Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

I’ll admit it. I got nothing done this weekend. I was positively glued to my iPad, pulling up the growing stats on my promotion for Unraveling Time, watching the numbers click upward hour by hour, day by day.

It was fascinating, and it totally exceeded my expectations.

(And in case you missed it, no worries; it’s still available for free, thru midnight tomorrow. Don’t be left out. Go claim yours!)

So, instead of something pithy and/or insightful, let’s talk about the progress so far.

I set the promotion to start on a Friday and run continuously through Tuesday. My thinking here was that it allowed me to get some buzz going prior to the kick-off, and to build on this through the weekend, when people had time to browse the Kindle store. Amazon gives you the opportunity to break up your allotted five “free” promotional days, but I wanted to build momentum. As the world turned, I saw numbers click up where the sun was shining (a nerdy thrill, I have to admit, but it was pretty cool).

This turned out to be a good choice, for several reasons. Not only did the weekend turn out to be stronger than Friday, the extended and continuous period allowed Unraveling Time to climb the charts in its two main categories–something I did not expect to see. Here’s where momentum really kicked in, though.

Once Unraveling Time broke into the Top Ten for its two categories, it stayed there. All weekend (and indeed, still this morning) it has been in the Top Five, and has owned the #3 and/or #4 spot in each category. This has given it visibility that would have been lost if I’d only run this promotion for a day or two. Five full days of exposure means people who have subscribed to the list of Top Ten “free” Kindle books have had time to get the email/RSS post, and go out to Amazon to see it.

As of 8:00AM (Pacific), Unraveling Time has been downloaded over 750 times. About 650 of those are from the US site, and over 100 are foreign Amazon mirrors. This is an astounding result, as I really only expected a couple hundred downloads at best.

More than that, I’ve been getting emails from people who have started reading the book, and how much they like it.

There is a strong synergistic factor at work here. In this promotion, I built on everything I had (which, to be fair, isn’t much). I posted about it here, which feeds over to LinkedIn and also to Facebook (and thence to Twitter). I posted about it in the promotional areas of LinkedIn groups, but I also posted a discussion of it in the discussion groups; my reasoning here was that people don’t care about promotions, they care about the exchange of ideas, and discussing the experience is valuable.

I also cajoled friends into “sharing” my FB post, and most of my friends have many more friends than I will ever have. So, even though only a dozen friends passed the post along, that built a viral wave that reached even more people.

Overall, this is nothing but a success. Of course, we’ll have to see if this turns into sales of the other titles, but even if it doesn’t, I’m not going to be disappointed. Unraveling Time is in the hands of new readers, and that was the main goal.

k