A Deconstructed Heart is free for the Kindle, 2/27-3/31

I’m sending my baby out into the wide world again, but this time with a new marketing strategy. The free promotion is over the next five days, which I plan to follow up with a placement as a Hot Title at the World Literary Cafe. On April 10, I go big with an ad at the Frugal EReader. I’m interested to see how this layered marketing approach works.

In the meantime, I’m pleased to see that A Deconstructed Heart has garnered some fantastic reviews from The Kindle Book Review and eBook Review Gal.

Here’s a choice excerpt from the latter’s website, which Susan Barton also kindly placed on my Amazon site:

“Let me start by saying that I loved A Deconstructed Heart! It was a sweetly poetic, easy read. Shaheen Ashraf-Ahmed’s writing style has a soothing, melodic quality that invites readers to be drawn into her stories easily. I was hooked from the beginning and immediately found myself looking forward to what would happen next. I would highly recommend A Deconstructed Heart be put on anyone’s must read list.”

If you get a chance to read A Deconstructed Heart, please add your own reviews. I look forward to hearing from you.

Related articles

• The Kindle Book Review: a review of A Deconstructed Heart that brought tears to my eyes… (coinsinthewell.wordpress.com)
• A Deconstructed Heart reviewed at Books Are Cool (coinsinthewell.wordpress.com)

 

A Change in the Weather: Free download this weekend

Tomorrow, A Change in the Weather goes free through KDP Select’s free promotion. It’s the fourth time I will have used a free promotion for one of my titles and it’s always an interesting experience. The first time I knew absolutely nothing, running my promotion for one day only, and A Deconstructed Heart barely moved, but I was still excited to think that nearly 100 people had my book in their Kindle. The second time, I was a lot more savvy, and A Change in the Weather had over 1,100 downloads. I’m still not quite sure what made it move so quickly… I didn’t get word that one of the heavy hitters was featuring my promotion, so it was quite a shock to get snapped up so quickly. I think that perhaps the unknown algorithm that placed A Change in the Weather in the relationships category was an advantage, because there is not a lot of competition in that category. I ran A Deconstructed Heart promotion most recently and was pleased to see it being picked up nicely, with a nice uptick in sales. A Change in the Weather is free from Friday thru Sunday, which should give me lots of time to draw people’s attention to my ebook. So we’ll see… it’s still so much luck, the time of year, the support of the right blogs… I have heard back from a few sites that say they will definitely feature the promotion this weekend, but I’m also hoping that Pixel of Ink finally notices me… fourth time lucky?

A Deconstructed Heart in print

Finally, after hours and hours of editing, proofreading and just generally being a fussbudget, I have a print edition of A Deconstructed Heart available at Amazon. I think it looks pretty faithful to the Kindle edition, which came out in October last year. The first order of the day as soon as the print edition was available was to let my mother know. I asked her to tell the 90-something lady who has lived across the road from my parents in England for the past 30 years. She is a former journalist and still incredibly sharp; her reading list puts mine to shame. She doesn’t have an e-reader and has been asking how to get a copy of my book. Guess who’s getting a belated Christmas present via US mail?

Climbing the Amazon rankings…

Denali – Mountain Landscape from Alaska (Photo credit: blmiers2)

My second free promotion for A Deconstructed Heart is wrapping up this evening, with over 600 downloads. It’s an awe-inspiring moment, to realize your hard work is in the hands of six hundred people you have never met, many of whom live thousands of miles away across the globe. What a fantastic time in which to be an author. A Deconstructed Heart is currently at #22 for free literary fiction books for the Kindle and, for some unfathomable reason, #22 also for historical fiction (not a setting I would have chosen for A Deconstructed Heart; for A Change in the Weather and The Dust Beneath Her Feet… well, sure). I’ll keep you updated on the latest when the promotion ends.