On Book Anniversaries and Making a Book Permanently Free

To celebrate the first anniversary of Lucifer's Odyssey, I decided to do something for fans. My first novel has been downloaded from Amazon and other outlets tens of thousands of times (most of these during free promotions) in the past year, and the feedback from this has been overwhelmingly positive. However, there is one recurring piece of feedback that I hear--a sort of lament--that I wanted to do something about.

The first three books of the Primal Patterns series describe a short period of time within a history that spans billions of years and fully informing readers of backstory can be problematic. My editor and I certainly struggled to give readers as much information as we could without distracting from the action and adventure that goes along with Lucifer's Odyssey. However, that doesn't mean we wholly succeeded in our endeavors with Lucifer's Odyssey either. For the anniversary edition, I wanted to add a whole new puzzle piece to the history of the Lucifer and Jehovah struggle, so I added a new prologue (On Loss and Temptation), which describes Lucifer's fall to Earth, his confrontation with Jehovah in Eden, and the Temptation of Eve with Knowledge. I think it's a great addition to the story and doesn't go too far into the past where planned prequels exist, and from the response of a beta reader I selected for the prologue, I think readers of the series will enjoy it.

To further honor the fans of the series, I have also decided to make the first book Lucifer's Odyssey free for at least the rest of the year. Currently, the book is already free on Smashwords, and I hope the change will percolate to Amazon quickly through its price-matching features. To hopefully expedite this process, I have contacted KDP and requested that they price-match Lucifer's Odyssey to the Smashwords (and soon Apple and B&N) free price. You can potentially help this go free by reporting a lower price on the Amazon page by clicking "tell us about a lower price" url as circled below in the Product Details.

Before the KDP Select program (which allows for five free days in a three month period on Amazon), this could take between weeks to months, if ever. I will be sure to update this post with the turnaround time on this, and if you have had any experience with price-matching to free recently on Amazon, please leave a comment. I am very curious to found out how fast Amazon is in price-matching to free.