An Amazon Adventure (Part 4)

The Price of Success

Well, here goes - I'm about to conduct a little experiment. Any of you who has looked will know that The Testing of Archie Rathbone has been available on the Amazon Kindle store for nearly two weeks now, but what you can't see, other than by deduction from the extremely low ranking attributed to it on the store, is that it's not exactly flying out the door!

The book started out (briefly) at £2.99 (about $4.50 I think), but I rapidly reduced that to the minimum permitted under the standard Ts & Cs - £0.75 or $0.99 (plus Amazon's delivery fee). Interestingly (perhaps) this drastic price cut had absolutely no discernable impact on sales performance.

Now before I go on, if you've read any of the posts that precede this on you will be aware that I'm exploring strategies for making my newly published book 'visible' on the Amazon listings. The principle I'm working on is that most people who explore Amazon's offerings will do a search based on some appropriate search criteria, and still faced with pages and pages of books that meet those criteria will probably scan through no more than perhaps ten of those pages (maximum) before either giving up completely or at least trying a new search. The result of this is that if your book is plumbing the ranking depths then Amazon't default sort criterion will mean that your book will never even be seen, let alone evaluated for possible purchase.

So, leaving aside any other strategies for now, starting tomorrow (Midnight PST Thursday 28th June, or 7 am Friday morning here in the UK) for 48 hours my book will be available on Amazon at a promotional price of £0 ($0). Now whether Amazon still adds a delivery fee to this I'm not sure, but either way this is the closest it can get to being free of charge. Now given that there are (allegedly) a large number of Kindle owners out there who only download free books (or at least strongly favour them) then assuming there aren't another ten thousand other books in the same category as mine, all also free at the same time, then there's a fighting chance that The Testing of Archie Rathbone will be seen, and (hopefully) downloaded. The net effect of this (the theory continues) is that when the promotional period ends, if there have been sufficient downloads then the improved Amazon ranking may be enough to make it appear much higher up in people's searches.

If the theory proves valid then the book will still have to fend for itself in competition with all the other books on offer. It will still be evaluated and judged either as being worth a try, or not. This can't overcome the deficiencies and failings of a sub-standard book, or one that is not presented to best effect.

So there we are - the gauntlet has been thrown down - the challenge accepted. I won't know the outcome until the end of the weekend, but I'll share my findings with you when I do!

The Trenchfoote Legacy

Oh, by the way, and before I sign off - in case you haven't noticed I have added a link (to the right of this page (under the LINKS heading) called The Trenchfoote Legacy. Trenchfoote is a character from my book, and the link takes you to a separate blog based on the premise that he has somehow escaped from the book's pages...