At the beginning of April, I went through the fun process of setting High Summons – the first book in my Warlock of Rochester series – to free. I’ll be breaking my analysis and summary of how I did this, what happened, and how I would do it better in the future into three parts. In this one, we’ll cover my results!
My sales increased with an average of 50-100 extra purchases per day. The bulk of these were on Amazon. After the first week, the sales decreased with two subsequent spikes during paid promotions (Freebooksy and Ereader News Today (ENT)); however, ENT was free half-day and $0.99 the rest. The free was only due to Amazon taking over 27 hours to update.
As of April 19th, I reached #1 in my sub categories (YA Horror, YA Coming of Age, and YA Urban Fantasy) as well as top 200 (#167 highest) overall. I had built up and stayed in the 2000s beforehand, which allowed me to increase on the single day jump of 941 downloads due to Freebooksy.
This also projected me into the #1 Teen and Young Adult Coming of Age spot for about 48 hours.
Similarly with the Horror category and Teen & YA Urban Fantasy:
ENT carried me on, but the downloads were half of Freebooksy. This could be as the last 4 or so hours of the day were $0.99. I had emailed and kept ENT updated on this, so there was a note on the advert, and the pricing was corrected when Amazon updated it.
Since then, I’ve put the price back up, and sales slowly returned to normal. The end curve lasted five days; however, I predict I’ll see another peak of the sequel titles in 2 weeks to 3 months.
But we’ll have to wait and see!
Eli Celata 
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