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Kobo Writing Life is pleased to announce that as of a recent October 2013 update you can now track your free book downloads!  Up until now, all reports were sales reports, and free books downloads weren’t captured in that data.  Now, however, you can also stay informed of which of your free books are being downloaded and where.  (Remember, with Kobo Writing Life, you can make your eBooks FREE whenever you wish for as long as you want – no strings attached)

You can view total free downloads on your dashboard under Sales at a Glance:

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If you want to measure the number of times a particular title has been downloaded for free, you can drill down to the book level under Sales by Book:

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Or, to see where your eBooks are being downloaded for free, you can see a summary of total free downloads in Sales by Region:

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These will be valuable tools you can use to gauge the temperature of your free offerings and inform your marketing strategies, and is part of the ongoing updates and improvements we are continually making to the dashboard to help you measure the success of various promotions.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  Even if you’ve never offered a title for free download, you might still see a small number of free downloads appear on your dashboard. Here are two reasons that might be:

  1. Someone internal at Kobo from the Publisher Operations / Kobo Writing Life / Quality Assurance team downloaded the book for testing to ensure it presented okay on one of our eReaders.  Sometimes we do this when helping answer an author’s question about something they are seeing when the book is downloaded (as part of the trouble shooting process) And other times, it could be part of the random sampling testing we perform on titles to ensure that everything is working okay on our devices and apps.
  2. Someone from our global Merchandising team might downloaded the book to check it out. This can be an extremely good thing for an author, as having the attention of someone from Merchandising can turn out to be very beneficial, particularly since there are thousands of titles published every single day — getting a Merchandiser’s attention is a rare and wonderful thing. Because if they like your book, that just might help get it some extra attention.
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