Is There Waning Interest in Free Books?

There was only one time when my free book promotion garnered zero interest. That was with Bad Blood, whose lack of interest I attributed to a poorly written blurb. (I've since updated it.) I canceled my promotion after two days, mainly out of embarrassment. I still think Bad Blood is a good story, yet it's never sold a single copy. I've decided I've done all I can with it to spark interest, and nothing works. So be it.

But now I've run a free promotion for Shadow Song for two days, and nothing. It's not the blurb and it's not the cover, so I don't know what it is that leads people to reject it.

I took a look at Amazon's offerings of free books, not to find out how far down the list Shadow Song is buried (I don't have that much time), but to get an idea of the "competition". Well, there are over 100,000 books currently being offered for free. I'm beginning to think this endeavor is not worth it.  

I'm assuming there are two camps: those readers who are free book addicts; who scoop up as many as they can, probably every day, and then people like me, who would never think to browse the free offerings. I'm not exactly a voracious reader, though. I suspect that the addicts don't actually read all their free books, either. They're collectors. It's easy enough to become addicted to various things, and free books are one of those things.

I don't pretend to know how Amazon's algorithm works, but I see that romance novels appear first on the list, followed by cozy mysteries, which probably makes sense. They tend to be shorter reads (as well as very popular genres), so readers can consume a book quickly. Since my genre is far, far down the scale of popularity, I can see why it's probably the 99,999th book on the list.

I wouldn't even bother blogging about this, but I do like to follow up on previous posts, so a status update is in order. I've tried figuring out the hows and whys in the past, but it's an impossible code to crack, and I'm not going to waste time fretting over it.

Shadow Song still has two days left of its promotion, but I won't be checking again. It was a spur of the moment decision to begin with, not an "OMG, I need to move this baby!" My books have run their course, unfortunately.

I've read ad nauseum that an author is wise to offer a free book when it's part of a series. That's smart. You'd want to spur interest in books two and three and however many more there are. For standalones, I'm quite convinced that the exercise is futile. 

But hey! It costs nothing to stick a book up there for $0.00; nothing except one's pride. But I've rather forsaken that anyway.