This and That

It's the end of the week and here we go again - not as dismal as the previous two or three weeks, so let's start with sales:

"Bride-and-Seek" went live Sunday morning and by the end of the day there was 1 borrow (this story is listed exclusively on kindle and prime members can "borrow" books with no return dates) and 1 sale. Monday not much was going on. Tuesday, I was out and about most of the morning and upon returning and checking stats, I found another copy of "Bride-and-Seek" had sold and a copy of "The Proposal" had sold. I'll take 3 sales in a week considering I've had 0 sales for several weeks in a row. I'd really love to see 5 or so sales per title every week but I don't see me reaching that goal this year, but I'm not going to give up hope on achieving that.

Tuesday, February 14th, "Bride-and-Seek" goes up as a free download (this is for everyone who has a kindle or kindle app on any device who can download ebooks from the kindle store) and will run from 12:01 PST the 14th through 11:59 PST the 15th (you have two days to grab up this paranormal romance based on the Covington Manor (UK) legend of a husband who loses his wife to a deadly game of hide-and-seek; he never did find her and died of a broken heart.) I'll do a late night posting each day to show my rankings and bestseller's ranking throughout the week (this will be for all my books so I can see if having one book for free really does drive folks to purchase other titles and I'm hoping to pick up the foreign market for both "Bride-and-Seek" and "The Tulip Kiss" - this being that the Eldering name used to be very big with tulips in Holland and with a title like "The Tulip Kiss" with an Eldering as an author, you'd think I'd have that market already cornered but so far not; I even sent a downloadable version to my father-in-law for him to pass the word to relatives still in Holland and around other places to tell them about it but still nothing there - one of these days hopefully).

I've been keeping track of Faye Tollison's rankings this week (well the latter part of the week) as she had put her book To Tell The Truth as a free download Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week. Surprisingly her rankings did well over the 3 days but her downloads/sales weren't as high as we expected, and it certainly wasn't due to lack of promoting it as free download.

Tuesday night she started 611,000 (some odd numbers there) and when I checked Wednesday morning early - 7:30 AM - she was at the seller's ranking of 3306 with her book being bestseller's ranking of #33 in the romantic suspense category. Her seller's rankings dropped throughout the day from #33 to #26 to #19 to #16 to #15 to #14 (seller's ranking of 250 at close of day). She made it into the top 20. All day Thursday she stayed in the top 20 with a start to her day at #12 bestsellers ranking to a rise to #19 by the end of the day. Friday was even worse with a drop to starting at #17 and going to #29 near the end of the day. Her downloads over the 3 days (and this was reported from her to me) were right at 1750 in all the kindle areas (UK, DE, FR, ES, IT and USA). She is scheduling one of her next free days on March 29th when she appears on Your Carolina with Jack Roper (a local celebrity here in the Carolinas) and hopefully with the appearance of her on TV and promoting her book, among other things - Heather's cover designs, my book (which I'm thankful to her for doing that but really I do a lot of promoting myself so I wish she'd just promote herself) and Sisters in Crime - her downloads will skyrocket. I keep telling her she needs to get some short stories of hers polished and put them up for 99 cents and see how sales will change (like I'm one to talk - lol; I have four stories available as ebooks and haven't really had any sales to speak of since the first of the year) because people really do look for more by an author if they like the one book they try out. No one must really like my books as stated by the sales I've had this year - lol. Maybe when I get Imogene: Innocense Lost people will like that book and start buying books, but that is a ways off.

I also did a price reduction for Finally Home from $12.99 to $11.99 print and from $3.99 to $2.99 ebook. I was thinking of reducing the state stories a bit but don't really see how I can since I still need those in-person sales and usually do discount the price at events.

Stop by Monday for the third part in my series of promoting your books from Bookstand Publishing's booklet I got from free. Am still in need of new questions from students related to writing so teachers, please send any writing questions your students may have to eeldering (at) gmail (dot) com with subject WWYWWQ; in the body, please put the student's initials (like E.E.) from (your name - like Mr Hughes') class asks question? I will respond to you/your class/your student before posting my answer on my blog. Once I have the posting ready to go, I'll send you an emailed copy of the post before it goes up to share with your class so they can see they made it on my blog - thanks everyone for participating in my weekly project of mentoring students to help them become better writers. - see you all in the postings - E :)