"The Sound of Shiant" goes viral!

It's been a really exciting week. On Friday 1st February, "The Sound of Shiant" and "Strange Cases: The Adventures of Edmund Forrester" were made available for a free promotional download on Amazon Kindle. I've done this sort of promotion before and they've been fairly successful. I've normally seen 200-300 downloads over the course of the promotion and a slight bump in sales when the promotion comes to an end.
"Strange Cases" did pretty well... 188 downloads from Amazon.com and 139 downloads from Amazon.co.uk. Add in the handful of downloads from other countries and the total was a pretty respectable 335. At its height of success, the collection reached number three in the free kindle short story charts. Not bad going for a book with no reviews at present.
I'm not quite sure what I did but "The Sound of Shiant" went nuts. By the afternoon of Saturday 2nd, the book was sitting at the top spot in the Amazon.co.uk free kindle fantasy chart, a position it held until Tuesday afternoon. It also reached third place in the free kindle action and adventure chart. Downloads from Amazon.com totalled 782 but the downloads really went crazy from Amazon.co.uk... 2,314. Add in the downloads from other countries and the total was a jaw-dropping 3,112!
What does this mean? Well... nothing, really. The book has enjoyed a bit of success and will hopefully get a few more positive reviews from those kind enough to take the time to post them. If I'm really lucky the sales in the coming weeks will benefit from a boost from all the publicity. I doubt any big name publishers are going to be coming up my driveway with a wheelbarrow full of money in the near future.
Of course, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thrilled to bits with these numbers. I'm also kind of terrified by the sudden spike in popularity. Still, this is what it's all about, eh? I didn't start writing with the aim of making a lot of money (that's never going to happen when I only make 23 pence per paid download)... I write because I want to entertain people. As of this week I've got thousands of new readers, I just hope the novel will entertain them.