THE MIDNIGHT GROUND: after-action report

The final numbers are in. During the course of yesterday’s 24-hour free e-book promo 1,713 copies of THE MIDNIGHT GROUND were downloaded and 4,000 KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) were read. The KENP number tracks the Kindle Unlimited subscribers who don't “buy” the book but rather read it out of the KU library. The book ended up being a Top 10 bestseller in a couple of categories but I don't think it hit #1 in any of them.

Here’s hoping some of those readers post reviews on Amazon or Goodreads. I’m already getting feedback from kind comments and positive reviews posted on other websites, but it’s the number of ratings posted on Amazon that engages Amazon’s automatic push-selling algorithms. The magic number is 50.

For reference, I believe this is a one-day one-title one-author record for us. The Campbellian Anthologies moved more copies faster, but those books were massive multi-author collections that nearly killed our business with Death By Administrative Overhead. (They did kill our original web server with bandwidth overload. That was fun. And expensive.)

As for the KENP: we haven’t seen these kinds of numbers since Henry Vogel’s THE FUGITIVE HEIR series was burning up the charts. This to me is the more meaningful number. It’s nice when people download your e-books, but the KENP proves people are reading them.

Much valuable data was collected from this experiment. I look forward to applying the lessons learned.

~brb