Report on the BookBub Promotion

I recently finished a special promotion on Eternity's End, via BookBub. For a little over a week, the book was deep-discounted to $.99. On opening day, when the promotional email went out, it sold over a thousand copies at the Amazon Kindle store! After that, it tapered off pretty quickly, of course. But in all, it sold over 1600 ebooks, some in the Nook store but most in the Kindle store.

Now that the promo is over (the price is now $5.99), things have really fallen off at the Nook store, but at Kindle, although numbers have decreased, it continues to sell better than it did before the promotion. I hope it continues!

My writer friends told me to expect a lot more reviews as a result of the sales. (Reviews are considered by some experts to be one of the most important factors in continuing sales.) Well, at first I didn't get any new ones. But today, two new reviews appeared at Amazon. Let's just say they canceled each other out nicely.

The first one reads:

I had to force myself to read this book . It was a very dull and boring read . Entirely too much fill .
It drones on an on with no real action .
THE ONLY THING I COULD SAY TO PUT IT SIMPLY IS THAT IT , REALLY, REALLY SUCKED.
I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THIS AUTHOR OR HIS BOOKS TO ANY ONE AT ALL

 Well, what can I say, except: We aim to please! You can't go out and buy that kind of customer satisfaction. Out of curiosity, I looked to see what this reviewer's other reviews were like. He has reviewed three other SF books. He thought they all sucked. (Including one by Andre Norton.)

The next one, fortunately, is more charitable:

Eternity's End is a high-space adventure that hearkens back to the days of sailing ships, complete with space pirates and romance too. This is one of those rare books that has stuck with me long after I finished reading. I enjoyed it from cover to cover and hope to find time to read it again someday.

That's more my style!

Ordinarily I don't pay much attention to reviews, because that way lies madness. You fixate on the bad ones, and try to hold to the good ones to salve your pride, but it doesn't really work. Best just not to read them at all.

Having said that, I would like to encourage you, if you've read Eternity's End, to go post a review at your favorite store or book-related social networking site. (Even if you thought it sucked!) It would help me, and it might even help new readers discover the book!