Kindle Countdown Promotion

I'm currently running a Kindle Countdown Promotion and so far the results are looking pretty good. We've sold approximately 16 copies in the first iteration of the sale (at $0.99) and there is still a day left in this phase.

There was zero advertising on the first day because of a travel conflict and we didn't do any advanced promotion. We made one post about 30 hours into the deal on the Facebook page which was only seen by about 70 people. My inkling is that Amazon does something with these promotional items to bring them to the forefront - especially now. I can only imagine how well the sales would be in a stronger category.

A few quick things I'm seeing from this promotion:

1. The way Amazon rates books must be based a lot on how quickly the sales come - as we've hit #10 in the Paid "Supernatural" category with just a few sales in this short frame of time (we actually peaked at #9 for a bit but we're holding between 10-12). The number seems to drop/fluctuate quickly and we've generally been well out of the top 100 in this category prior to this promotion. I'm sure now that the strategies I've read about how to build your book sales based on getting to #1 in a category is fairly accurate; and I think, as these books have mentioned, the key is to simply promote well in advance to get as may sales as you can at once. I bet for most categories simply selling 50-100 copies would easily secure you the #1 spot. How easily you can hold #1 remains to be seen...
2. We've likely overpriced this book quite a bit and I'm fairly certain that once this promotion ends I'll drop the price permanently to $2.99. We may even have to consider a drop all the way to $0.99 but the sales have been so much lower than we had hoped that it would be nice to keep that 70% royalty rate in place.
3. It appears that Amazon will also drop the price of a Paperback that is linked to the same Kindle book by a few dollars. However, though we've seen the price fluctuate, it appears the royalties are locked at the rate they approximate when setting the price. 

More information as the promotion progresses. There are still 4 days remaining.

Edit #1: Update

The promotional countdown was pretty successful! We did limited - and I mean limited - advertising for this deal which was a day late because of travel conflicts. We only mentioned the deal once on our Facebook page but  the total sales from the promotion were 45 units.

We will definitely use this to our advantage more in the future - probably much more beneficial than the previous "FREE" book deal unless you're building an audience for a book series and just want to get a lot of copies spreading around.