KDP Free Promotions - a few things I have learned

This blog post is really for the benefit of authors who may not have promoted their Kindle books using Amazon's KDP Select Programme, but who may be wondering whether it's worth doing so. It will also be beneficial for readers who want to learn how they can help support their favourite authors when there is a free promotion going on.

There is a bit of controversy surrounding the whole KDP Select Programme. Indie authors and their books definitely benefit from promotion by a massive online retailer if they take part in the Programme, but the question remains: do the benefits of this type of promotion outweigh the detrimental effect? The result of KDP Select is that there are now millions of free books flooding the market. When will readers find time to read all of these books? Is it a fad? Will readers get bored of these promotions when their Kindles are full to bursting? Will actual sales of books diminish as a result?

I'm going to ignore the controversy for the moment, and tell you a bit about what I have learnt from my own experience of the KDP Select Programme. Right now, I'm thinking that, yes, maybe this promotion has helped me because a lot more people now have my book on their Kindles. Whether they ever get around to reading it or not is another matter. For now, I prefer to believe that they will read it, love it, and buy the rest of my books -- yes, my imagination is still working ;)

Here are some tips for those of you who are thinking of doing one of these promotions:

1. The first time I did the promotion, back at the end of July, I didn't know about all the websites and blogs that promote free books... I think I only tried to get listed with Pixel of Ink, as that was one that I heard has a big following. I now know that there are many similar sites, okay not all of them have a large following, but they are growing each day.

Here's a handy blog post I found about the list of sites that will promote your book. It also has a list of Facebook pages that you can post to. Bear in mind that going through this list takes a while, so don't leave it until the last minute! http://katrinaparkerwilliams.wordpres...

2. I was told about the benefits of Hootsuite by a few of my author friends. I used the free version during my promotion to schedule some Tweets on Twitter during the night when I couldn't be online. This service will send the Tweets out at any time you choose, so you can market your book taking into account different time zones.

3. Readers can help their favourite authors by posting links to the free books on their Facebook pages and other social networking sites and by tweeting and retweeting links on Twitter. I think it's important to have a more or less constant online presence during the promotion to get the most benefit from it.

4. Set up a Facebook Event for your free day and invite your FB friends and ask them to invite their friends. Everyone loves a freebie, so it's a good way to get extra promotion.

5. Goodreads allows you to set up Events. I did that for my first free promotion but not for the second one as I ran out of time! But I think it's also a good way of letting more people know about your free book.

6. Another tip I heard was that in the days following the promotion you should keep your book at a low price as there will be readers still seeing your book on the bargain ebook sites and if it's priced low there's more chance they will buy it. After my first promotion I priced my books at $2.99 and had quite a lot of sales in the month after the promotion. This time I've reduced the price to 99 cents to see if this will mean even more sales. In the past couple of days I have had more actual sales than I would usually have in 2-3 months, so it seems like a good tactic.

As indie authors we are always looking for ways to help more people hear about our books as our resources are limited and we cannot afford expensive advertising. I think Amazon KDP Select is a way to help promote and kick start sales. Whether those sales continue, I think will be based partly on luck, and partly on continued marketing after the promotion.

Good luck to all authors out there who are considering using KDP Select.

Here are some stats, from my promos:

In my first promotion, which was a 2-day one (and bear in mind that I didn't promote on the free sites), I had just over 1,700 free downloads of Coincidences.

This time, it was a 3 day promotion and I had just over 13,800 downloads.

The majority of the downloads in my first promotion were in the UK (about 1,400). On the second promotion, the majority of downloads was in the Amazon.com site (over 10,000).

I did the first promotion - 2 days - on the weekend Saturday & Sunday.

The 3 day one, I did on Sunday-Tuesday, as I had heard that weekdays are better for downloads. The Monday was the day I had most downloads in the Amazon.com site, over 6000.

Coincidences went to #1 in the UK free Kindle store in the Drama Category, and #5 in the top 100 free Kindle books

On Amazon.com, It went to about #18 in the top 100 free Kindle books, and went to #1 in two of the free Kindle store categories: Drama, and Theater.

I hope this information will help.

Remember, if you missed the free promotion for Coincidences, I am leaving it at 99 cents/77p for the next week or so. US/India:http://www.amazon.com/Coincidences-eb...
UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Coincidences-...