Self Publishing Diary: The Real Promotional Value of Amazon's KDP Select Program

So I enrolled my thriller-tastic novel THE DOOMSDAY CLUB into Amazon's Kindle KDP Select program and I have to say the results of that experiment were quite eye-opening.

One of the interesting aspects of the KDP Select program was the ability to put my book up as a free download for a short period of time. From the KDP Select promo control panel window, I chose 12/31 to 1/2, knowing there'd be a good amount of traffic on Amazon over the New Year's holiday weekend.

You don't accrue sales royalties for free books downloaded, but I figured there would be some good branding opportunities to be had by getting in front of new readers. That seemed obvious.

What didn't hit me until a couple of days later was that the REAL promotional value is not so much in the hope that free book downloaders will come back and buy more of my stuff BUT instead now THE DOOMSDAY CLUB is now newly associated with dozens of other similar genre books thanks to Amazon's brilliant discover mechanism otherwise known as: Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

You probably can't see it because the screenshot has compressed to fit this window, but now THE DOOMSDAY CLUB is part of the buying history of 13 pages of associated books. (That's 8 books per "page"). I can't tell you exactly how many "pages" of associated similar genre books were there before. I think it was less than four.

Over the course of the free promo, TDC was downloaded for free over 1,000 times and rose to #4 on the charts for free books in the sub-category of "Men's Adventure" so I think the exposure it received during the free giveaway period was pretty decent. However, because I believe the real value in this promotional tool is that whenever someone happens to look up one of many other books listed in the "Customers Also Bought" list for TDC, my book will come up on that page as something similar-minded genre fiction consumers picked up.

Now, I have seen new paid downloads after TDC went back to $2.99 so I think it will help this book get more visibility in a very crowded market for thrillers… HOWEVER… and I'll let you in on a little secret that you can now be partly privy to if you've managed to read this far…

Last year, on top of the 11 other books of mine I released, I also wrote and published two other books under secret pseudonyms. (One non-fiction, one fiction… and no, don't ask because I personally find it much more amusing to keep it a secret for reasons that are interesting only to me.) The purpose of this particular experiment was to see if I could release books that would get zero social media mentions and have no website. Basically, I was just releasing these books on Amazon, etc… to see if they would sell. So, I did the same KDP Select promo with one of them during the same exact period and have now seen the paid downloads really take off for the same reasons I expect TDC is now getting more traffic.

So yes, I'm becoming a fan of KDP Select and I'm contemplating enrolling more of my books into the program to enhance their discovery potential by Amazon consumers. I especially think I may make all of my new titles exclusive to Amazon for their initial three months in release. We'll see…

Stay tuned…