KPD select free days or Coundown deal?

[D.S]

Hi Authors, wondering if anyone has had recent experience using the KPD Select programme with either Free Days or the Countdown deal?
Any opinions about which programme is better?
Thanks.

[J.J.]

I put Dream Dancing on the Free Days program for 5 days and it brought a lot of traffic to the site. There were a lot of downloads too. In that aspect it was successful, the downside is that it brought more traffic than it had in months and I didn't get royalties for it.

[Alexes]

I did a Countdown deal recently. Didn't sell a lot of books, but that had more to do with the limited amount of places to promote a new release with few reviews and less with the Deal. What I learned from the Countdown is 1) the US and UK deals have to be set up individually. I missed the pulldown menu and wound up NOT setting up the UK. 2) Amazon puts a lot of restrictions on your book surrounding the countdown days regarding price changes. Read the instructions carefully. Good luck!

[James]

With KDP select you are limiting your market. Not everyone uses kindle. You are missing out on costumers using ITunes, Kobo, B&N, and a few other markets.

[Alexes]

James wrote: "With KDP select you are limiting your market. Not everyone uses kindle. You are missing out on costumers using ITunes, Kobo, B&N, and a few other markets."

James, would you mind sharing what percent of your sales come from the other markets? I hear some authors say it's worth it, and others say they get few to no sales outside of Amazon.

Thanks.

[S.]

I've done freedays. Only a handful of download though :(

[James]

Hi Alexes. It took a while to build up a following in the other markets, but on average I get about thirty percent from other markets. It also depends on the talent of the author. A poorly written story will not sell in any market.

[James]

Here is an interesting article from Smashwords.
Amazon and Hachette Book Group are locked in an epic battle over the future of e-book publishing. The outcome of this dispute will have permanent ramifications for publishers and indie authors alike.
You can read the rest of the article here.
http://blog.smashwords.com/

[Al "Tank"]

It's a two-edged problem. Free days used to be gold, but Amazon changed their formulas and now you have to give away several thousand to make it worthwhile. Most of the time when we've tried it recently, we've actually lost ground because there were no PAID sales during the give-away.

Paid sales are the new "gold" in the Amazon world, "free" is almost worthless.

We haven't tried the countdown thing, since we can always offer a book for 99-cents without the restrictions of KDP Select.

[D.S]

Gives me a lot to chew over. Thanks for all the interesting and informative posts!

[Al "Tank"]

Alexes wrote: "what percent of your sales come from the other markets?"

We look on Smashwords sales as "found" money. Amazon is the 800-pound gorilla in the eBook world.

However, Smashwords has a number of features that make it worthwhile (and found money is always nice too). For one thing, we can use Smashwords' coupons to give away copies to people who want to review a book.

And you can price books as free on Smashwords without any restrictions. Several of our author's short stories are free on Smashwords while Amazon insists on 99-cents. Amazon loses sales here because free lead-in shorts can sell more books in a series.

Amazon will post some shorts at free, but they reserve the decision to themselves (like Hugh Howey's original Wool).

[J.D.]

I did the KDP Select thing just a few weeks ago, and I have mixed feelings about it.

I'll echo what a lot of other people are saying in that I don't like going exclusive with Amazon, but I really wasn't giving up much by doing so. At this point the vast majority of my sales had been on Amazon anyway. Though I will say that once my 90-day exclusivity period is over I'll be reposting back on Smashwords for their great distribution to other markets.

While my books were running their deals on KDP, I had one come down to .99 and the other go free. The free did way better than I expected, the other not as well, but both went out the door much, much faster than they had been up until that time. So the short-term gain in attention is very nice, but I'm really hoping to get more in the long-term from that burst exposure. (Like those who got the free book deciding they're willing to come back and pay for more.)

I come out of it thinking that it's a great marketing tool, but I don't want to cut out non-Kindle folks forever. I'll likely come back here and there to KDP for that shot in the arm, but they won't get my undying loyalty.

If you're interested, I also blogged about it here:

http://www.jdbrinkfugitive.com/2014/0...

Good luck!

[J.D.]

I tried KDP Select last year with my debut novel NORTHMAN and had around 7k free downloads resulting in a spike in paid sales and reviews. It was worth it, but I have no idea how many people actually read it and how many books are languishing in the quantum nether regions of thousands of Kindles.

This year in early May, I tried the same book with Countdown and only sold around 40 books. Too early to say if it has had a positive effect on sales of my other stories, but it has raised interest in my latest one.

I believe that not too far in the future all ebooks will be free to download. The copyright laws are meaningless now and new authors seem willing to sell at 99 cents or zero for a 'platform'. I have a blog article about this if anyone is interested. http://wp.me/p24Exb-bt

As for Smashwords, I've never found it effective and sold very little through it so haven't bothered uploading my latest novel: AND SOON THE SONG.

Hope that helps.

[D.C.]

J.D. wrote: "I tried KDP Select last year with my debut novel NORTHMAN and had around 7k free downloads resulting in a spike in paid sales and reviews. It was worth it, but I have no idea how many people actual..."

I've never tried Countdown because most of my self-pubs are cheap (nothing over $2.99) and I occasionally knock those down to .99 for a few days or weeks. Anything I have on Select has had at least a few free days.

I've had very good luck with the free promos (My last Foxgrove was on the UK Top 100 in its genre in the paid store for about a week after its free days, and I've hit number one in the free store for genre a few times). Now, I'm a hybrid, and any real money I make is off my traditionally published books, which are both more expensive and much more widely distributed, so what works for me does not necessarily work for someone else.

I think it's extremely unlikely that all downloads will be free anytime soon, despite the difficulties of enforcing copyright in the new world order. There are a number of people currently publishing who would be better served by Wattpad than Amazon, but I don't think all traditional publishers are about to disappear, and some indies make real money off the self-publishing platforms. While some new authors do price very low, I've seen plenty who price very high.