There are heading for a million books published every year in the USA alone, so competition worldwide in all genres is fierce, especially when you remember bestsellers go on selling. To Kill a Mockingbird has sold forty million copies since it was published in 1960, and still sells at the rate of one million a year. J.K. Rowling’s books are equally successful.

Few indie authors give up their day job, but good books do sell. When is the optimum time? Friends who are avid readers gave me the answer to that question when I was surprised by New Year’s Day sales of my first book. New Year’s Eve is the big occasion, and the day after people like to relax. Obviously, that includes authors, but it shouldn’t. It’s a chance to offer YOUR books when fewer are being pushed.

Many indie authors pay for promotion, so it makes sense to spend money when there’s a good chance of making sufficient sales to end in profit. Therefore, the dates to avoid are Valentine’s Day (romance) Mother’s Day (women’s fiction, cookery, craft, etcetera) Father's Day (sport, male-orientated thrillers and westerns). Profitable dates are those in the two or three weeks before these occasions, and the same applies to Christmas for any book; early December is the time people are buying, especially children's books and print copies of anything.

Consider now THE weekend: Thanksgiving, followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The market is inundated with books, many heavily discounted. Unless you can afford one of the very expensive sites, and you book your date as far in advance as that site takes bookings, forget it. The smaller sites, free or charging a few dollars, simply cannot compete.

The good news is that free or cheap sites do work if you schedule a date that isn’t particularly popular. Also, weekends are not the prime selling times you might expect them to be. Many promotion sites work by sending out emails to readers, and they aren’t necessarily opened the instant they arrive. Choose to have your book featured on a Thursday and a lot of the recipients will look on Friday and buy books for the weekend.

Another consideration is what are you attempting to sell? If you have a series, or a book with a sequel, spend to your limit on advertising free downloads of book one. Every free download pushes you farther up the “free” chart on Amazon, improves visibility, and kicks in search engines; every download counts as one-tenth of a sale and thousands are possible. There are sites that guarantee numbers and will rerun if the target isn’t met.

Sales is the second advantage of offering book one free. I have an Amazon review that reads “the seeds of subsequent volumes are artfully placed, never intrusive, but fetching enough to make me buy the other three when I'd only gotten three-quarters through the first novel.” That person was far from the only one; sales spikes of my other four books in the series proved it.