Questions on KDP Select

[Tamara]

Hi Everyone,
I'm hoping someone can advise me.
I recently published my second novel Unsung Odysseys on Amazon Kindle and enrolled it in KDP Select a few days ago. The novel is a re-telling of Odysseus' return from Troy through the voices of women.

I have two questions:
The ebook is for .99 cents, so I'm guessing it is not worth enrolling it in a countdown deal since it's so inexpensive anyway. Is that correct? Or have some of you had success with running a countdown deal with a .99 cent book?

My second question is about running a free book promotion. I understand I can run it for five days. I am thinking of running it in one day increments and spreading out the five days over the 3 month period? Is that an effective way to run it? If not, can you suggest an alternative?

Thanks in advance for any advice/suggestions you can give me. I appreciate it.

[Jacques]

I think you're probably right about the countdown deal. I think it makes sense to use one day increments. Another writer has explained to me the value of spreading the pricing on a promotion across a few days, like this: 1st day free, 2nd day .99, 3rd day 2.99.

Of course, this last advice only makes sense if the regular price of your book is higher than .99. You probably know best about this, since it's your book, but I'd recommend not using .99 unless the book is very short (under 60k words), or is the first in a series, and you can make up in follow-on sales for the lost revenues on the first book.

Also, a lesson I learned the hard way is not to rely on free KDP Select days alone. You also need to schedule some other sort of promotional advertising for the same day, or it just won't be very effective.

Best wishes

[Tamara]

Jacques wrote: "I think you're probably right about the countdown deal. I think it makes sense to use one day increments. Another writer has explained to me the value of spreading the pricing on a promotion across..."

Thanks for the advice. I set it at .99 cents because I was told it would have a better chance of selling at that price. I'll spread the free promotion days over the 3 months and promote it on Goodreads as well.
Thanks, again. I appreciate it.