Rethinking Free Book Promotions

            Last week I was thinking about free promotions on Amazon and whether they work any more. I’ve been using them since I published my first mystery novel, The McHenry Inheritance, in July 2012 and have given away more than 4,000 e-books since then.

            All right, I know what you’re thinking. Go ahead and say it. At least we’ve established what my books are worth. Can we move on, now?

            Seriously, anyone who decides to start writing novels, even popular genre novels like I do, has to look at it as a long-haul proposition. Sure, there are people who get a bestseller on their first try, but maybe one author in a hundred thousand catches lightning in a bottle like that. The rest of us are doing well to be making grocery money after five or six books. Rent? You’d better have a day job.

Chasing Readers, Not Dollars

            With my third mystery novel, Not Death, But Love, about to be published on Amazon, I’m still very much in the business of going after readers, not dollars. If I build a reasonably sized, loyal audience for my books, I’ll eventually make some money. And the good thing about self-publishing is that I don’t need to have Stuart Woods or Mary Higgins Clark sales numbers to make a go of it.

            That’s just as well. My books are more Josephine Tey than Mickey Spillane, and they’re aimed at the classic mystery niche. But finding the readers who inhabit that niche takes a lot of time and effort.

            For some time now, I’ve felt that free promotions were part of that effort. When you’re an unknown writer, one way to get people to give you a look is to offer a free sample. If they like it, the reasoning goes, they’ll come back and pay for the next one.

            There’s a lot of slop in that approach. When a book is free, plenty of people will download it and never look at it. So I figure, based on the return rate for direct mail solicitations, I’d have to give away a hundred books to get two readers who will actually read my book.

Diminishing Returns

            In the beginning, I was averaging more than a hundred books a day on free-giveaway days, with a few considerably bigger blockbuster days. Over the past six months, the well has been running dry, and I’ve been wondering if free promotions work any more. I Googled that question and found plenty of other writers who shared my skepticism.

            Monday of this week, with misgivings and low expectations, I did a free promotion for my second novel, Wash Her Guilt Away. Halfway through the day, it looked as if I’d fall short of 100 downloads for the day. Then, between 1 and 4 Pacific time, the book started moving like ice cream in a Georgia July. It finished the day at #12 on the Kindle free crime fiction list, and it was the second best day ever for free downloads of that book.

            So what do I make of this? My guess is that it was an anomaly — that there happened to be a large number of crime and mystery readers who started looking at free books at the same time, and I just rode the wave. But I could be wrong. It’s hard enough being an author, but the hardest thing of all is trying to make sense of your sales numbers. My head is being perpetually scratched.

The Limits of Realism

            Watching an episode of Elementary recently, I perked up when it got to a scene where the detectives were visiting a witness who had just emerged from a coma after being shot by a multiple killer. Sherlock Holmes had already deduced the identity of the killer and the detective in the hospital room whipped out a photo of the perp and held it up, at which the guy in the hospital bed pointed to it and said “Yeah …”

            So not right.

            Also not so big a deal.

            It wasn’t right because any competent defense attorney could have raised questions about the identification; the victim was essentially asked a leading question of the type not allowed in court. That’s one of the reasons most modern police departments seeking an ID from a photo give the witness a half-dozen pictures of potential perps to choose from. That way the identification does a lot better if the case ever comes to trial.

When a Mistake Doesn’t Hurt Too Much

            On the other hand, the scene occurred in the context of a show in which the basic premise is that the New York City Police Department is using Sherlock Holmes and his associate, Dr. Joan Watson, as consultants on major crimes. Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s a certain amount of reality avoidance in the show to start with.

            From that perspective, a violation of police procedure for the purpose of wrapping up the story within an hour is at most a minor infraction. Had the scene occurred in a drama that prided itself on being grittily realistic about the details of police work, it would have been a howler.

            Similarly, in the novels of Golden Age writers like Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Josephine Tey, a mistake about the effects of arsenic on the spleen is not a deal-breaker, provided, of course, that the solution to the mystery doesn’t revolve around the reader catching the mistake. Those authors were more concerned with the motives of the suspects, and having one of the suspects behave out of character would be far more serious in their books than getting a scientific detail wrong.

Yielding to the Story

            Nobody who writes a book wants a glaring and laughable mistake in it, and a certain due diligence in that regard is important for all authors. But there are ways of dealing with it other than rigorous research. For example, Catriona McPherson, author of the Dandy Gilver mysteries, said in a newspaper interview that one of the reasons she did a series set in the 1920s was so she wouldn’t have to waste a lot of time learning forensic stuff and writing it into the books. Like Christie, Tey, et. al, she wanted to focus on the characters and situation.

            In the course of doing the final revision for my first mystery, The McHenry Inheritance, I had to make a call in that regard. Re-reading the book, I realized that at one point I had the local sheriff doing something the FBI chief on the scene would surely have done himself. The scene was unrealistic in the same way as the one-photo lineup in Elementary.

            On the other hand, the story was at that point barreling toward its climax, and introducing and developing a new character at that point would have sapped its narrative drive. So, reality be damned, I let the sheriff go ahead and do the FBI chief’s job. When you’re writing fiction, there are times you can’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.