Winning a PROMO Code

As I intend to give away all of the PROMO codes that Audible has given me thus far and will continue to do so as new ones are allotted, I decided to outline the method in which they will be given away and how I arrived at it.

The first approach I looked at was looking for folks who have contributed significantly to the project(s), including the books and the game. I started down this path but it became increasingly hard to estimate and manage.

The second approach I looked at was to reward folks that have registered on the site. This second approach is more straightforward than the first, so it is preferred. It is a lot easier to register/subscribe on a site than to do something significant and warrants attention. What is something significant, after all? Solving world hunger? Maybe, but that would be a reward in and of itself. That would be like giving someone a cookie for rescuing a child from a fire. Ya, not doing that!

So it made a lot more sense to offer the PROMO codes based on registered users. Then the question of what aspect of registering should be of importance came up. Should it be based on height or hair color? Is it easy to divide winners into young and old, skinny or not so skinny? etc... that gets complicated and significantly hard to remain impartial since I'm ugly, old, and fat. So I'd be a terrible judge. Instead, it becomes easier to use the registration information that I would not be able to judge or even alter and easily fake. This is where the registration dates started to come in handy. Every registered user gets a timestamp that shows when they were registered. I could sort members based on this date and then easily count to some arbitrary number, and this, in effect, would be like picking out names from a glass bowl, which is hard to do in the computer world. The glass bowl thing is way overdone anyway.

So registration dates sorted by date and then counted to 100 sounded great. But what if I got to 200 registered users? I started to wonder if that was possible, and yet why wouldn't it. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to give the last out of every 100 registered users a free audible. That started to sound really appealing, but would I have enough audible PROMO codes? Over time certainly, I thought.

I have eight books in this series, and Audible appears to be giving me about fifty PROMO codes per book (maybe more or less), so what if I methodically sorted the registered users and then started giving them away at a rate of one PROMO code per 100 registered users. That sounded pretty efficient and fair, right?

So 50 x 100 x 8 books? That comes out to... oh wait! That's 40,000 registered users. Um, I am not that ambitious. I think I'd be happy if I could get even 1K users. So I needed to change this a bit.

So maybe 50 x 5 x 8? That's a lot better.

So here's the way we'll do it. Every 5 registered users, sorted by date, will get a free PROMO code until supplies last. Easy does it!