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KDP Select on Goodreads
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That's really a question of Amazon's policy, not Goodreads'. Other authors in the group may be able to provide information, though.(Having ebooks listed on Goodreads doesn't necessarily mean they are available for download here, of course. Only those that have download buttons are downloadable.)
my admittedly newbie understanding of KDP is that books in the program can ONLY be sold at amazon for an initial period of time (I believe 3 months) and THEN you can sell it elsewhere. However, the KDP program allows you to offer your book for free on 5 separate days (though you can bunch those days together in various combinations) and then its free for ANYONE, and some authors might be just alerting goodread members to that giveaway.
again, this is my understanding. Not a lawyer. Nor a taxidermist.
You must be exclusive to KDP Select (not selling elsewhere) as long as you are IN KDP Select. So you do it for 3 months. Then it's up to you if you renew for another 3, but while you're in the program, you can't sell elsewhere.But having your books listed on Goodreads doesn't make them "available" on Goodreads. And you can certainly tell your Goodreads readers that your book is available for free on Amazon right now.
Hope that helps. Best of luck.
You just have to either add the ebooks yourself or request in librarians group to for us to add for you. http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1...(Goodreads gets no data feed or automatic updates from amazon, their choice, so has to be manually added if exclusive to amazon or kindle edition.)
You can post out via blog or status update the details of your "free" promotion to goodreads fans and any member browsing your author page.
That "currently free" type of phrases or other promotional info/links (including purchase links to bookseller sites like amazon) doesn't go in the book description. Against policy and gets removed when found (policy because it's a data record in goodreads database and not a product page on bookseller site).
As Rosalind implies, what John describes is the KDP Select program, not all KDP publishing. You can publish an ebook for Amazon via KDP without Select's 3-month package of exclusivity/borrows/free days.
Karen, you're right. My apologies. I was referring to KDP select.
My concern about programs such as KDP Select are the impacts on new authors (I am one) and the overall book selling business. When my novel is free on KDP, it hit as high as #11 on Kindle/Science Fiction/Military. That was a nice high for a new guy. When the promotion goes away, I am back in the unknown.I think it is hard to break out of the "unknown" when the only people acquiring your work are the deal seekers. I know, I've been one of those deal seekers. There are many good novels available for free on any given day. When my book has a price associated with it, it is hard to compete with free.
I think the electronic world is putting a lid on fiction prices and author income. However the good news is that I am able to be in the game. The find an agent and/or publisher game is much harder to break into.
I write because I like to write. When I get something done, I am happy when I can share it with others and hear that they enjoy it as well.
James wrote: "My concern about programs such as KDP Select are the impacts on new authors (I am one) and the overall book selling business."Yes, I think its a two edged sword. It allows us to enter a market immediately that would normally take three years, if we were lucky.
The downside is our voice is drowned out by all the other new voices.
It will have to hit an equilibrium at some point, and either traditional publishers are going to have to make the process less arduous or the herd of self publishers will have to thin on its own.
Either way, I think reviewers are the catalyst that will determine exactly how this works out.
There are still those who prefer paper--I'm one of them. Also, if this hasn't been mentioned already--once you're in KDP select you have to unsubscribe after the 3 month period or you will be automatically re-upped--I found this out the hard way!
Nikki wrote: "There are still those who prefer paper--I'm one of them. Also, if this hasn't been mentioned already--once you're in KDP select you have to unsubscribe after the 3 month period or you will be autom..."Wow Nikki, thanks for mentioning that! I'm just coming to the end of my 3 months and I guess I missed this in the small print. Thanks again for the heads up!
Yes, I found it out the hard way, too, Nikki. Doesn't seem to have done much for my books either, though my latest ('The Other Side of Silence) is going for free on April 1st and 2nd (not an April Fool's joke!)if anyone's interested.
Oh yes lots of people get caught out and end up back in KDP select unawares.
Alexandra wrote: "Oh yes lots of people get caught out and end up back in KDP select unawares."And pretty soon you might not have a choice. In case some haven't heard: http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/41...
It is hard to miss... when I looked at that link last night it was 4 pages, last look was 28:)
I'm not sure if I'm answering the OP's question correctly, but yes, you can have your book here on Goodreads in conjunction with having it on Amazon. You cannot have your book for sale anywhere else. But if you had every excerpt of your book written on, say, various Facebook docs, that's not against their policies as there's no function to purchase books from Facebook or Goodreads, etc.
Hope that helps!
Rosalind wrote: "You must be exclusive to KDP Select (not selling elsewhere) as long as you are IN KDP Select. So you do it for 3 months. Then it's up to you if you renew for another 3, but while you're in the prog..."Thanks for your advice. Do you happen to know if we can sell a book on Amazon kindle (but not register it on KDP) and also sell it on Smashwords or Kobo?
KDP SELECT demands exclusivity and for that you get the Amazon Prime admission (where people with Amazon Prime can borrow the book and you get paid) and the chance to offer your book for free 5 days in the 90 day term, which some find a good marketing strategy.KDP without select you don't get these but your book still gets published on Amazon and you can also publish elsewhere like Smashwords.
It is ONLY exclusive if you tick the Select box. All the details are in the FAQ.
KDP is kindle Direct Publishing = Amazon.
A.L. wrote: "KDP SELECT demands exclusivity and for that you get the Amazon Prime admission (where people with Amazon Prime can borrow the book and you get paid) and the chance to offer your book for free 5 day..." Do you think that it is worth trying to sell ebooks using Smashwords? Thank you
Sure, why not? So long as you are not in Select you can sell your books elsewhere. Smashwords is a bit fiddly with the formatting but there is a free book available which could set you off in the right direction.
A.L. wrote: "Sure, why not? So long as you are not in Select you can sell your books elsewhere. Smashwords is a bit fiddly with the formatting but there is a free book available which could set you off in the r..."Thanks so much for the advice. Very much appreciated.
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.
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.
I'm dying to know what the "share" percentage would be for a fiction book in a more popular category. If someone does that, please share!
The other major achievement out of this exercise, is that I've accomplished my goal of marketing my main book KDP's Best-Kept Secret Revealed: How to Embed Videos and Widgets in Your Book Description in tandem. I've embedded multiple links to the "Secret" book from the "Buttons" book. The result? An undeniable association between the two. Now when you browse the "Buttons" page you get this: (Customers who viewed this item also viewed:)
(You may need to right-click and View Image to see the details.)
Thanks for reading. M. Eigh
P.S.: Just want to add a screenshot that show the Amazon "product correlation" algorithm does work. The screenshot below captures the use case scenario when you browse to my "buttons" book, you see the "Customer who bought this item also bought" prompt, which lists my "Secret" book right at the first spot.
M. wrote: "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...."
Thank you for sharing all this very valuable information.
Toni wrote: "A.L. wrote: "KDP SELECT demands exclusivity and for that you get the Amazon Prime admission (where people with Amazon Prime can borrow the book and you get paid) and the chance to offer your book f..."I've had one of my books published through Smashwords for about 5 weeks now and so far it has sold one copy through Barnes & Noble. It sells about one copy per day on Amazon.
For me, there are several problems with publishing on both Smashwords & Amazon. Part of the KDP agreement is that the electronic edition of the book is not sold at a lower price anywhere else. This makes it impossible - unless you have no integrity and ignore agreements you have freely made :) - to run reduced price, or free, offers in the way you can on Amazon just to get your book noticed. The 5-day free KDP Select promotions are what allowed an unknown author (me) to get my book up to number two in Amazon's search results for the book's main keyword.
The other problem I have with Smashwords is reporting. My book has moved from page 7 to page 1 in iBooks for that same keyword, but no sales have been reported because, it seems, Apple reports monthly. The feedback, through Smashwords, about sales in its various outlets is abysmal.
That said, while my book is performing well in its category on Amazon, I don't need to use KDP Select for the free days and so can afford to leave it with Smashwords for a while to see what happens. But my experience so far means that my other books will probably remain available only on Kindle and maybe Createspace for the paper versions.
I write self-help non-fiction so my experiences may not be helpful to fiction authors.
I sell for an Amazon, no question and I agree the reporting on SW is hard to deal with as all the stores report at different rates.Amazon will price match it, they will not kick you off. That can be a bit of a nightmare to put the price back up.
Some strategies work for some and not for others. It sounds like KDP Select works well enough for you Michael, which is great. As you say it may well depend on genre.
James wrote: "My concern about programs such as KDP Select are the impacts on new authors (I am one) and the overall book selling business. When my novel is free on KDP, it hit as high as #11 on Kindle/Science..."Great attitude, James. I also love to write. It would also be nice to recoup the money I spend on covers, editing, etc. My understanding is that Amazon is in the money-making business. If they think giving the book away will eventually lead to more people buying the book, its hard to argue with their expertise. I'm just in the process of deciding to go to KDP Select with The Secrets of the Montebellis. It's my first novel, but may pave the way for the second.
Megan wrote: "Nikki wrote: "There are still those who prefer paper--I'm one of them. Also, if this hasn't been mentioned already--once you're in KDP select you have to unsubscribe after the 3 month period or you..."Sounds like this needs to go on a Google calendar. :D
Cheryl wrote: "Megan wrote: "Nikki wrote: "There are still those who prefer paper--I'm one of them. Also, if this hasn't been mentioned already--once you're in KDP select you have to unsubscribe after the 3 month..." Thanks for mentioning this everyone. I didn't know this. I will have to make sure that I act as soon as the 3 months is up.
We are well served by the auto-renewal of our titles in Kindle Select. We primarily use our Kindle editions to promote our authors' work and boost their rankings. We want to make it easier and cheaper for students to get them, for people to loan and borrow and talk about them, and for people to think about giving the paperbacks as gifts (with the incentive, now, of getting their own Kindle copy for .99 via Matchbook).Because Kindle readers and reading apps are so ubiquitous, we don't fool with any other forms of ebook publishing. But we are a publisher, not an author, and what we publish (poetry, flash fiction) is not likely ever to be bestselling.
We take advantage of what Amazon does for us so we have the resources (time being a biggie) to acquire and publish more good books. We are happy to pay Amazon (via CreateSpace, Kindle Direct Publishing) their cut because we couldn't do what we do without them.
My understanding is you can not sell KDP books anywhere but Amazon, yet I see other authors list free Amazon ebooks, is this permissible?