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Scheduling Ebook Sales on Amazon (not in kdp select)
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You have to manually set your price to run a promo outside select. You can run a temporary free promo, but it's not easy. I wrote to Amazon to ask them about this and they are much more likely to do a temporary price change than a permafree, but you need to have the book free in another market. Plus, it would need to be free in all territories you are looking to run the promo in.As to pricing, you have to uncheck the box to price separately in other markets. It's checked by default.
Thanks so much for the quick and helpful response, Christina! I am only looking to do a temporary sale, not a permafree so hopefully I can get that set up.
Christina wrote: "As to pricing, you have to uncheck the box to price separately in other markets. It's checked by default.
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Could you point me in the right direction for this box? I just looked again at the pricing page in kdp and I'm not finding it... but maybe I'm just blind. (The only two boxes I see are the worldwide rights and only certain territories ones above the pricing section.)
Under each individual territory it asks whether you want to price based off the .com price or manually set your own price. If you set your own, it will tell you what the minimum and maximum are for each territory. I think that in order to see this, you now have to expand the pricing tab to see all markets.
Thanks again, Christina. I set everything up on Kobo and waited for the price changes to go through there for the promotion and then I contacted amazon about it and they got on it and set it up for me very quickly. So yeah, it would be nice to be able to do it myself, but at the same time it took a 2-minute e-mail to get the same result so I'm happy with that!
Now to see how this goes!
Nice! We're you able to give them an end date or is it open?
Yes, I gave them an end date (Sep 28th) since you suggested that might help sway them. They didn't ask any questions, just set it up for me, so I'm guessing it helped! Hopefully this time-frame will allow me to play around with things and stack different promos as I go along in between the day job and trying to actually write more stuff! lol
I've got a few planned/set up already based on some of the links from this group's promo sites thread and I'm excited to see how this goes!
That's very good to know! I'm taking some books out starting early next month and I'm likely going to try to distribute through Pronoun, but it sounds like going to Kobo directly might be a good idea.
Nice! Good luck with your distribution for those titles! I would recommend going to Kobo directly, the dashboard is very user-friendly and any changes I make always go through very quickly and without any hassle.
If you want to run sales on multiple platforms it might be worth looking into publishing through Pronoun. It's a self-publishing company, like KDP, but they distribute to Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and Google Play. They require your book be distributed to Amazon, but the others are optional.You can control the price from Pronoun, including on Amazon, and it does allow you to make your book free on Amazon, either temporarily or permanently, without the nuisance of getting Amazon to price match.
Just an update on this. I've done a couple of free promos for my different novellas since starting this thread and I wanted to give a little update of my experience so far. If you are doing this I would recommend giving yourself a day or two in between requesting the price-change on kdp and the actual advertising/promotion.
Most of the times I tried it someone got on it right away and the prices were changed within a couple of hours of me sending the e-mail, but the last free promo I did it took almost a day for someone to handle it (I guess it was a busy time around Halloween?). Even when it was done it took a long time for the change to come into effect on some of the different markets and for a couple of them I'm not even sure it did at all. I also had a couple of free downloads after the price was set back to its (non-free) original price so I am still trying to figure out what went on there.
However, like I said, it worked out quickly and hassle-free for me the other three times I did it, so don't let my warning deter you, just give yourself a few days on either side of the promo for everything to be fixed.
Hope this helps someone.
What I always do is market mine down to $0.99 on Amazon and make it free on Smashwords. It does take some time for the price change on Amazon-up to 48 hours if I am remembering correctly.
Anyway... I'm trying to schedule a sale for a few days on Amazon and I'm running into some issues. Any advice would be much appreciated.
1) There's no visible sale scheduling section on kdp, so it looks I will have to manually change the price and remember to put it back after the sale, whic is fine, but it would be nice to have the option to just set it and forget it (btw, that option does exist on kobo)
2) It seems that FREE is not an option. I find this a little bit ridiculous. I had heard of people having issues setting things to permafree on Amazon, but surely, I can do a limited time sale/giveaway! (Is there a better way to do this than set it free on kobo and wait for amazon to price match?)
3) This isn't really related to the sale, but I'm finding that Amazon insists on making the prices across its platforms equal which means I am stuck with one marketplace having weird prices like $2.41 or something. (another fyi, kobo lets me - encourages actually - fiddle with the prices so they look pretty in all marketplaces so I can end them in 0.99 instead of .41 and random stuff.) Anyone know a way around this?
Thanks for all your help in advance!
PS: I'm not trying to advertise kobo here... as you can see I am branching out from kobo due to low sales (also, they and everyone else on the internet encourages going wide) - but it does seem to have some pros!