Blog: Topping The Charts

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Friday was Launch Day for Storm House, and it was all EXTREMELY exciting. Not only did I have the knowledge that people could actually now READ the book at last, I could also see people downloading it via the magic of Amazon's Kindle reporting system. It draws you a graph - a flipping GRAPH - that shows you how many people have downloaded your book and it updates LIVE! I could have happily watched it all day, and nearly did!!

I was so enjoying the graph so much that I didn't think to check the actual Amazon Page, so it was only when Mr W Pilkington tweeted about it that I realised the book was at NUMBER ONE in the Amazon Charts! Specifically it was at Number One in Children's Action & Adventure Literature and Science Fiction Adventure, and - AMAZINGLY - Number four in Science Fiction itself!

This pretty much BLEW MY TINY MIND, yet MORE was to come. The idea to launch the book for free like this came from reading several 'How To Promote Your eBook' guides which said that this was a good way to get new readers interested. If you can get a boost into the CHARTS then much more people will see it and download it to see what the fuss is all about. I must admit I was a bit dubious, but BLOW ME it turns out it actually works! On Monday a tweet by Mr A Cartmel (my MENTOR when I wrote 'Storm House' as a screenplay) got a whole bunch of NEW people to download it, plus (I think) people coming home from Indietracks (where I'd given out a load of flyers) downloaded it too, which meant that it went back to the top of the charts, at which point things went a little bit crazy. Over the course of the day I got literally HUNDREDS of downloads and it ended up at number one for Science Fiction as well! Every time I looked at the GRAPH (and I looked at it A LOT) there'd be more downloads, so I can only guess that this was the legendary People Browsing The Top 100 Free Books that I had been told about, seeing it and giving it a go. It's all been VERY exciting!

So what I want to say here is thanks VERY much to everyone who leapt aboard to download it over the weekend, as that was what got it out to THE WORLD. I never expected it to do this well so quickly, if at ALL! If you've not joined in yet there's still time to jump on the THRILL RIDE - you can still download it for FREE from Amazon today (Tuesday), and then after that it'll still be very much available for just a couple of quid. There's also the GORGEOUS Paperback version too, which costs a bit more but is worth it because it is AN ACTUAL BOOK you can HOLD and show off with on public transport!

Whichever way you read it, thanks very much and I hope you like it!

posted 1/8/2017 by MJ Hibbett

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