Kindle Scout Campaign - Guide - Part 5 - Ending Results

First of all, if you want to check out my services list of promotional places and recommendations, click here. I go into pretty deep analysis about a lot of different places I have checked out to get nominations and page views for your campaign! It's worked out very well for me (at least pre-results) and hopefully my advice can help you!

Now, onto the details!

Campaign is over, so here are some final details about how it went! It ended midnight and it is hard to believe it is finally over. Now, I have to go through and fix up my website post campaign. It feels a lot like taking down decorations after Christmas: it is fun putting them up, and not nearly as fun sending them all back to storage!

It's Over

It's good to be over with, and now I can finally sit back and relax. I'm not sure how well I'll be able to relax, but at least I'm busy. I've actually been working on writing the second book in the series. It's coming along slower than I would like, but the fact that I have anything done with it is a huge plus.

If my book isn't picked, I'm planning on releasing them close together in timing. If it is picked, I'm planning to offer it to Amazon, and if they say 'no thanks' then I'll just publish it on my own. Either way it won't be a huge deal, and then I'll be on to new projects!

Thank you all!

Now is my opportunity to formally thank everyone for their support and for following along with this campaign. I put a lot of work into all of this (both writing up the blog posts, running the campaign, and writing the book itself) and to a large extent it is a relief just to be done with it.

I can't thank you enough for your support, and I hope you get a free copy directly from Amazon. Even if you don't, however, I'll make sure to offer free copies up to everyone who nominated after the fact!

A little bit of analysis

Should you spend money on your Kindle Scout Campaign? When it comes to Kindle scout and spending money and why hot and trending and pageviews matter, there are a few launch elements to keep in mind:

*Sales
*Reviews
*Also-Boughts

Sales and also-boughts contribute to how Amazon recommends books. If your book syncs up high on another books also-bought list, then amazon will recommend your book to people who read the first book, and it caps to display 100 books (but could be considerably higher). Likewise, a book that is selling very well is more likely to be recommended by amazon to new readers, so getting sales begets more sales. Reviews show amazon how well their system is working, and thereby contribute a community opinion of the book that helps when recommending.

Kindle Scout books that are chosen are given to everyone who nominated two weeks before launch, and reviews are allowed to be loaded onto the book before launch. This doesn't contribute to sales, but it does contribute to also-boughts and reviews. This can give your book a huge leg up on recommendations, which means more sales, which in turn means more reviews and also-boughts. It's a sort of self-feeding cycle, and so the more pageviews/nominations you get the stronger the initial push to this cycle.

However, you don't need any of this to have a successful book launch, and many books are able to come out in one day and almost immediately attain huge success on the quality of the writing. Kindle Scout is willing to invest in these titles as well, because the goal is to add good content to their library. The best case scenario is good content and this early boost of also-boughts and reviews.

So, no, you don't have to spend any money to get selected. The biggest problem you face revolves around the possibility of not getting picked: investing in page views and nominations is essentially investing in your book's launch, and the more you get the stronger your launch is. However, if your book isn't chosen, then all of that investment is for nothing.

Hence, if you invest, you're essentially gambling that money, and either it can be a huge investment that will pay off in your book's launch through Kindle Scout, or it is a complete waste that could have been better spent on your actual book launch after you are declined.

One way to hedge your bets is, in your thank you note invite people to follow your newsletter for a free copy post launch (which essentially attempts to hold onto the benefit of pageviews and nominations) and to try and build excitement about your book, but even that results in an overall loss.

So, no, you don't need to spend money to get selected by Kindle Scout, and if you do spend money you need to think of it more as investing in your book's future than just running this campaign. Do whatever you can to build things up for after the campaign is over with. My goal with this blog (and why I spend money on my campaign) is as much to tell people what did and didn't work for me and help people put their money in the right places.

What comes next?

Later I will release a few very important posts about the Kindle Scout process, including a post about whether or not my book was picked and my launch plans with or without Amazon, a post about all of the services (paid and free) I've found over all of my campaigns through the years, and a post about all of my stats across the four campaigns I've run.

More Blog Posts