Pat McCraw's World of Fantasy & Romance: How to promote a free kindle ebook

Hi everybody,

I'm Pat McCraw, German author of a big fantasy series called "Duocarns". Today I'd like to explain how I promoted my new book without spending a lot of money.

Two years ago I decided to have the first book of the Duocarns translated and the result of said translation is more than acceptable.

There is a problem however: I can consider myself a little light to the US/UK market. All new, with my first english book to offer.The Duocarns have a big fanbase in Germany, but that alone doesn't help promoting the book, as no one from there can actually buy e/books from Amazon.com.

I can tell you what I did:
First, I put the price of the book to 0.99$.It's not a lot, but if you are unknown it's a good price to start with.I posted the news in several G+ communities and FB groups ... and sold 10 books in 1 week.

A bit later I found out that a book is absolutely nothing without verified reviews.
Most of the promotion pages I found wanted money or atleast 10 positive reviews. A few German friends, who like English literature, read the book and wrote reviews.But since I gave them the book for free, none of those reviews have been verified. Same old problem.

My book is a "Select" book, so I started a "free" promotion. I wasn't sure how many days would be best because in Germany the sellings of the free books start to stagnate after 3 days.I ended up setting it to 5 days and started to promote the book 10 days before that, since I wasn't entirely sure how the US market worked.

I spent some days to list it in on several pages, who publish lists with free ebooks. These pages have been quite helpful to do so:

http://www.ebookbooster.com/
http://www.anneliewendeberg.com/2014/07/15/how-where-to-advertise-your-ebook/
http://booksonline.directory/index.php

The book "Duocarns - The Arrival" started it's free promotion tour on 09/05/14 to 09/09/14.
I posted it twice daily in 20 FB book/authors/promotion groups and in about 10 G+ communities.
Since I am member of http://bookblogs.ning.com/profile/PatMcCraw I wrote blog articles and promoted it in several groups.
I also asked a few American friends to "buy" and review it. And my cover artist promoted it in Yaoi groups.
I have been using links for all countrys, minimized by http://www.bitly.com.
The links contain my amazon partnership ID, which shows my sale statistics. Bitly also shows how often the link has been clicked.

Posting the Amazon link by it's own, over and over again, seems a bit bland to me. People don't want to see the same pictures all the time.
Which is why I made several promotion pictures for the book and changed them frequently: They were all made by http://www.imikimi.com

The result:

Downloads in 5 days:

D - 94

US - 519

UK - 65

misc - 30

Total ca. 700

Most of the downloads were made on the first day. (350). After that, just as guessed, it dropped and stagnated.

It prooves that the German and US market aren't that different when it comes to the free promotion days. So I'd never set it above 3 days again.

Kindle is back on 0.99$ and I will see if the promotion will have a "sales-tail".

The promition of the english book was actually advantageous for the german edition. It made german people purchase their native edition after having seen it.