Experience with the KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Select campaign

There has been lots of talk about the KDP Select program in the industry and being at the lowest end of the food chain I most certainly won't benefit financially from it, however I highly appreciate the program for one simple reason: You get 5 days of "download for free" for every book that you enroll in the program. (The condition of enrolling is that your book must only be available in electronic form on Kindle and nowhere else. Since I haven't come around to publishing my Dome Child novel in any other e-book format yet, I thought, why not, and joined the program).

I don't know if other benefits of KDP Select will unfold for me, but the 5 days "download for free" feature has turned out to be a definite benefit.

The KDP Select program allows you to use your 5 days within a period of 3 months in whichever pattern you want (single days, all 5 days in a row, etc.). I enrolled in KDP Select on the 29th of January and thought to test out the download for free feature the weekend after, starting Friday, 3rd of February and lasting through Sunday, 5th of February. The remaining two days of the "download for free" campaign I wanted and have saved for the HalCon weekend (a local SF convention), which will happen on the 14th and 15th of April. I am scheduled to hold a panel at HalCon talking about the indie-publication of Dome Child and want to offer the panel participants a free download of the book. I am yet undecided as to whether to make the 14th and 15th free or rather the 15th and 16th. Well, I still have some time to decide on that.

Back to the first three days of "download for free" campaign.

I created my first ever "event" on facebook and invited some 120 of my facebook friends to the free download period = those are still people who know me already in one way or the other. The one most difficult thing for the "new" author is to find an audience that does not know you personally for some reason.

So, people I knew were starting to download but then, maybe, hopefully, finally some buzz effect was created by the following factors.

a) Ranking:

After about the first "download for free" day, the Dome Child rose in the ranks of "free books in the SF/adventure category" and entered the top ten, where it stayed for most of the free download period climbing as high as rank 4, averaging out at about rank 7. There is a wonderful advantage of this feature. Presumably other people than the author's friends look into this ranking, see the book there and, since it's for free, they download it. Yeah! Thus the author managed to make people who don't know the author buy his/her book.

b) "People who bought this item also bought that item"

I, of course, have no clue about Amazon's algorithms but I suppose that after a certain amount of downloads your book enters the feature of "people who bought this book also bought this and that item". Meaning, a new feature pops up on the homepage of your book showing "people who downloaded this also downloaded that". Thus the top ten on the SF/Adventure list are cross-pollinating each other and each book appears on the other's page. I think this is the second factor that makes some people download the book of an author they have never heard of before.

c) Finding the author

Last but not least, a little side-effect. When I searched for my name in the Amazon system before the campaign, the Dome Child eventually popped up, but also with a comment "did you mean Regina (someone else)". Now it's just me who is popping up when you enter my name into the Amazon search system and right below the Dome Child glowers my photo from my Amazon's author page. That means to me that the Amazon algorithm has learned who I am (smart algorithm, I like you) because I probably have exceeded a certain threshold of downloads etc. for the thing to recognize me.

I don't know the final number of downloads yet and I won't until the mid of March (around the 15th of each month Kindle gives you the detailed sales figures of the previous month) but I am really thrilled as to how many people actually did download the free Kindle version.

Whatever the figures are, I think I will be pleased with them, since this is the first mini "buzz" I managed to create thus far with any one of the many marketing methods that I tried so far.

Which means, I am pretty glad that I entered KDP Select and I appreciate that Kindle offers this opportunity.

Now, after the "download for free" period is over, sales have of course plummeted again, but I hope the "people who bought this book also bought…" feature will stay up there for quite a while now and maybe lead to one or the other customer to pay 2.99$ to download the Dome Child.

One way or the other, there are still two more days of "download for free" campaign left and I'm looking forward to the hopefully next mini-buzz in April.

Thanks to everyone who downloaded the book, and now I hope that everyone who did download it will read and like it as well