have two books independently published so far and am working on a third. I love the freedom that you have to design your book how you want to, to price it as you wish, to decide whether and how to run free promotions. And I love the speed of the whole process -- once you've decided to publish, you can just go ahead and do it.

Despite the success of this promotion, there is one thing that I do find frustrating.You can never quite work out why your promotion has gone well. So, this book did really well in the US during its promotional period, but less well in the UK, whereas my other book, "A Matter of Degree", did much better in the UK in its free promotional period. Why? I don't know.

But maybe that's a perennial marketing problem, rather than an independent publishing one. Maybe its never that clear why one approach goes well and another less well. Still, if the formula works, stick to it -- and that's what I intend to do!