Book Marketing That Worked!

For about six years I've had a Kindle Touch reader with ads on it.  It used to be they'd show ads for stuff other than books, but in the last couple of years they just show ads for books, which 99.9% of the time I ignore them.  But there is that 0.1% of the time when I do click on the ad.  So I thought I'd share a marketing success story since there aren't very many.

I kept seeing that cover in black-and-white with a tag line "Hit pause on horror and mayhem with the SciFi series about a brighter future that will make you smile."  And after like 10 or 20 times I thought, "Well, what the hell?  It's only 99 cents."

Like Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5 it mostly takes place on a space station.  The station (and most of the known universe) is overseen by highly advanced robots called the Stryx.  Fearing humanity would destroy itself the Stryx uplifted humanity by giving them advanced technology to join the many other advanced races in the universe.

For a few years Kelly Frank has been the ambassador for EarthCENT, which sounds prestigious, but it's a job with long hours and little pay, to the point she often has to sleep in her office to avoid her landlord.

The first book, Date Night on Union Station, deals with Kelly getting set up by a new automated dating service for some crappy dates.  But ultimately she finds her true love in Joe, a former mercenary who runs a junkyard with his "war dog" that's a genetically engineered pooch probably as big as a dire wolf on Game of Thrones.

The book isn't really laugh out loud funny sci-fi like Douglas Adams or Nigel Mitchell for the most part but it's amusing light sci-fi. 

I decided then to buy the second one.  And since then I've borrowed the third, fourth, and fifth ones.  They aren't great books but they're solid reads and when I borrow them they're free, so there's that.  They're mostly under 200 pages so they don't take long to read either.

I'd really like to know how the author got more than 800 reviews for this since it doesn't seem published by Big Publishing or anything.

Anyway, I guess if you can get a lot of ads on Kindles you can eventually browbeat someone into checking out your book and buying it.  Every squirrel finds a nut once in a while, right?  Huzzah!