So my first ZoeBub/Stuff Your Kindle/eReader event is done, and I had over 8,800 copies of Crystal Shard downloaded, plus a significant handful of Empress of Storms.

For ease of math, let’s say that 9,000 people downloaded one of my books. Seeing as 1) romance readers are absolutely voracious when it comes to reading, but 2) they also tend to have immense TBR backlogs, let’s posit that maybe 5% of those 9K readers will get around to reading my book in the next six months or so and like it enough to want to buy the next one in the series.

That makes 450 readers who will either buy Crystal Blade or read it in KU (although I already have three purchases of Crystal Blade racked up since the beginning of the event). If those 450 readers buy it, I’ll make $1,548. If they read it in KU, I’ll make less than that but I’ll still make a significant amount. And if I have Crystal Reflection, Crystal Citadel, and Crystal Empress out by then, I could make as much as $6,192.

Now, let’s look at Empress of Storms. If one reader read Empress and decided that she wanted to read the entire series (and this happens a LOT), that’s the purchase of three novels, a novella, and a short story, which earns me $13.46. And Empress of Storms is romantasy, which is really starting to take off now (more on that in another post) so it’s very likely that more readers who read Empress will want to read the entire series.

But that’s just the money aspect from this one ZoeBub event. From a purely audience building point of view, knowing that one of my books was downloaded almost 9,000 times is absolutely tremendous. And it’s building the audience of dedicated readers that makes an author’s career.

TL;dr, I deemed the Stuff Your Kindle event to be a tremendous success, and hopefully I can participate in the December event as well.