Nope.  Not a typo.  FOUR of the Top Ten Kindle slots are BelleBooks and Bell Bridge titles.

#2  Crossroads Cafe   Deborah Smith

#3  Murder Takes the Cake    Gayle Trent

#6  Mossy Creek     Smith, Dixon, Ellis, Ball, Knight, Chastain

#9  Once Bitten   Kalayna Price

#25  All God’s Creatures   Carolyn McSparren

There has been much made over the last few days of the dominance of free books on Amazon’s Kindle Bestseller List.  Some point to it as an indication that readers are demanding cheaper ebooks.

No.  They’re just loading their brand new Kindles and who doesn’t like a good free classic like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea?

But for the commercial publishers (like BelleBooks, Tyndale, Scholastic, and James Patterson’s publisher), who have free books hitting and STAYING in the Top 10 (and more big publishers with books in the Top 100), this is just promotion.  We cleverly thought that people with bright shiny new Kindles received as holiday gifts would need content.  So BelleBooks arranged for some of our backlist to be free for a limited time.  We selected 5 books—either first in series or from an author with other titles published by us.

Boy howdy!  Has this paid off.  One of the books – ONCE BITTEN – is the # 1 Fantasy book on Amazon.  Not Kindle…the full Amazon list.  Has been for days.

CROSSROADS CAFE is the # 1 Romance book on Amazon.

MURDER TAKES THE CAKE is the #1 Mystery on Amazon.

Full list, not just Kindle.

The books are getting fabulous reviews.  I don’t know about you, but I DO look at reviews when I buy a book.  Especially if I don’t know the publisher or the author.

This is the equivalent of “end capping” or co-op advertising.  For decades large publishers have paid for book placement in stores, in national chain newsletters, etc.

This is how a small publisher says, “Our books can hold their own.  Just try one.”

And head to head, the small publishers books are beating out the other free books from large commercial publishers.  We’ve always felt, that putting the books in front of readers is the best way to build a audience for the author.

We don’t know distributed units yet.  But we can say that the print versions of these books have shown some sales increases as well.

Got a Kindle?  You might just want to pop over to Amazon.

We think it’s nothing short of fantastic that so many of our books have risen to the top when there is so much free content on Amazon.  And so much free content from large NY publishers who are doing the same thing we are…leveraging back list to promote their front list.