Final Tally: 17,206 Free Downloads of John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

The final numbers are in for the John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood 48 hour Amazon Free eBook promotion and (drum roll, please), here they are:

• United States – 16,048
• United Kingdom – 891
• Germany – 141
• France – 106
• Canada – 106
• Spain – 11
• Italy – 8
• Japan – 1
• Total: 17,206

Over the course of the promotion we saw the book move up from number 10,000 or so in the Amazon Free rankings to #10 in the Kindle Toop 100 Free, so that was pretty exciting.  Also, according to Amazon there are 4,000 to 6,000 books per day that go into free promotion status, so there’s plenty of competition and we seemed to do pretty well. I’ve been reading blog posts by other authors who have done this and the highest total I’ve seen so far is 15,000 — so it would seem like we can declare this to be something of  a success from the point of view of just getting as many eyeballs as possible to consider JCGOH and the issues that its about.  From a “cause” standpoint, it’s pretty gratifying.

Here is a screenshot showing where it peaked during the free promotion, at #10 on the overall Kindle Top 100 charts, and #1 in Arts and Entertainment:

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The theory is that it’s supposed to generate a surge of paid sales in the aftermath of the promo.  So far that seems to be happening, at least to some degree — we have as many paid sales in the 10 hours since midnight last night as we had in the first 6 days of the month prior to the promo.  It will be interesting to see where this part of it leads as well — but the main point was to get more eyeballs on it, and it seems to have done that.  Also, I just checked — it was at 24,000 on the paid Kindle charts when I got up this morning, and it’s at 10,886 now so it’s moving up.

Here is a screenshot of where it is now in the paid charts, at 11:32 on the morning after the free promo:

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One other thing that it seems may have happened is that it may have gotten on the radar of more of the entertainment bloggers and writers who have covered the John Carter story.  A handful of these picked it up and tweeted about it, and got copies, so there may be some more reviews and writeups forthcoming.

Anyway, that’s the report.

Thanks to everyone who downloaded and tweeted and facebooked about it.  Obviously, like any author, I’d like to make a little scratch from my work — but also like any author, it’s nice to get eyeballs on your work and in this case it’s doubly nice because the book has a mission to keep the conversation alive about John Carter, and hopefully this helps that at least a little.