I have this book, Frogs in Aspic that does not sell. I have never sold a single copy.

The reasons are probably: the title sucks, the description on Amazon is brief and not helpful, it is listed in the wrong categories, and it has never been reviewed.

I have tried a couple of things. First, I released it as a free Torrent, hoping to get someone interested in it. Second, I ran a promotion on Amazon from Jan 1 to Jan 5.

The torrent resulted in about 75 direct downloads from my machine and about 500 downloads across the world of torrents. I think most of these were leeches, grabbing everything, and the book might be repackaged eventually in larger bundles of Kindle books. I think about 10% or so of the downloaders will eventually read the book. Perhaps 50 readers. Of that, perhaps five might eventually buy another book.

The Amazon free promotion was disappointing. There were about 130 downloads of the book, but by the third day, downloads stopped. I would suggest to everyone: do not run a free Amazon promotion for more than two days. There is a steep cliff after the second day with sharply diminishing returns.

I reached about 3,000 rank in free Kindle books. I made it to a rank of 40 on free short story books, but that is still on the second page. My goal was to get higher on the category lists so that the book might be self sustaining. I came fairly close, but not close enough.

I discovered that I had a louse description of the book, and I also had the book categorized wrong. I had listed it originally as Fantasy/Short Story and Fiction/Short Story. I realize now that these are for single short stories and not collections. I should have had it in Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction categories, although they are not really horror. The Fantasy/Short Story category no longer exists on Amazon, so that was a total waste.

I changed the description today to include a table of contents, so people could get a flavor of the stories that I write. I put teasers next to each title. I pressed the submit before I could change the categories, so I have to wait 24 hours. I will redo the categories tomorrow.

I hope to actually sell a book in the coming year. If you read the book, please leave a nice review.