When Amazon KDP Select Meets Social Share Buttons

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When Amazon KDP Select Meets Social Share Buttons

Hi folks,

Want to share with you my latest experience with KDP Select. I put my book How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages for a two-day free giveaway last Sunday and Monday. I was planning to take advantage of Friday and Saturday rush traffic, but it took KDP about 24 hours to publish my book, and when it finally became “live” in KDP Bookshelf, it was somehow not available on Amazon for another 4 hours. So I missed the scheduling and had to settle for Sunday and Monday.

I did not advertise or list it on any of the free book sites, simply because of the book’s category (Kindle authorship and Web marketing.) I did Tweet like crazy and got about 12 RT’s. One of them from freeebooks.org (I think) and they listed it on their site.

The book did extraordinarily well for not costing me a penny to advertise. It stayed at #1 free download spot for most of the time in Authorship and #2 or #3 most of the time in Web Marketing.

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“How to Embed Social Share Buttons in Your Kindle Book Pages” # 1 Most Popular on Amazon

Some 8 or 9 hours before the end, I was hit with a very bad luck. An author posted a 2-star review on the book, a day after K.A. posted a 5-star review on it. It turned out to be a mistake on the reviewers part. But she did not respond to my inquiry as to why she did not like the book until the next day when the free promo was over. She subsequently pull the 2-star review but the damage was done. The book went down in the last few hours from #1 in Authorship to #4.

Overall, It had 190 downloads in US. Worldwide total is probably 240. Not bad for a 2-day efforts in a very small niche category. The day after the promo saw 4 purchases. Not very impressive, that inopportune mistaken 2-star review definitely did its damage.

Since all the links are blasted out by myself, I made about $15 in commission for embedding my Affiliate id in the URL.

The one thing that stands out — something I have done for the very first time, and is what this book’s topic — is the set of floating social share buttons I put on the book page (you can see them live here on the book page: http://amzn.to/18xrEHq.

Out of the 240 downloads, I got 22 shares out of these buttons. Not quite but roughly 10 percent. I think it is a significant number. These 22 shares are something I would never have gotten if I did not put the share buttons in the book page.

Had I not had the misfortune of getting a erroneous bad review at a very bad time, my promo would have finished with much more robust finale and the number of shares may be much more, so would the immediate sales afterwards.

Plus, it does not cost anything to put these viral buttons on my page. Well, if you want to do it, it will cost you a whopping $0.99 for the know-how contained in my book. All you need to know in order to drop those buttons in your book pages is carefully documented in it.

Predictably, Amazon’s “product correlation” algorithm shows it magic once again. Now, when you browse to the “Buttons” book, you get the “Customers who bought this item also bought” prompt, as shown in the screenshot below: