How I reached #9 on Amazon's Free Contemporary Romance Best-Seller List

This weekend I tried a free Amazon promo for the first time. I listed my contemporary romance (more a literary love story, really), Looking Glass Friends. It was the first time I tried this promotion, and the results were surprising. In fact, the book reached #9 in Free Contemporary Romance, made it into the fiction list and reached #135 in ALL free Kindle books (of course, I forgot to take a screenshot of this ephemeral moment).

In all, Looking Glass Friends was downloaded 1, 368 times and two audiobooks were sold as well. From my, admittedly, limited experience, these were excellent results, of which I am very proud.

All the traffic was funneled through this simple Facebook ad. It was the "Buy Now" button that made all the difference. I see that the button doesn't show here, but it was there when the ad was live on Facebook, and it enabled Facebook users to click their way directly to buying/downloading the book with no intervening steps. This, coupled with the number of awards the book has won, made it super-easy to get Looking Glass Friends, while the awards vouched for the story's quality in lieu of reviews.



In my experience, Facebook users do not tend to spend money, but they are very supportive of creative ideas, and when something is offered for free, they will participate willingly. Once Looking Glass Friends made it into Amazon's top seller pages, I am sure downloads were generated that way as well.

The Day After

I am now following the advise of another author and trying Amazon ads to see if the momentum of sales can be maintained even in a small degree. I notice already that Looking Glass Friends is being read on Amazon Unlimited, which helps its sales ranking. But the true test is to see if readers are willing to take a risk on my unknown novel, despite its only having 4 reviews at this time. Time will tell if I did right to lower the price from $5.99 to $2.99. As for all self-published authors, every step is an experiment. But this time the experiment worked, which feels great.

I hope other authors find my experience helpful.

All My Best,

E. L. neve