Saturday, August 5, 2017

Dueling promotions and Amazon lets me see the future!

I've been running two promotions this month, one to advertise that Turnabout is only 99¢ (for a few days only) and one to advertise that The Sixth Discipline is free.

One advantage to advertising a book, even a free one, is if you sell or give away enough copies it gets into Amazon's ranked groups (100 top free science fiction, e.g,), and folks who didn't get the email promotion notice it.  Turnabout did okay, It made it to:


But The Sixth Discipline jumped up to:
Even though the email promotion for T6D was Friday, it's still going strong; I've given away over 200 copies today.. But in checking for free downloads via the KDP interface,I discovered something I had never noticed. Using my phone (I was walking the dog and when we stopped to rest in the shade, I checked my numbers), the Sales Dashboard tab let me select tomorrow's date as part of my date range! And when I did that, I could see I already have 23 downloads, presumably from time zones where it's already August 6. 

The screen shot below was created in Firefox, as I discovered the Chrome browser didn't let me select a one-day future date, but the Firefox version did.  I highlighted the date range so you can see it's for those two days. I couldn't include Thursday because it had over 1,000 downloads and that would make tomorrow's 23 too small to show as more than a tiny blue line.



The really odd thing is, I was using Chrome for Android on my phone when I noticed this! 

Also note, these numbers are for Amazon only. iBooks and B&N take a little longer to report "sales figures" because I get them via Smashwords. 






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