My author friend Autumn Birt recently shared her results with promoting a free book on various smaller promo site. Specifically, she wanted to test her hypothesis that by submitting two different free books (one fantasy and one thriller) on several free advertising sitesevery day for 30 days, by the end of the period she would see a greater number of downloads compared to the previous 30 day period, when she was doing no promo whatsoever.

So, what happened?

Amazingly enough, the hypothesis was proven wrong! When she compared the two months, there was little improvement:

Image by Autumn Birt

In fact, as she points out, if you look at total downloads from the control month versus the 30 days of free promo… well, can you tell which bar is for which month?

Image by Autumn Birt

What went wrong?

I have to admit, her findings took me aback. There…