Last Saturday, I made The Glaze from Breaking and A Multitude of Daggers free on Amazon. My goals were to raise my sales rankings, get more attention for my work, and to say thank you to the friends and supporters who have been so helpful through the whole process of starting up Upper Rubber Boot Books, not to mention years of support for my writing.
My fantasy novella had 209 downloads, probably all from friends, and I was really happy that so many people were interested, but what really blew me away was the unexpected popularity of my poetry collection. I got my final sales figures this morning for last week, and Glaze had 1315 free downloads, plus 17 paid downloads when the promotion ended, as well as reaching #1 in the Top 100 Free category, and then being as high as #6 in Canadian Literature and #31 in Poetry (in the “paid” categories). Now, I don’t know 1332 people interested in poetry, so some fairly high percentage of those downloads were by strangers, which made me very excited. That’s more sales than I had, total, for the print edition of the book. And a handful of people also bought the press’ other books, Blueshifting and 140 And Counting, which may or may not have been related (I think at least some of those sales were people looking in the “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed” section, but I can’t be sure).
Overall, it was a very successful day, and I’m grateful for and humbled by the response.
