Normally, I give away my short story books for free from Monday to Friday. For my latest issue, No. 11 The Wheel, however, I made it available for free starting on Friday (the promotion will run until Wednesday). Over the weekend, I may have seen a small increase in downloads, but nothing spectacular.

So far, my best-performing short story was downloaded 45 times in German and 8 times in English over five days (Killtime – US – DE). My worst performer was Protocol: Twilight (US – DE), with 13 downloads in German and 4 in English.

The Wheel had 22 downloads in the US and 16 in Germany over the weekend alone—you can still grab a free copy here: US – DE

That’s a slight increase compared to my average. Compared to my best issue so far, it’s roughly on the same level.

I wasn’t sure whether people look for books to read more often on weekends, even though online traffic is higher during weekdays for most of my other web projects. After this experiment, I’m still not convinced that they do. Sometimes, it’s simply the cover and the title that spark more interest in a book. Killtime, for example, just sounds more exciting than Protocol: Twilight, right?

Maybe the cover of The Wheel is one of the better ones I’ve created, which could have led to its above-average performance. Even if that’s the case, the download numbers aren’t dramatically higher than usual.

For now, I’d conclude that it doesn’t make much of a difference whether I set my books to free on Fridays or Mondays.

I’ll run more experiments in the future, but for the moment, I’ll go back to running my free promotions starting on Mondays and leaving out the weekends.