Welcome to the Drawing Room

Hello! I assume you are here desiring an audience with Lord Heartless? He is out at the moment but I anticipate his return at any time. Until then, find a comfortable chair, settle in, and enjoy a spot of tea. Browse through the available reading material, learn what you can of the heartless duke, and decide if you really want to meet him. Please leave your calling card in the form of a comment.

It was lovely to see you! Please stop by again.

***Please BEWARE*** If you have yet to read Heartless, certain aspects of the story may be inadvertently spoiled for you here. Please take care while exploring.

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Adventures in KDP Select (Final Thoughts)

The following post was written closer to the end of my Heartless KDP Select run—around March 2013, I believe—but was never actually posted. I'm posting it now, just to give everyone my final thoughts on my Heartless KDP Select run. Believe it or not, things have changed a great deal since this post and none of it can be laid at Amazon's door.


There is a lot of controversy surrounding KDP Select. Amazon demands exclusivity and that rubs a lot of authors raw. It makes me mad but there's very little one can do about it just short of cutting off your nose to spite your face: refusing to sell your books on Amazon. 

I know it's not an effective tool for all authors. I decided to try it simply because the majority of my eBook sales have always come from Amazon, ever since I uploaded my first titles back when there were only 40k books in the Kindle Store (2008). When Smashwords started up, I added my titles there too and when they started distributing to the other major retailers (beginning with Barnes & Noble) I was right there with them, my titles (4 at the time) in one of the first batches of books sent out. But my highest sales were still Amazon and that never changed. 

The stats for my Heartless run in KDP Select (90 days): 
  • Free books: 19,195 
  • Lending Library:  217
  • Sales (not including Feb 1-4): 998 
I believe it is safe to say that KDP Select worked for me. Unfortunately, I cannot pinpoint exactly what I did (or what happened that had nothing to do with me) that really catapulted Heartless out there, causing the success. I hyped the revamp for over a year, hyped the re-release (a little), hyped the free days (a lot), appeared on one site that catalogs free Kindle downloads (HUGE thank you to OHFB for that!!), and... hmmm. I think that's it, though I'm sure I've forgotten something I did. I have tons of friends who helped with the hype too and I will be forever grateful for that. (Special thank you to Linda Boulanger, Rachel Rossano, and Airicka Phoenix. ♥)

In bonus news, my Smashwords sales have also increased. They are still NOTHING compared to my Kindle sales but they are much higher than ever before. I think enrolling one of my books in KDP Select successfully got my name out there, thus increasing sales in ALL outlets.

Thank you so much for tagging along with me on this journey. It's been a rollercoaster of emotions, let me tell ya!


Things have changed greatly since I first drafted this post. Long story short, I am done messing with Amazon's exclusivity clause and will never enroll another book in their Select program. I plan to post to my author blog with the details on my decision, but in the meantime, email me if you can't wait, or don't follow my author blog: jaimeygrant (at) yahoo (dot) com.

Lots of , Heartless Readers!!! 


Friday, January 11, 2013

Adventures in KDP Select (Part 4)

I've used all five of my free days now. My total worldwide downloads was 19,195. That's a heck of a lot of potential readers out there! Thank you to everyone who took a moment to grab a copy! MWAH! ♥ 

Here is the breakdown by Kindle Store: 

  • BR (Brazil): 2
  • CA (Canada): 49
  • DE (Germany): 426
  • ES (Spain): 11
  • FR (France): 23
  • IT (Italy): 20
  • JP (Japan): 2
  • UK (United Kingdom): 1515
  • US (United States/India): 17,147
If you've read Heartless and enjoyed it, please consider taking a moment to leave your review on the Amazon site where you purchased/downloaded it. I would appreciate that more than words can say. 

 

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

My last two free days...


Heartless is FREE again, worldwide, in Amazon's Kindle Store. This is the LAST TIME it will be free. This book leaves the KDP Select program Feb 4 so I will no longer have the opportunity to offer it for free. If you don't want to spend $3 on this book but you still want to read it, grab it NOW.

And do me a HUGE favor. Tell your friends it's free right now so they can go grab a copy too, if they wish. Thank you so much!!

~♥~♥~♥~♥~♥~ 

Here are the store links: 

Monday, December 17, 2012

The Heartless Paperback

Heartless is now available in paperback!! YAY!! It's in several Amazon stores worldwide and I've linked each and every one of them on my website

Here's the print cover, in case you're interested in seeing it: 

Click the image to see the LARGE version. 
A bit of Heartless cover trivia: 
The pink fringed tulip from the original cover (and now the back of the new cover) was one my mother gave me from her garden to brighten up our house a bit a few months after we moved back to Michigan. I thought it perfectly represented Hart's love for Leandra, beautiful but rough. 



Saturday, December 1, 2012

Adventures in KDP Select (Part 3)

Wow. My first free days were completely nerve-wracking. I forgot to eat, didn't want to sleep, neglected my kids and my husband—only remembering to feed any of them when they complained—and felt like garbage physically the whole two days. That said.... 

WHAT A RUSH!!!!!! 

Screecap of Amazon's Top 100 in Historical Romance lists

Heartless peaked in the US Kindle Store at #1 in the Top 100 Free in Historical Romance (shown above) and #14 in the Top 100 Free in the Kindle Store (shown below—sorry for the HUGE pic). 

Screencap of Top 100 list in Amazon's Kindle Store


My final download counts:
  • US: 12,415
  • UK: 1062
  • DE: 344
  • FR: 15
  • ES: 8
  • IT: 14
  • JP: 1 
Grand total: 13,859 downloads worldwide. Besides that, 31 copies of my other books sold in the two days Heartless was free. (That may not seem like much to some of you more successful writers out there, but for me, that's AWESOME!) I think I can count this as a successful two-day promotion, don't you?