Giving away thousands of Kindle books…. what madness is this?

I’m sure you've all seen me shouting for the past few days about giving away FREE kindle copies of The

Flight of the Griffin, and if you haven't, I can't believe I missed you! I've been tweeting on twitter, posting on Facebook and shouting out loud on Goodreads… did you not get my email?

I've been asked several times why go to all this trouble to give my books away for free, so I thought I would explain a little.

I now sit, after the first of a three day free promotion, and I've given away over 13,000 electronic kindle copies of The Flight of the Griffin. Many independent authors hate the idea of giving books away and I totally understand, it takes a lot of effort and heart ache to write so why should it be given away free?

There are actually several reasons. Firstly it pushes the book up through the Amazon rankings made up of some pretty complicated algorithms. So currently, TFOTG is number one on the US Amazon Kindle for Epic fantasy books, which is pretty amazing, and it’s currently running at 7^th top free book on Amazon.

After the promotion these numbers will gradually drop, but it will be high on the search list for a few weeks and bring in paid sales (Yeeeessss!)

I’m also hoping that of the 13,000 people that downloaded, maybe 2,000 will actually read it (many people just grab free copies and never read them….. go figure!) and that of those 2,000 a few will be good enough to leave a nice review, which also pushes the book up in the rankings on Amazon. Of the people that read it, of course I’m also hoping that many will want to read the sequel, Chaos Storm, and buy it… yes, another hearty cheer!

All in all, it’s better than remaining a needle in a haystack, I’m just bouncing up and down trying to get my books read; so please, download it while it's free, read it, tell the world and yes… please review!