Experimenting with Amazon KDP Select

I made an important decision today. I determined that, as I really wasn’t selling many books through all the other book vending channels, I would put all of my eggs in one basket. That basket is Amazon, the great titan of the modern publishing world.

I have enrolled all four of my current works (‘Empire Under Siege’, ‘Phoenix Rising’, ‘Paradise’, and ‘The Bloody King’) in Amazon’s KDP select programme.

The KDP select programme works in two ways:-

1) It allows members of Amazon ‘Prime’ to borrow your book for a month through the ‘Kindle owners lending library’.

2) It allows members of Amazon’s new subscription service ‘Amazon unlimited’ (which they pay $9.99 a month for and allows them to read as many books as they like) to download your book.

What does this mean? I hear you say… Well, if an Amazon Prime member borrows your book or an Amazon unlimited subscriber reads more than 10% of you book, then you earn a share of the ‘KDP select global fund’. For the month of September the global fund stands at 3 million dollars with the average amount being paid for each book being about $1.80 (as far as I can tell).

The only downside is that you have to remove your book from all other vending channels. This is a bit of pain but it may be worth it… (I hope).

Will it work? Will this move generate additional sales? Who knows… But I don’t really have anything to lose as the books weren’t really selling through the other channels anyway :-)

I feel like I am experimenting a lot with different things at the moment but I guess that is the lot of the indie author. I will report back on my little experiment when I have some useful data. In the meantime, if you are an Amazon ‘Prime’ or ‘Unlimited’ member, why not pop on over to Amazon and have a read of my books? :-)

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