61b5f-christoph2bfischer2bcover2bludwikaLast week I used the five ‘free days’ in the KDP Select programme to allow free kindle downloads of Ludwika.
It is a double edged sword as it can attract verified troll reviews, but it helps to spread the word about yourself as an author and about the stories you write. I was lucky to secure a space in BookBub at my first attempt and I naturally jumped at the opportunity to get more publicity for the book (even though the good news reached me on holiday in San Francisco and I had to prepare everything from a borrowed laptop).

The result was phenomenal though: 63,380 hqdefaultdownloads worldwide, which is the best of all my BookBub and other promotions to date. I topped the free download charts for 36 hours on Amazon US, UK and stayed in the Top Ten in Australia, Canada and India for the same amount of time.12573762_951484791567548_717632952932756077_n 12507138_951484801567547_4642327016691277677_n

My author ranking went head to head with that of Michael Punke (writer of Oscar nominated “The Revenant”) and is currently still at #67 in historical fiction.

Thank youThanks to everyone who downlaoded, shared and spread the word about the giveaway.

This is particularly important as the cover is that of Ludwika Gierz, a real person, whose past still holds a few secrets and whose descendants in the UK are still separated from their family in Poland. Every piece of halina and ludwikapublicity might help them to connect.

But to those of you who have asked how I did the promotion, here is the story of this giveaway:

My BookBub advert went out on the Tuesday, which means the book needs to be free at 8am UK time / midnight Pacific Time.

Quite often this doesn’t happen smoothly and so I scheduled my promotion quietly for the Monday. A little late, the book showed free at last on Amazon Monday morning and I began to tweet and blog about the promo.
I shared the blog posts on all media, especially dedicated Facebook Groups for Free Books.
Examples are ‘Free Books R Us’, ‘Free on Kindle Today and Beyond’ etc. Just search on Facebook for keywords such as free, kindle, and promotion to find more groups of that type. Make sure you read the group guidelines before joining and posting.
I used a schedule of posting in each group once during busy times and once during quiet time, so I would catch the main stream and also have chance of standing out. I also made sure not to post too often to avoid becoming a spammer.

There are also some other tools and publications to advertise your free book. BookGorilla, The Fussy Librarian, Read Cheaply etc. are all similar to BookBub, although not as far reaching at this moment in time. I advise you to google for free book adverts and then google also for customer / writers’ feedback. Some publications are said to attract more troll attention than downloads. There are also some tools that do the work for you: For $15 they will load your book info into 30-80 promotional sites. Whether they are massively effective I couldn’t say, but it is worth a shot if you have the money. Best of luck!

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Blurb: It’s World War II and Ludwika Gierz, a young Polish woman, is forced to leave her family and go to Nazi Germany to work for an SS officer. There, she must walk a tightrope, learning to live as a second-class citizen in a world where one wrong word could spell disaster and every day could be her last. Based on real events, this is a story of hope amid despair, of love amid loss . . . ultimately, it’s one woman’s story of survival.
Get the book at your Amazon store:   http://bookShow.me/1519539118
Find it on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/LudwikaNovel/
and on Goodreads   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28111001-ludwika