and exhausting.
Recently, I put one of my books up on Kindle for free for a week. I also added it to KU, both as a means to garner new readers who would – hopefully – purchase others of my books if they liked this one.
I posted about the free sale daily on TikTok, Instagram, and my fb buisness page.
And I tracked the downloads for free and the KU page reads.
These are the results: 89 KU page reads
37 free downloads.
This is actually pretty pathetic for a free book.
This tells me a couple of things, potentially.
- nobody wanted the short story book even for free
- people don’t like short story books
- people don’t like the genre ( horror) in short story books
Let’s analyze those points:
Nobody wanted the short story book, even for free. WHY? is it points 2 and 3? Is it that they don’t like my writing? Is it that they didn’t want to be bothered even getting a free book because either the subject or the author ( me) wasn’t palatable?
So many questions with no answers.
It’s becoming even more exhausting trying to garner new readers every day in this economy. Billionaires don’t read. Not the stuff I write, anyway. My books are read by women, mostly, usually above the age of 30 with kids, grandkids, jobs, and responsibilities. In this economy, they are already stretched as far as they can go, so buying books has become a luxury they can ill afford.
I hear this and feel it so profoundly.
My husband asks me routinely why I still do this. Why do I make myself sick with trying to come up with new ways to market my books, find new writers, and discover new ways to get people interested enough to read my work?
The answer is really very simple: it brings me joy.
Despite it being a time suck and at times anxiety producing, not doing it would be worse because then I wouldn’t have any joy.
So… the struggle is real and exhausting, but the joy offsets all the misery for me.
I’d really like to seel some books and get new readers, though.
Peggy Jaeger, Author 