What the Heck??!!! Amazon Kindle book Free?

Yeah! What the Heck?!! I kept reading how HARD it was to get your book free on Amazon and that the only way to do it is to use the area where it states: Would you like to give feedback on images or tell us about a lower price?, and then and only THEN, and only SOMETIMES and RARELY would your book become free on Amazon Kindle.

SOOoooooo… why the heck is my book Free ALL OF A SUDDEN!??!!

Hey, I’m not complaining…not in the least, but it surprised the heck out of me! I checked my KDP sales reporting everyday (I know, I’m obsessed with my little small potatoes of sales) and I see that IRID has 1975 sales. I was like, “there’s a mistake somewhere.” So, I went to the book’s site on Amazon to see if there were any book reviews. Nope. Still just the one. But then I saw the ranking and it was number 65 for Free books.

Huh?

Yeah. I’m scratching my head. Then, I looked at my book’s pricing and … $0.00 is what I see.

What the Heck??!!

I went to my Author Central page and took a look at my book, and sure enough, it states:
This format of “Irid” is currently ranked #65 out of over 15,000 free books in the Kindle Store. (updated hourly)

I look over to my hubby and tell and show him what’s on my laptop. “How the world did this happen?” I ask him. Then I answer my own question. The only thing I did differently was connect my Author Central Page to Shelfari (just learned that it had that capability) on Aug 10th and now one of my books is Free, and that happened somewhere around Aug 11 (my other free book didn’t get “un-freed”…hmmmm). I’m guessing someone must have flagged IRID because it was free on Smashwords and Barnes & Noble? OR the Amazon Bots found out? I don’t know how it happened. I don’t care how it happened. I’M JUST SO DARN HAPPY IT DID!

I’ve gone and “un-freed” my books on Smashwords, which will take a bit to update to Barnes & Noble, so when I do get IRID back to being a paid Kindle book, the “bots” or whatever will know the pricing is the same. So, no more Free books for right now…well, on Barnes and Noble, the two books are free until it updates. I still have the Smashword’s coupon option if I want to give away any free eBooks.

What was really shocking was that after all this researching for answers, I went back and my ranking jumped from 65 to 57, AND I became #2 ranking in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > Romance > Fantasy, Futuristic & Ghost. AND the books jumped from 1975 downloads to 2048 to 2090 to 2111 to 2122 to…. And my ranking went from 57 to 54…. I had to get my excited butt to sleep. I had things to do in the morning. So, you know it was the first thing I checked when I woke back up, right? IT WAS LIKE CHRISTMAS!!! What’s inside that beautifully packaged, bowed present….??!!!! The rank went to 52 with 2580 downloads at 8:30AM to 3242 downloads by 5PM (That’s Central Time)!

Every time I refreshed my webpage, the numbers kept going. And, of course, that’s what I did for the rest of the night, and the next day, watching the numbers grow…and my ranking go down in the overall free books for Kindle (not for the genre–it stayed at #2). But hey, the numbers of downloads kept growing and, about the rank,…that’s just how it goes. The most uplifting part for me is that I had wanted One book to be downloaded by 5,000 people in Smashwords, but the number of downloads was just getting slower and slower. At the rate that it was going, it was going to take TWO YEARS to reach 5,000 downloads. NOW! NOW! Now, I’ve reached that number with Kindle in just FOUR DAYS!!

HURRAY!!! Another goal accomplished!

On Aug 14, by 10:20pm, the count was at 3683.
On Aug 15, by 5:40pm, the count was at 4670 and by 10:25 it reached 5,044!!

Some people might think, heck, the book is Free, why wouldn’t anyone download it?

Just because it is free, doesn’t mean it’s something someone would want to read. Think about how you would want to spend your time? You want to read something you would enjoy…free or not.

And what’s great about FREE books?

I got a few more purchases of my other books because of the free IRID sales on Kindle. COOL BEANS!

Now….now I sit back and wait for those people who’ve downloaded my book to start posting reviews. It might take a few months, since people download FREE books and have a large collection of books on their Kindles. It will take some time before they get to actually reading my book. Until then, as of the night of Aug 15, 2011…I became #1 Free book, of the Top 100, in the genre.

I’m scared… 🙂