What a Feeling!

How does it feel to be #1 at Amazon even if its just for a fleeting moment? It definitely is an eerie surreal sort of feeling, especially because it happened accidentally and not by design. I woke up to see my book made #1 in ‘historical biography’ and #3 in ‘memoir’ category. I kept on hitting the keyboard. Really? Is this for real? How did this happened? I only had 2 reviews.

When I started writing my book, I thought it would make a great stocking stuffer for Christmas. I wanted to give my family this book as a gift, and most especially to my daughter, who was raised in a different culture, so that she could at least understand my world and how I was raised.I was very shy at first to promote my book or even talk about it. Of course some friends and family were patrons from the beginning and so I imagined that they were doing me a favor by buying my book, you know showing support, or whatever. I was surprised when a couple of family members and their friends, whom I did not know at all, were really interested enough in knowing my story and perhaps my Dad’s story to make the purchase.

Then a year later, I hooked up with a childhood friend and her daughter. Her daughter, Mia, a millennial, kept asking me very substantial questions and was very curious about that time period during Martial Law. “Tita, did it really happened?”I was, of course, flattered, but also concerned by her questions. In this time of rich information and elaborate disinformation, people are always trying to rewrite history to their favor, some have even suggested that Martial Law did not happened at all. It was an alternative reality! That day, I was more determined than ever that my story, or at least my truth, be told. I engaged in FB groups to start promoting my book and I got to know many emerging Indie Authors like myself, who were willingly and generously shared their stories and experiences.

I was drawn to one group that was really nice and very friendly called, ‘We love Memoirs’, they actually claimed to be the friendliest group in FB and yes, they were indeed! They had about 6K + members. Joining was easy, but there was one caveat, you are not allowed to discuss your book. Huh? How do we promote or sell our book if we are not even allowed to share it or discuss it? “Believe us, it works!” they assured me. Promotion is allowed only under certain terms and times, but it was strictly constrained and monitored. Nevertheless, we can talk about anything else, the birds or the bees, plants or pets, etc. So I gave it a try, believing that they could make it happen.

By accident, someone from this group promoted my book as a FREE promo and did a shout out to the group. The next thing I knew, I had thousands of downloads that day and before I knew it, I was #3 in memoir category and crawling my way to #1! But since it was a mistake, readers finally caught up with the error and asked me where’s the freebie? Ooopsie, I decided to ride on the momentum and explored the benefits of the FREE promo. And believe me, people love your freebies!

To maintain my status, I blasted my promo to social media coupled with amazon and FB ads to make it last a week or two? Then I was pounding the keyboard and shared my freebie promos to all the FB groups who allowed it. It seemed like the formula worked; I tested it for a friend or two on their books, and if we didn’t make it to #1 at least they made it to top 10.Being a virtual web consultant in my other life, I understood algorithms and how they work. It’s a numbers game and somehow, I’d accidentally stumbled upon a working algorithm.

Hmmm, best selling kindle author for a week? Got to love the title, but is it me, science or dumb luck! You decide.

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