Today, I’m doing a deep analysis of my recent KU free days promotion, what I did, and how it went. So, though it is October and therefore Spooky Season, our theme of the spooky side of publishing is going to start next week, because I have a feeling this postmortem may go a little long.

So last week, I mentioned what I’d set up to promote the free days for my first-in-series historical cozy mystery. Here’s how it went.

Over the course of five days I had 5,301 free downloads of The Poison in All of Us. I hit the top of the free charts in U.S. Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, and LGBTQ+ Mystery. Probably in Cozy Mystery as well, though I was traveling with only mobile devices which made it hard to check. I know I got pretty far up that one, but I can’t be sure. I was in the top 100 free overall several times during the course of the promotion. I didn’t rank in Amateur Sleuth, but I could have. And here’s your first lesson from my experience. If you think you’re in a category and you are getting ready for a promotion like this, make sure you’re in that category for the Kindle store, not just for Books. I though I was in Amateur Sleuths, but it was only for paperback.

I probably was better served in terms of visibility by the Cozy Mystery, Historical Mystery, and U.S. Historical fiction categories than LGBTQ+ Mystery, even though it is personally important to me to be in that category. Unfortunately, like many queer categories, it has a lot of books listed that aren’t mysteries at all. They’re clearly romance. Category stuffing is a problem in many categories, but it seems to happen more to queer categories and plays into a number of stereotypes that I could go on about. Suffice it to say, queer people have interests outside of romance. Surprise. Surprise. And while I applaud what queer romance writers have done in being pioneers of representation for our community, it is frustrating when some folks category stuff without paying any heed to what that does to other’s visibility or public perception of books labeled as queer. But I am getting off topic now.

But, still, I feel quite positive about the number of downloads and the rankings. No promotion can go perfectly. Next, let’s analyze each advertising platform one at a time.

The first day of the promotion, I sent a newsletter to my email list and promoted on social media. I had a pretty good result from that, with some of the downloads being due to Amazon algorithms. I was pleased to see downloads start piling up before I’d sat down to compose my email. 335 for day one.

Day two had trickle over effect from the newsletter the previous day, as more folks opened their emails, but I also had my Hello Books promotion going out. Now, they specified clearly that I needed to have the discount in place by Thursday for the promotion to run, because they have both U.K. and U.S. audiences, and free days that start on Friday U.S. time would not be running Friday morning for the U.K. But I noticed the email went out at 4pm Eastern. I’m guessing that U.K. readers get these emails earlier than U.S. readers. That would be pretty late for the U.K. But I could get a clear answer on that. The reason I wanted to know was that I didn’t see a big spike in downloads until the Hello Books email went out. So I’m guessing I just don’t have as much appeal to U.K. readers, which makes sense as the series is heavily focused on U.S. History topics. U.S. readers just have a closer connection to those issues. Total for day two: 523 free downloads.

Day three blew every other day out of the water. Since I don’t know for sure that Hello Books didn’t send at 4pm Eastern to the U.K., I can’t be sure that a chunk of this isn’t from U.K. readers opening the next morning—though all of the days have trickle over effects to the next days. On day three, I had 2,