Is Kindle Countdown the new Free? Keeping books visible in 2014

For the past year there has been a good deal of hand-wringing over the question of KDP Select free promotions. Have they de-valued fiction, do they attract negative reviews, do they even work anymore? As anyone who regularly reads my blog posts knows, I have been a strong proponent of offering ebooks free for promotional purposes, and free promotions have been very good to me in terms of increasing my reviews and keeping my books visible and selling.

However, I also believe one of the distinct advantages we have as indie authors is our ability to use our own sales data to respond innovatively to changes in the marketing environment. As a result, in the past year I followed a number of different strategies to keep the books in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series visible, including beginning to experiment with the new promotional tool, the Kindle Countdown, that has been introduced as part of KDP Select.

In this post I am going to:

A.   Review how successful the strategies I pursued last year were for selling books in 2013.

B.   Address whether or not Free is failing as a strategy.

C.   Compare the Kindle Countdown promotions to Free promotions .

D.   Assess whether or not Kindle Countdown promotions can replace free-book promotions as my primary promotional strategy for 2014.

A. Last March, I became concerned by the growing competitiveness within the eBook market as the number of eBooks published soared and traditional publishers began to adopt some of the strategies of indie authors. I listed six strategies I was going to follow in 2013.

1. Have free promotions less frequently. In 2012, I had noticed that promotions too close together were less effective, so I began to space out my promotions. As a result, whereas In 2012 I ran ten free promotions, resulting in 132,552 free downloads, in 2013 I only did four free promotions, resulting in 145,494 free downloads. This meant that fewer promotions in 2013 resulted in higher numbers of downloads with each promotion—and greater effect on the post-promotion rankings and sales from each promotion.

2. Use longer promotions. I had concluded that breaking up the five free days available under the KDP Select rules into 2-3 promotions was counter-productive (more time-consuming, more expensive, less effective). So, I determined to do fewer but longer promotions. However, I soon discovered if you used a BookBub ad with your promotion—most of the downloads came within the first few days, so I scrapped this approach and kept to one short free promotion per 3 month interval.

3. Schedule promotions near the end of the month. I noticed that most of the borrows of my books as part of the Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) were at the beginning of a month. It is as if all Prime Members suddenly say, “Hey, I get another free borrow,” when a new month rolls around. So, I scheduled two of my four promotions for the end of the month so that the resulting post-promotional visibility would be at the beginning of the next month. This strategy worked: In each case, the promoted book was borrowed at least 1000 times during the month following the promotion.

4. Do more 99 cent promotions. By 2013, the evidence was mounting that the one way to ensure a successful promotion was to schedule a BookBub ad. However, it costs almost twice as much to promote a 99 cent book as a free one with BookBub. Therefore, when a 99 cent sale of my second series book, Uneasy Spirits, had disappointing results without a BookBub ad, I decided not to pursue this strategy in 2013. I did, however, use a 99 cent promotion of Uneasy Spirits in conjunction with the launch of my third book, and I did begin to schedule 99 cent sales through the KDP Select Kindle Countdown option as soon as it was introduced at the end of 2013.

5. Experiment with promotions that are not tied to free or discounting. My premise here was that, if free promotions were becoming less effective, I would need to find alternative or complementary methods of making my work visible. In 2013, I did a book tour and guest posts on relevant blogs: I participated in book and Kindle Fire giveaways; I paid for banner ads and book sponsorships; and I paid to boost posts on my Facebook page. As far as I can tell, none of these alternative methods of promotion had any appreciable effect compared to the impact of a single free-book promotion on Bookbub.

6. Write more books and short stories. I published the third book in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Bloody Lessons, in September of 2013, and I put together the first three books in the series as a boxed set and made it available in November. I am about to publish a third short story. 

Conclusions: Looking at the effects of these six strategies, there is evidence that three of them proved effective. Having fewer free promotions increased the effectiveness of the promotions I did, placing the promotions near the end of the month did stimulate borrows, and publishing additional works did compensate for the lower royalties brought in by the first two books in the series. As a result, I was able to maintain my over all sales for 2013 near the level of the year before.

B. While the data confirmed what others were finding, that I needed more free downloads in 2013 than in 2012 to achieve post promotional visibility and sales, I was curious about what this meant in terms of the continued effectiveness of free promotions. I decided to compare the KDP Select free-book promotions I did in November 2012 to promotions I did in May and August 2013. (In each case I had used BookBub as the primary method of promotion.)

KDP Select Free Promotions Data

Nov 21-23, 2012  Maids of Misfortune Free promotion with BookBub

 
Pre Promotion Sales

   
Post Promotional Sales

     


Maids of Misfortune
5 books a day
56 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
6 books a day
10 books a day


Borrows
4 borrows a day
20 borrows a day

Total Downloads: 17,184

May 25, 26 2013 Maids of Misfortune Free promotion with Bookbub

  
Pre Promotion Sales

   
Post Promotional Sales

    


Maids of Misfortune
12 books a day
63 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
11 books a day
27 books a day


Borrows
3 borrows a day
21 borrows a day

Total Downloads: 30,000

August 6-8 2013  Uneasy Spirits Free Promotion with BookBub

 
Pre Promotion Sales

   
Post Promotional Sales

   


Maids of Misfortune
6 books a day
12 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
7 books a day
14 books a day


Borrows
2 borrows a day
 9 borrows a day

Total Downloads: 35,000

Conclusions: 1) Free promotions are still very effective under certain circumstances. In fact, the BookBub-backed promotion of Maids of Misfortune in May 2013 was slightly more effective than the November 2012 promotion of this book in terms of total downloads, increased visibility, and long-term increase in sales. 2) This didn’t hold true with all books under all circumstances. For example, my free promotions without a BookBub ad had no significant effects on subsequent sales, and the first book in my series consistently did better in subsequent sales (not in total downloads) than the sequel. 3) Because BookBub is expensive, doesn’t accept every book, and now will only promote a book every six months, authors, myself included, need to continue to look at alternative methods of keeping our books visible. Which is where the Kindle Countdown becomes important. 

C.  October 31, 2013, KDP announced its Kindle Countdown option for books enrolled in KDP Select. This confirmed my feeling that Amazon was systematically nudging indie authors away from depending on free as a promotional tool. I am not going to describe the details of the program, but I am going to report on the four Kindle Countdown promotions I have done so far and draw some conclusions about how they compare to KDP Select free promotions. Since I was experimenting, each Kindle Countdown I did went for a slightly different number of days and used different combinations of promotional ads. However, in all of them I kept the price at 99 cents throughout the promotion. The data also just represents sales in the US store, since my sales in the UK store remained minimal in all the promotions (even the one that was backed by BookBub).

Kindle Countdown Promotional Data

November 23-29, 2013, Kindle Countdown, Maids of Misfortune

 
Pre Promotion Sales

   
Post Promotional Sales

    


Maids of Misfortune
 4 books a day
 6 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
 4 books a day
 8 books a day


Bloody Lessons
16 books a day
12 books a day


Borrows
 7 borrows a day
27 borrows a day

Limited promotion, profit in sales of Maids of Misfortune at 99 cents, $804.18 

December 16-21, 2013, Kindle Countdown, Uneasy Spirits

Pre Promotion Sales

  
Post Promotional Sales

    


Maids of Misfortune
 6 books a day
 5 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
 8 books a day
 8 books a day


Bloody Lessons
13 books a day
12 books a day


Borrows
27 borrows a day
 7 borrows a day

BookGorilla promotion, profit in sales of Uneasy Spirits at 99 cents, $137.69

January 9-13, 2014, Kindle Countdown, Maids of Misfortune 

Pre Promotion Sales

  
Post Promotional Sales

   


Maids of Misfortune
 7 books a day
16 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
 6 books a day
11 books a day


Bloody Lessons
10 books a day
14 books a day


Borrows
34 borrows a day
21 borrows a day

Bookbub promotion, profit in sales of Maids of Misfortune at 99 cents, $1495.54

February 7-13, 2014, Kindle Countdown, Bloody Lessons

 
Pre Promotion Sales

   (6 day average)
Post Promotional Sales

    (18 day average)


Maids of Misfortune
 6 books a day
 5 books a day


Uneasy Spirits
 7 books a day
 7 books a day


Bloody Lessons
 9 books a day
19 books a day


Borrows
31 borrows a day
 7 borrows a day

Limited promotion, profit in sales of Bloody Lessons at 99 cents, $1142.04

D. Comparisons of the KDP Select Kindle Countdown and Free promotions:

1. Based on post-promotional sales, free-book promotions are definitely superior to a Kindle Countdown 99 cent sale (at least at this point in time). Not only did the KDP Select free promotions increase the sales of the promoted book, but they also increased the sales of the other books in the series. In comparison, Kindle Countdown promotions had weaker and less consistent effects on post promotional sales of all books.

For example, the BookBub-backed free promotion of Maids of Misfortune in May, 2013 increased the average sales per day of Maids fivefold from 12 books a day to 63 books a day. In contrast, the BookBub-backed Kindle Countdown promotion of Maids in January, 2014 only increased the rate of sales per day from 7 books a day to 16 books a day.

This differential was probably because the consistently large number of downloads in the BookBub free-book promotions translated into higher post-promotional rankings in the popularity lists than occurred with the more limited sales under the Kindle Countdown promotions.

In addition, the Kindle Countdown 99 cent promotions did not have any consistently positive effects on the sales of the other books. With free promotions, I always saw some increase in sales of the other books in the series. With the Kindle Countdown promotions sometimes there was an increase in sales (sales of Uneasy Spirits doubled after the November, 2014 promotion of Maids of Misfortune) but more often the sales of other books in the series remained stagnant or even dropped afterwards.

I suspect the difference here might simply be the result of the difference in the volume of books downloaded or purchased. If 1 percent of the 30,000 people who downloaded a free copy of Maids of Misfortune went on to buy another book, that would be 300 sales.  If 1 percent of the 3000 people who bought Maids of Misfortune at 99 cents went on to buy another book, that would be only 30 sales.

2. Kindle Countdown promotions—like free promotions––do have a positive effect on increasing the number of reviews. But again, as one would expect, the difference in volume between the two kinds of promotions will have an impact. Nevertheless, I must note that my Kindle Countdown promotions produced a greater number of reviews than I anticipated.

For example, in the month after the May 2013 free promotion of Maids of Misfortune I had 60 new reviews (which was less than .2% of the 30,000 who downloaded a copy of the book). The January 2014 Kindle Countdown promotion of Maids of Misfortune garnered 44 reviews in the first month (slightly more than 1% of the 3000 who bought the book for 99 cents). So, the Kindle Countdowns seem to be producing proportionately more reviews. I know that, for some of you, the low percentage of reviews in either case is frustrating; but if you do frequent promotions of any kind, as I do, the numbers do add up nicely and have a demonstrable effect on sales in the long run.

3. While Kindle Countdowns are not as effective at this point in producing sales after the promotion, at least you make some sales (and money) during the promotion. For people who have used free-book promotions and then had negligible post-promotional sales, this can make a Kindle Countdown a less risky proposition.

For example, let’s take my least successful Kindle Countdown promotion so far, where I had Uneasy Spirits on sale at 99 cents for 6 days. Because under the terms of the Kindle Countdown I get 70% of the royalties of those sales, I made slightly over $300 with this promotion. Deducting for the cost of ads, I made nearly $140 in profit.

However, if this had been a free promotion (with a similar low post-promotional sales  and the same cost for ads), instead of making money, I would have lost the $127 in sales that I would have made during the promotion if the book had remained on sale at the regular price. When you include the cost of advertising, this means I might have actually lost money with that free promotion.

In contrast, even with the higher cost of a BookBub ad for a 99 cent promotion for the January 2014 Kindle Countdown promotion, the risks were minimized by the money I made during that sale. The BookBub ad resulted in Maids of Misfortune showing up on the top 100 paid Kindle Book list for two days, which resulted in enough sales to pay for the ad five times over.

4. There is also the psychological benefit of selling and not giving away a book, even if the discounted book is only 99 cents.

As I wrote in the beginning of this post, I am not opposed to using free-book promotions to gain visibility for my books. I firmly believe that one of the reasons my books have sold so successfully is because I did free-book promotions. And, I would still advocate using KDP Select free promotions over Kindle Countdown promotions under certain circumstances. For example, I think KDP Select free-book promotions can help unknown genre fiction authors quickly gain readers, increase the visibility of their books, and garner a significant number of reviews.

But…I am no longer an unknown author and I was able to keep Bloody Lessons, which was published in September, continuously in several bestselling mystery, romance, and historical fiction categories without doing a single free promotion of the book. So, personally, I am happy that there is now an alternative method of promoting my books. I suspect for those who never liked the idea of free promotions, the Kindle Countdown may be a welcome alternative.

5. Finally, I believe that a good deal of the advantages that KDP Select free-book promotions have over Kindle Countdown promotions are the result of fewer readers having discovered the Kindle Countdown page. This should change over time.

In a recent post, Kristine Kathryn Rusch delineated different kinds of readers, one category being, Always Buys Discounted Books. This group has had two years to be trained by Amazon to look for free books when they go into the Kindle store to browse for their next purchase. However, Amazon has recently done a number of things to make it more difficult to find free books in the Kindle Store while at the same time they have worked to make the Kindle Countdown page a friendly place to look for discounts.

It used to be that when readers browsed best-sellers by category they saw the free books listed alongside the paid books. Now, they have to click on a tab to see the list of free books, and every time they start a new search they get sent back to the paid list.

At the same time, if a reader knows to look at the Kindle Countdown page in the Kindle Store (on the left under Daily and Monthly Deals), there are a number of factors that make these 99 cent books more enticing than if they simply discovered the books listed with the regular paid books.

The list of books is smaller, so it easier for readers to find a discounted book of interest to them. Today there are fewer than 2000 books on the entire Kindle Countdown list, and only 72 books in the entire Mystery sub-category. Conversely, if a reader went to look for a book in the Mystery popularity list, they would find there were over 60,000 books listed, and they would have to scroll down several pages to find the first book listed at 99 cents (ranked at #71). If your discounted book isn’t in the top 100 books in a regular category, it probably remains invisible—not so if your book is on the Kindle Countdown page within any category.

In addition, when a reader looks at discounted books on the Kindle Countdown page, they see the regular price of the book and how long the book is going to remain at that the discounted price (the maximum time the book is discounted is 7 days). This encourages the buyer to go ahead and buy a book that seems interesting (there is a countdown clock to add to that sense of urgency.) On the other hand, if they are looking for discounted books in the regular lists, not only does it take a lot of scrolling down pages to find them, but when they find a discounted book they don’t know if this book is a recent discount or if it is always at that price (and they can put off buying it) or if the book is at that price because it doesn’t sell well at a higher price. All of this might deter a reader from buying the discounted book.

The books on the Kindle Countdown lists are constantly changing since an author can only do a Kindle Countdown for books in KDP Select and can only do one Kindle Countdown promotion per-title in a 3 month period. In contrast, most of the books at the top of the popularity lists or bestseller lists, including those at 99 cents, stay there month after month, with only an occasional new book or newly promoted book rising to the top. This means that someone who is searching the regular lists for a discounted book is less likely to discover a new book to buy than if they searched the Kindle Countdown list.

Summary:

1. KDP Select Free promotions, particularly backed by a BookBub ad, can still be a very effective way to get post promotional sales, higher visibility in category lists, and a higher number of reviews.

2. However, the difficulties in achieving a successful free promotion have increased because of increased competition with traditionally published books, changes in how free books are found in the Kindle Store, the limitation of BookBub ads to every six months, and the increased competition and cost of getting a BookBub ad.

3.  On the other hand, while KDP Select Kindle Countdown promotions are not yet as effective as KDP Select Free promotions, they do offer an alternative for those authors who have their books in KDP Select––an alternative that has certain benefits for authors (like less risk of losing money and greater visibility for their discounted books).

4. I also believe that as more readers who always look for discounted books discover the Kindle Countdown page that the Kindle Countdown will become more and more effective.

5. For my own part, since I have found that even BookBub-supported free-book promotions were less effective for the later books in my series (and the first book in my series won’t be eligible again for a BookBub ad until July), I have decided that doing a Kindle Countdown promotion for each of my three books in the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series in turn is the best way to keep my books visible throughout the rest of 2014.

Obviously, your milage may vary. Books are not widgets––every book is unique. My experiences may be unique to my books. But I do hope that, by sharing my data and my analysis of that data, I have helped those of you who are struggling with questions like whether or not to sign your books up for KDP Select, whether to continue to use free promotions, and whether the KDP Kindle Countdown is a viable way to keep your books visible in the Kindle Store.

I would appreciate hearing from those of you who, as readers, have started to use the Kindle Countdown page and whether you have found it a good way to discover discounts.

For those of you who are authors and have done a Kindle Countdown promotion, I am interested in whether you found it effective and under what circumstances you found it effective (what ads you used, how long you had the book discounted, and if you used the incremental increase in price during the sales).

With knowledge comes power and with shared  knowledge can come shared success!

M. Louisa Locke, February 25, 2014