THE DREAM DANCER soars as a freebie

Over the weekend, Amazon cut the price of my novel, THE DREAM DANCER, from a modest 99 cents for a Kindle copy to zero, free, nothing. The impact?
On the first day of the giveaway, Saturday, July 16, 2011, there were 553 downloads of THE DREAM DANCER putting the novel at 181 on Kindle’s free-ebooks best seller list; number five in Literary Fiction and number three in the Occult genre.
By the following day (Sunday), there had been 2,022 downloads with THE DREAM DANCER ranked 69 on Kindle’s free-ebooks best seller list; number one in both the Occult and Mythology genres, and number two in Literary Fiction.
For the first half of July while THE DREAM DANCER was still selling for 99 cents, one copy was sold providing me with a royalty of 35 cents. Now I wish the 2000 plus readers who downloaded this now free ebook had been willing to pay the measly penny short of a dollar, but they weren’t.
I must admit I’m happy just to have more readers, especially thousands of more readers.
For those who don’t know what the term downloading means, let me explain: Downloading an ebook is like selecting a hard-copy book from a bookstore or library shelf. You add it to the lists of books on your Kindle, or whatever device you are using, and hopefully read it.
I consider THE DREAM DANCER my best novel. In the two years that it has been available through Amazon, no one has reviewed it. I was happy to see one person clicked “the like it button” over the weekend.
I hope that all the 2,000 plus downloaders (so far) will read THE DREAM DANCER and that some among them will review it. And most of all I hope that thousands more will download and try it.
Oh, the reason for Amazon slashing the price? The company has a policy offering its books for the lowest price out there. THE DREAM DANCER was being distributed by Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Apple, etc. as a freebie. Amazon discovered that and matched it.

THE JYNX sales

Over the course of a full year my novel, THE JYNX, has sold 13 copies in paperbacks and E-books. Certainly not a glorious sales report. Why hasn’t the book sold? Obscurity. Any book promoted widely, reviewed in magazines and newspapers, and distributed through local bookstores would sell thousands of copies. I know that from my experience with two nonfiction books sold through an agent and printed and distributed by two major publishers.
Let me whine for a moment. I had plans to promote THE JYNX, which is a well-written novel with a logical plot and interesting characters. What intervened was a devastating case of the shingles centered around my left eye. That plague began Sept. 15, 2008 when I was unable to use my left eye and totally fatigued for months. Nine months later, I still have lingering problems involving eye strain and fatigue, which prevent me from reading and writing with the intensity of my pre-shingles life. I am hoping that the shingles problem will fade in upcoming months.
I estimate from the available stats that my free online novel, THE DREAM DANCER, has been read by more than 1,000 persons over the past 21 months. THE DREAM DANCER is the best novel I have written. While that feeds into the substantially larger readership being free is probably the key factor. We all enjoy the freebies online.
I am planning to make THE JYNX a free online read with the hope that a larger audience could result in larger sales numbers. And, I am going to offer THE DREAM DANCER for sale as a paperback and E-book hoping to tap into the pool of those who have read it. Whenever I read a book I love, invariably I buy copies for friends and relatives.
So, we’ll see.

A suggestion: My latest novel, THE PENCIL ARTIST is available as an e-book on Smashwords, Kindle, and Barnes and Noble; as a paperback on Amazon.