That's how many more books I've sold in the last 7 days compared to the past 7 months The Monkey State has been out in the wild.
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Now, 'sold' is a misnomer as around 95% were free copies as part of the promo I've been rabbiting on about recently.
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It's taken the total tally for both books to 3,019 - with a heavy ebook and US reader skew now.

Maths isn't my strong point. There's a reason I write. What I can see clearly though is it's 2,350 more people with a copy of the monkeys in their hands (or on their devices).
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It'll be interesting to see if this leads to any additional reviews/ratings and sales...

Shame you can only run them once every 3 months?

Maybe.

I'm still processing exactly what I think about this promo, but I can certainly say the experiment—to focus on that one thing for my marketing—was a success.

I'm also left speculating why this promo went exponentially better than my first back in April. New variables were having a 2nd book available. More social proof on my product page. Yet, my hunch is it came more down to another element...
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This time I actually promoted it.

With a little help from some friends.

5 in fact.
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>>> Serena Choo, Emma Ellis, Tom Grundy, BookBarbarian and FreeBooksy <<<
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The latter two were paid services I must add. They have an audience of avid Fantasy readers. And clearly a collection of those who love a bargain!

The first three are individuals with aligned writing work who popped me on their newsletters for which I'm super grateful.

Rather than blabbing on about me, which I seem a little prone to do on this newsie (probably because I see it as a form of diary and I did promise you the experiment results 🙊), I wanted to give these writers the floor briefly.

1. Serena Choo - Has a simply beautiful book released this year. It has 28 calming short stories from the simple philosophy of Zen. It also happens to feature a monkey as its protagonist and with over 180 reviews at an average of 4.9 she must be doing something right. You can get your tail around The Monkey and The Way of Zen here.

2. Emma Ellis - Has become a mini virtual mentor to me in recent months offering advice from 10+ books into author life. Incredibly prolific whilst living a nomadic life for most of the year. I'm torn which of her series to recommend given I'm currently immersed in two of them... so here's her Amazon author page.

3. Tom Grundy - Took the biscuit by not only featuring me in one of his emails... but in 3! He even had me doing copy edits from a Starbucks in Brasov. Aha, I'm kidding (kind of). Tom has had me hooked on his daily emails since I first saw him featured on Paul Millerd's blog as part of a piece on Quitting & Returning To Work. We're plotting a collaboration down the line, so won't say much more now, but he has a book coming out pretty soon, Don't Quit Your Job, which I cannot wait to read (again). Grab his free workplace happiness report from a link within that link if you want to revolutionise your 9-5 mindset.

I was told that other people's audiences (OPAs) could be a 'hack' for marketing your product.

What has been nice though is that these three features came about completely organically.

Trusting my toucan, you could say.
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​- J. R. Roberts​
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​P.S. Now trying to decide whether to pick another 'one thing' for marketing or focus my allotted side project time only on Book 3. Let's see. Someone suggested my working title, Song of the Rainforest was too dreary. Do you agree?