Despite a few bumps on the production highway,

is now live on Amazon in both Kindle and Paperback editions.

I learned a few things on this one. First of all, the new Kindle template is a dream to work with. I tried to use my goto method, and was getting lots of random code generated. Ick! Jo knows nothing of Chinese…

So I went to the template, and I will definitely be using it from now on.

What I WON’T be using, at least for the foreseeable future, is the Kindle Paperback service. I thought I would try it, since I already had the files set up for the ebook, and it was fairly easy to do, but there is one major problem to work out before it is viable in my book. They don’t have facilities in place to offer author copies at a discount, like CreateSpace. This was a deal breaker for me, because I have to be able to get my copies for conventions at a decent price. They are set up for those people who just want to tell people where to get it and leave it at that, and that is fine. I’m not one of those people. So, I redid it all the old way on CreateSpace, and will have copies for sale in Wimberley next Saturday.

Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.

I’ve also been running a Free Book promotion on The Marvelous Mechanical Man to celebrate (and get people interested in the series…)

So far, that’s been awesome! 172 downloads the first day, 167 the second, and 44 today. I have also been testing some new places to market the sale — on Reddit on /r/fantasy and /r/freebooks; on Goodreads; on NextDoor. I think Reddit has been driving the majority of the traffic, but I had someone on NextDoor thank me because they needed new reading material, and when I told him I hoped he enjoyed it he replied “Hooked. Already through the first three chapters.”

Music to my ears.

Even more astonishing to me was the KENP jump…757 pages yesterday, and 518 today. When I filtered by title, someone apparently has gone through all four books this weekend! (They are ALL free on Kindle Unlimited, all the time.)

It will be awhile before I can see the true impact on these marketing experiments, but I am sincerely hoping that Jo and Alistair have broadened their circle a bit this weekend. 🙂