Why Ask Why?

My first foray into "indie publishing" was in October of 2010 when I put out a collection of short stories called Just Another Day in Paradise.  I was a total newbie at the time, but guided by the incredibly patient and helpful G. Wells Taylor (author of my favorite vampire novel Bent Steeple), It got it together and put it up for sale. I made some mistakes--the TOC isn't interactive, which it should be, and I paid, way, way, way too much for the awesome cover image. (I'd do it again, though. I saw the photo when it was first published in the newspaper and then tracked it down with the most intensive Google image search ever.)

The collection was never a big seller, so at some point, I made it "perma-free."  And as it turns out, there are a lot of people who wn't pay 99 cents for a collection of short stories, but are more than happy to pick it up for free. (Yes, I CAN give my work away.) So month after month, I've watched people "buy" the book.  Some of them have been nice enough to leave reviews (thank you very much) and in the intervening four years, the collection has rarely been out of the top 10 of free book collections. So I have to ask--why has there suddenly been an uptick in downloads of the book this month, nearly four years after it first became available?  So far this month, I have "sold" more than 300 copies of the collection and it is now rated #3 in athologies and collections/horor and #6 in anthologies and short stories in the fantasy/sci fi genre.

I'm not complainng, I'm just curious.  If you haven't read the stories and would like to, you can find the collection free here.