On Tuesday Deep State (Acer Sansom #4) was part of an Amazon Daily Deal promotion. I was, naturally, rather excited to see how it would do. And I was pleasantly surprised.

There are four books in the Acer Sansom series. Deep State is #4. Amazon had reduced it for the Daily Deal from £3.38 to £0.99. Before the DD it had been fluctuating between 7000 to 10,000 in the overall ranking positions for a while. Its best chart position during the DD timing was #174 in the overall Kindle chart, which is pretty impressive. I’ve never had a book go that high before. In fact I’ve only ever broken into the top 1000 a couple of times and they were R&M Files #6 and #7.

What really made my day was the immediate effect that the DD had on the rest of the Acer series. Book #1 is a perma-free book that has been hovering around #1600 chart position-wise. (It does baffle me why Dirty Business doesn’t sit higher than that – it’s a free book and it’s got a great review average). Anyway, on the back of the DD Dirty Business surged up the charts to #50 in the free downloads chart and it’s still in the top 100 a couple of days later. I’m not making anything out of that, of course, but it means readers are downloading it and that increases the possibility of knock-on sales for the rest of the series.

Even better than that books #2 and #3 in the series were both in the Amazon top 1000 by the end of the day. That was a really good boost for sales and visibility for Acer. Neither of those titles has been near the top 1000. (I know that doesn’t sound much but for a CWAP like me the top 1000 is something, when you consider there are millions of books available to download through Amazon.

I get why readers would be encouraged to download book #1 because it’s free but I don’t understand why readers would also download books #2 & #3 in the series when they haven’t had a chance to read the others. I’m not complaining.

What has that image of a Paul Nash exhibition at Tate Britain got to do with my writing life? Not much. But I was standing on a train station platform on my way home from Gatwick at the beginning of the week when I noticed a big billboard poster for it. It was like the sun came out in my heart. Like David Booker, I am a big Paul Nash fan. Also like David Booker, I have a Paul Nash fake hanging on one of my walls. I’m so looking forward to going.