Freebie promo and sales

The freebie promo which I ran at the end of April for the books of the Angel Mountain saga has clearly had some impact on Kindle sales of the titles.  Now that about six weeks have passed since the promotion was running, I have checked the daily sales figures, and it seems that there has been a virtual doubling of sales.  The number of days with zero sales has dropped sharply, and while sales are by no means spectacular compared with the big best-selling titles, they seem to be ticking over nicely.  Conclusion?  Some people have read the books which were downloaded for free, and have decided to buy subsequent titles.  Alternatively, people have told friends about the books, and they have purchased them from the Kindle Store. 

I'm never going to make a fortune from Kindle sales, but a monthly income twice as high as it was before is always welcome!

Portrait of a servant

This is a pleasant -- indeed rather charming -- image of a Georgian servant working in the laundry of some grand house or other.  I thought it rather appropriate -- maybe one of Martha's servants working in Plas Ingli looked something like this?

The dress looks about right for the era, but maybe your average laundry maid might not have looked quite so tidy...?

A Rare Privilege

A lady called into the workshop the other day to ask me to sign a copy of "Martha Morgan's Little World".......... it turns out that she, and her daughter, have read all 8 of the novels of the Saga twice, and that her mother is now also getting into the series in a big way.  More to the point, a horse has now been given the name "Mount of Angels" (apparently "Angel Mountain" was already taken), and said horse has the pet name of Martha.

I like it!  I have never done any investigations into how many white rats, hamsters or pet snakes might also have been named after the mountain or after Mistress Martha......

PS.  The horse in the picture is not the horse in question.

Colourful Cilgwyn

This was taken today, just up the road.  Purely by chance, a nice patch of shadow on the summit of Carningli.  The bluebells are not as vibrant this year as last, because the dead bracken has not been flattened by winter snow.  So bracken stalks are still prominent in all the fields.  But their foxy red colour adds something to the scene......

Martha -- hard at work

I found this in Twitter.  It's an illustration of Jane Austen hard at work on one of her novels -- but let's pretend that we are looking at a youthful Martha Morgan, scribbling away on one of her diaries.......

Trinity Church, Bellingshausen Base, King George Island

The Russian Bellingshausen Base on Fildes Peninsula, King George Island, is the location of Trinity Church, the only permanently-staffed Eastern Orthodox church in Antarctica and the southernmost Eastern Orthodox church in the world. The church is a 15 m-high wooden structure built in traditional Russian style. It can accommodate up to 30 worshippers. The structure was built out of Siberian pine. It was assembled on high ground near the coast by the staff of Bellingshausen Station.  It can conduct weddings, and a marriage ceremony conducted here in 2007 was the first church wedding to be conducted in Antarctica.

It really is a very strange and beautiful structure -- built in an area that was totally unspoilt in 1965/66 when I was there, but which is now one of the most polluted areas in Antarctica, with no less than six functioning research bases, an airstrip capable of taking heavy transport aircraft, and junk lying about everywhere in the areas where old base installations have been abandoned......

Freebie promo and web site visits

Another thing that happened during last week's freebie promo was a great increase in traffic to my web site called www.brianjohn.co.uk.  Normally, as we can see on the graph above, there are between 20 and 50 visits per day, but over the period when I was tweeting and putting things on Facebook, there were 835 visits to the site.  That of course was then tied to 1500 free downloads, since the site was the location for the Amazon URLs used by people as their links.  Again, there is not much direct commercial relevance in web site page views, but generally this has to be a part of the grand strategy of raising awareness of the novels.....