My Second Experience with Amazon's KDP FREE Promotion
As you read below on my Febuary posting, I had shared my first experience with the KDP select free promotion. I had shared also that for me, the experience was a successful one for being a new author. VERY new author, I want to stress. I have only been a official Self-Published author for about 8 months now, so you can see I am still learning it all. I first want to send outa big thank you to everyone! And I mean EVERYONE! All authors that I have interacted with, have been wonderful to me! Very open-hearted individuals with tons of kind advice and always willing to give tons of helpful tips.
Ok, with that said, let's go on to my experience with KDP promotion, again knowing this is for a newbie author. I am stressing this ,so for you well know authors who are reading this and have not tried out Amazon's KDP promotion, this will not discouraged you. I know my success story is small in comparison to others. So here goes…
On my first promotion of my book One of Them , I did this:
Did my free promotion for 1 day.
I promoted on Facebook, Twitter and tried getting listed on the two sites below (thanks to Emlyn Chand the genius behind Novel Publicity and Author of Farsighted).
Ereader News Today (ENT) - Which I did not get posted
Pixel of Ink (Did not get on that one as well)
This was a chance that Ihad been told about in Emlyn's article about her own experience with the KDP free promotion and what she did. You can read here - http://bit.ly/wS1USM (I told you she is wonderful!)
You can also check out Novel Publicity Network- http://on.fb.me/yijbv8 This is Emlyn's Facebook group for authors, this group is filled with many amazing authors who are so giving of great tips, helps and shares. They are all wonderful and all have left a wonderful impression on me.
Emlyn Chand of course also has a website (a must for readers and writers) – www (dot) novelpublicity (dot) com.
Ok…back on track now. Now to my results for my first run (so you won't have to read below). This is what happened for me:
Did the run on a Thursday and ran it for 1 day
Uploads: about 500
Sales after : 18 books
I got up to #644 in the Kindle Free store, ranked #2 Children's - Girls & Women and #12 Children's in People & Places
My total sales that month: 32 books (this includes my other books as well)
My ranking before: Median was between 200,000-300,000
My ranking after: I lingered between 100,000- 200,000 after that and throughout the remainder of the month - so you see there was an improvement, even if little.
Now if your thinking , hey A.D. that's still pretty low. Remember, I am a newly self-published author. An author who is leaning as she goes in the writing industry and on building a platform, promotions, etc… a broke author :0) So you can understand my limitations.
But again, please do not get discouraged! For you new authors like me, who have sold little to no books per month, this should give you hope. KDP does work and not just for us but for the more know authors as well. I have read many success stories from both groups. Outputs do vary greatly, but just because one's is larger than yours, doesn't mean give up. You see that my first run had a small output, but it was still a good one. Now on my second one, it improved even more. So it does improve! For me, I will say KDP had been a success story for myself and each time and this is why I say that.
Mysecond run:
Did Free promotion for 2 days this time (heard that was better) and on a Mon & Tues. (Days do matter, but everyone has a different turn outs, some say weekends, some say beginning of month and some say definitaly do them around holidays)
My uploads this time: about 3,000
My Amazon ranking went to #98 (better than I ever thought!) and hung between #98 & #110 (this is for FREE books). Was #1 in the Girls & Women again and #1 in People & Places again.
What I did on Promoting:
Sent announcement to ENT- awesome guy by the way! My book was listed! (later in the day when it was up there)
Shared on Facebook & Twitter (not too much though- by Emlyn's advice)
And that was it.
I had sold 4 books of One of Them before the promotion days. After, I sold 15 books, but remember this month is still not over!
For borrows: ( Amazon just changed the menu, which better shows your borrows, uploads and sells) I received 2 borrows, 1 is for my other book (The Key #1 Of The Anna Kippling Series)
Total book sales (including my others) 32- so far…. remember still in March! So who knows by the end of the month :0)
Can I call this an improvement, oh heck yes! My ranking the next day did go down to 150,000-160,000 as Emlyn said in her article, but it went up the following day and now I am lingering between 15,000-30,000. I am continuing to see sales daily and it's great! My other books have picked up a little too. To top it all off, I even earned a review on this one from a very kind reader…it was a five star!
Now let me quickly explain to those of you who might be laughing (but in good heart) why I am so happy over 32 sales. My sales for the two months prior to this one (Dec & Jan) I sold 6 & 11 books for the month. Now for Feb & March I sold 32 in Febuary and 32 so far for March and again still counting! So you can see a big jump there. Not only have I gained more sales, I have also gained more readers which was the true drive for me behind this. Out of all of those readers, yes I do know this, maybe half will read it and then maybe half of that, will turn into dedicated readers. The ones who will come back and buy other books of mine will help in those sales.
Bonuses to this promotion are recieving reviews, which many of us need these (I raise my hand on that), climbing higher in the charts( this gets you book better noticed) and it increase awareness about you, the author.
Now for the readers who are reading this, please don't think any of us authors as greedy hungry monsters. Ok… well….some are, but MOST of us are not :0) We truly love what we do and want to share it. To make a decent living from what you love, everybody wants this. So it is our goal, we do dream of being the next John Locke or Amanda Hocking, but we know its not a truly realistic thing. It can happen, but not for everyone. We do prize our reviews immensly, so it's not just about the profits. So for you wonderful readers, please do not be afraid to leave a review for your author, even just clicking the stars. They mean a lot to us!
So to sum it up for you authors or authors in the making, if you're still on the fence or still feeling a bit discouraged, you can also look at it this way… KDP is free. Yes you do have to be "exclusive" with Amazon for 90 days to get this, but is that really such a bad thing?
It's just 3 months and for newbies, that's not much of a sacrafice. For those who are more established, it's to me still worth a try. You only have to do one book. With KDP, in not having to pay for this and getting good results, if not better. What do you have to lose? Yes, I know some would love to point out, it took you two tries to do as well as some. Yes is may take more than just one try. There may need to take a second or a third or even a fourth, but you see it was still a success.
For anyone starting out from a bottom, the only way to go is up, right?
I would like to wish everyone who gives this promotion a try, tons and tons of good luck! For me, I pay attention to my fellow author friends and their FREE promotion books, I do download many (I do have Genre preferences), but if I don't upload your book, I at least share the promotion. Alot of authors do this, its what we do, because we are awesome!
May loads of good karma flow your way,
A.D.
