KGUN 9: 2/25/19.

The annual Tucson Festival of Books just ended. As always, it was a massive event thronged with book lovers. I spent several hours staffing a booth for the Arizona Mystery Writers. I am a longtime member. I didn’t have any mysteries to flog, but I did hand out business cards and bookmarks for my psi-fi novels, Reluctant Android and Alien talk.  The AZ Mystery Writers is a pretty mellow group and nobody objected.

I didn’t really think many people would look up my books online from the information on my cards, but you never know. Book sales are always one at a time.

The previous week, I had signed up for a book promotion at Smashwords.com. It was their  “Read-an-Ebook Week!” sale. I have been “selling” two to six books a day on that sale.  For me, those are numbers to notice.

I say “selling” in quotes because for that sale, I priced Reluctant Android at zero, hoping to attract attention with a freebie to the second title, Alien Talk, which I discounted to $2.99.

Reluctant Android is “flying off the shelves” as a free download. Maybe some of the people I met at the book festival did go online to find it, and “free” was a price they liked. At zero dollars, I will not be retiring on my earnings. But I always say I want readers, not customers, so I am living the dream.