(And yes, I know, I haven’t posted here for yonks. That is going to change, believe me.)

I’m making some business changes here at Chez Cameron — namely, no more free first in series books. Over the last five years I have given away 27,969 free downloads of Empress of Storms and 9,767 free downloads of Storm Season on Amazon alone. The reasoning behind this was, if I made the first book in a series free, it will prompt people to download it, read it, love it, and buy the rest of the books.

Yeah. That hasn’t quite worked the way I’d hoped. Mind you, I do get the occasional burst of purchases where someone gets the rest of the series, and that’s delightful. But I haven’t made nearly the number of series sales that I’d hoped for with this stratagem.

So, as of today, I’m setting both books at $3.99 on all platforms. That’s still a helluva deal in a world where ebooks are regularly $9.99, but more importantly it acknowledges the undeniable fact that readers are more likely to read a book that they actually pay money for. It’s easy to stuff your Kindle/e-reader with free books, but how many of us actually get around to reading all of those books? If you actually purchase something, however, there’s more impetus to read it than a book you got for free.

And that’s my in with these readers — get them to read the first books in the Olympic Cove and Two Thrones series, and hopefully they’ll buy the rest of the books in each series. We’ll see.

Mind you, I’ve also sold 6,625 copies of Empress of Storms since 2015, which just about squeaks it into bestseller country. It will be interesting to see how long it takes me to crack 7K copies sold.