The other day I set up a three-day free promotion for my paranormal thriller short story, The Last Stop. Like most of my free promotions, I expected to move a few units a day, and top out no higher than, say 40 units. The decision to setup the free promotion was somewhat whimsical, and I didn’t even have time to submit to any Kindle promotion sites to help it out.

Yesterday, the first day of the promotion, I didn’t think much about it. But, late in the day I decided to check the ranking… and was floored to see The Last Stop ranking in the top 1,000 free books on Amazon. Holy crap! How did that happen?

As of this post, it is #701 over in free Kindle books, and #2 in Free 90-Minute SF/F Short Reads

This has never happened before. As I said, I’m used to a handful of books moving, and I’ve honestly been pretty happy about it, considering I never used any paid promotion sites to get downloads. Of course, this time I didn’t even use free promotion sites to get downloads. Speaking of downloads… how many did I get?

When I logged into KDP on Amazon, I was shocked. When I first checked last evening, there had been 155 downloads! I’m not even sure I’ve had 155 download, paid or free, ever. Downloads continued through the evening, reaching 224 for the entire day.

Today is looking pretty good so far, too. I woke up this morning to find a dozen downloads already. Crazy.

The question is, how did this happen? I have no idea. I’ve been waiting for a successful free promotion like since for a long, long time. Of course, I wasn’t thinking it would happen this time. In fact, since I’m getting closer to publishing my novel, which is a totally different genre, I wasn’t even sure I should be promoting The Last Stop anymore, but, I figured I’d do one last promotion.  I’m glad I did, but I still can’t explain how it’s doing so well when all previous promotions never performed like this.

Using Google, I couldn’t find any blog sites that took notice. I got a couple retweets on Twitter… but not until the evening. If there’s someone out there who used their reach and influence to give my short story a boost yesterday, I thank you!