Firstly I reduced WB to free on Smashwords a week before my planned promo and got everyone to notify Amazon of the price drop. This used to work and they would price match. However now they want everyone to sign up with KDP Select and sell your book exclusively with them so they don't co-operate so easily!After a week with no joy, I found out that if you reduce your price on B&N you have more chance of Amazon price matching, so I did this and waited another week...still nothing so I gave up! HOWEVER the problem with distributing with Smashwords is they only update price changes/edits every couple of weeks so when I altered my Smashwords price to the original 99c they didn't notify B&N (& even now it is still free!)
Then to top it all off, yesterday a UK author tweeted me asking why Witchblood was free on Amazon.com and not on UK!! I didn't know as they hadn't notified me! So I have had to re-publish WB on Amazon and it still took 24hrs before they changed the price back to 99c and the only way I can seem to remove the B&N freebie is to opt out of distribution for B&N. So tomorrow Smashwords will take it off sale and then next week I will have to opt in again...phew! It's lucky I have lots of hair because I have been tearing it out at quite a pace!The silver lining in all of this is that during the day (or days as I don't know when WB went free on Amazon.com) it has been creeping up the kindle charts, and yesterday I actually got to No 8 in Children's Bestsellers Supernatural & Romance charts and No 258 in overall Kindle charts!! This is really good for Witchblood, as the highest I got was in the 200,000s previously...out of circa 800,000 books!
Today I have dropped back to No 13, but it's still kinda great to see my first book in the Top 20:
sounds really frustrating - tbh i considered doing similar, but it sounds like it's more hassle than it's worth...I've a couple of other books I'm thinking of doing permanently free in the hope that it will get more readers to my 'paid' books...we'll see
ReplyDeleteWell done on the chart rankings though - make sure you take a screen shot to inspire you when you get writer's block :)
Thanks :-) It is pretty great and inspiring...I haven't got writers block currently but my current chapter is NOT flowing as I would like it to! In fact think I'll go to bed and come at it with fresh eyes tomorrow!
DeleteI hope you get it all straighten out. Congrats on your rankings.
ReplyDelete