As many of you know, from July 4th until the 8th, I gave away six of my titles for free. Never, ever in my wildest dreams did I imaging getting as many downloads as I did without even having a BookBub or a major advertiser running one of my books or all of them.

Boy was I wrong and I’ve never been happier to be wrong. 

With a great deal of effort creating some advertising graphics, (I’m being sarcastic here. These graphics which I created on Canva, probably took me all of 90 minutes to design) a paid ad with FreeBooksy (quite reasonable by the way) and a whole lot of word of mouth and shares on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook and last but not least, a measly $20.00 Facebook ad, I managed to obtain 16,444 downloads across thirteen countries around the globe in 5 days! By the way, if you’re not using Instagram to market yourself and using the hashtags creatively so readers can find you, you are truly missing the boat. Check out my Instagram and you’ll see what I mean.

16, 444!!!!

Sure, it would have been fantastic if I’d actually sold that many books at regular price but that wasn’t the point of this whole experiment. The point was to get people to read my books and want more of them and that is exactly what has been happening since the promotion started! I am over the moon happy because since July 4th, people have read over 30K pages of my books and that number rises daily according to my KDP reports. Oh and did I mention I’ve been averaging between 10-15 kindle book sales per day since the giveaway ended and that number is going up every day? Did I mention I’ve received new verified purchase Amazon reviews on my books as well as some on Goodreads and acquired new fans on my Facebook page who are lovely and engaging?

I understand to many authors, giving away your work seems like surrendering and believe me when I tell you, I never imagined myself doing this either. However, if you read my blog post about why I did this, perhaps it will help you understand.

I didn’t write my books to get rich or famous. Yes, I’d love to have enough of an income from writing to quit my day job and write full time but I started writing books because I wanted to tell stories. I wanted to entertain people much like a singer, a band or a dancer. These books are my dance, my song and the music of my soul. I want to share them with as many readers as I can. I want them to keep coming back for more so I can hear their smiles, laughter and tears through their words.

I truly believe success is coming and the opportunity for me to be able to write whenever I want is just around the bend but unless many, many people can find my books and read them, what good is being an author if we can’t share our stories?

Right now I am feeling so blessed and I hope and pray the blessings from all of my efforts keep coming in the form of wonderful readers who just want more of my books.

Peace out!