I want to say a BIG THANK-YOU to everyone who downloaded The Alchemist's Box for our first promotion on Saturday. Watching the downloads rack up was exciting, and from that one day there are now around 500 extra copies out there to be read. If you got one, I really hope you enjoy it.

As an independent author, gaining book reviews is SO important, so if, once you've read it, you can spare a moment to write a few lines of review on Amazon, it would be so helpful. I really need to build up reviews on Amazon.com (the US site) as well as on Amazon.co.uk, so if you downloaded it from the UK site, you can still post a review on Amazon.com by clicking here. 

From here on, I'll give some details on what we did for our giveaway, which may only be of interest to other independent authors, so if you're not interested in the details, I thank-you once more for your help in reading this, and hopefully downloading the book.

OK, so the Amazon free promotion was for a single day, Saturday 14th Jan, 2017. We submitted free ads to 18 book promotion websites, of which we found our book live on 6. The other twelve may have tweeted or posted details of our book promotion on Facebook, or may not have had room on the day for our book, so I will calss these 12 as unconfirmed. We also paid fairly small amounts for promotions on 3 sites, and posted details on 2 book promotion forums, and tweeted to 5 book promotion twitter accounts. 

This resulted in download of 470 copies over the day, with a significant number (approx 1 in 3) of those coming after 10 pm UK time, suggesting that a lot of folks in the US downloaded in their late afternoon/early evening. The following day we also had a small spike of paid sales, which easily covered the price of the ads we placed.

Our target from this first round of promotion is to increase the number of reviews on amazon.com. Before the promotion we had 5 reviews, and I'm optimistically hoping that if 1% of the downloads turn into a review, we might get another 4-5 reviews from this campaign. If this is the case, this will open up other promotional sites to us who have larger distribution lists, such as Book Barbarian, who claim to have an average of 1800 downloads from their site alone for promotional giveaways, but require a minimum of 10 reviews.

We will plan another promotion once we have the second book, Lose a Princess, Lose Your Head, published, as I'm hoping that will be ready in a couple of weeks now its back from the editor. I'm formatting it for e-book at the moment, and having a final proofread to try to ensure it is as error free as possible before it is published.   

Finally I will summarise the promitional websites we used:

Paid ads:
ebooksoda.com ($20)
newfreekindlebooks.com ($5)
snickslist.com ($1)

Free ads where our listing definitely went out:
pretty-hot.com
ebookasaurus.com
www.philipsmith.eu
ebooklister.net
contentmo.com
askdavid.com

Forums:
book-circle.com
kboards.com - book bazaar

Tweeted to:
@DigitalBkToday  
@kindleebooks   
@Kindlestuff  
@KindleFreeBook  
@FreeReadFeed  

Sites submitted to, where we were unable to confirm whether our promotion was live (if you heard of it from one of these, please let us know and we will adjust the post):
freebooksy.com
bookangel.co.uk
bookbongo.com
bookdealhunter.com
bookoftheday.org
bookwormworld.com
thedailybookworm.com
ebookshabit.com
ebookskill.com
theereadercafe.com
freebooks.com
frugal-freebies.com

The FREE GIVEAWAY of The Alchemist's Box is doing great. We're getting lots of downloads, and climbing the Amazon charts. Unfortunately, to get any higher we need to start deposing the likes of H.G.Wells, Victor Hugo, and Robert E. Howard: three of my heroes! Still, it looks good to see The Alchemist's Box in such exalted company!
If you haven't downloaded your copy, get it tonight before it goes back to full price!
Download from Amazon.com  or  Amazon.co.uk.

Its all happening this week! I received Lose a Princess, Lose Your Head back from my super-talented editor, and I think it reads really well now. I've done a final proofread, and so the second novel in the Merchant Blades series will soon be ready for release. Just need to format it for the e-book, refine the cover blurb and it'll be ready to go.

The Alchemist's Box has been doing well so far. The Kindle Unlimited 'pages read' count has been stradily increaseing, despite having done little promotional activity yet. We've even had our first '1000 pages read in a day' day! Its been read around the world, with sales in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, and of course in Greece, and its great to know there's people out there who I don't know who are picking it up and reading it (without having been bullied into it!) I'm also really pleased that from the stats it looks like once people start reading it, they can't put it down, and get through it in a couple of days.The intention when I wrote the book was that it would be a page-turner that would make you miss your stop on the bus! 

This weekend we're running our first promotional event, a GIVEAWAY SATURDAY, where the book will be available to download for FREE from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. Hoping we get a good number of downloads, that will hopefully translate into some more good reviews on Amazon. I'll blog more about that on Saturday, but if you want a copy, or you know anyone who might want to get their hands on a free copy, Saturday's the day!