Name: Stuart Aken

Age: 67 outside, about 23 within.

Where are you from?

My mother was warned I’d be born dead, due to her shock at my father’s death three weeks earlier. But, stubborn from the start, I landed very much alive. That was in a neighbour’s bed as we’d been evicted from the home that was tied to my father’s job. This all happened in Hull, a city port in the north east of England.

Now I’ve retired from employment, I live with my wife in a small village called Lydbrook. It hugs both sides of a steep-sided green valley in the Forest of Dean, in the south west of England, and not far from the border with Wales.

A little about your self `ie your education Family life etc  

Following my mother’s death, two days after my 16^th birthday, I left home and joined the RAF…

Following my Call to Arms, a number of you responded by sharing with me your book marketing experience. I now have about a hundred responses by some fifty authors. Although some of the responses were expected, there were quite a few surprises in there for me.

Methodology

For anyone wishing to take a look at the raw data, you can download this Excel spreadsheet. I grouped the results according to whether the book was offered full-price, discounted or free. I also have a fourth category titled Other, that includes any entries where this was not specified.

To compare the various ad media, I came up with a number that represents the ratio between number of sales and cost of advertising. In other word, if you spent $1 and had one sale, then this number would be one. If you spent $1 and had two sales, the number would be two, etc.