UK Amazon Kindle Forum discussion
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KDP Select - What do you think?
Not sure if anyone is still visiting this thread, but I'm going to shout out anyway! I've held out for about six months, waiting for Amazon to come begging on their knees for me to join 'Select', but they are tough customers! So, to save their face, so to speak, I'm prepared to meet them halfway, and enrolled my precious book 'The Vanishing Cyclist' to KDP Select (OK, not quite halfway).
Just so I'm clear, this is NOT me caving in completely, oh no! This is most definitely the tail firmly giving the big dog a jolly good wag.
When I'm a millionaire, I'll let you know how it went!
Rosen wrote: "My trailer for Straight Out of University has had many views on YouTube, but not sure how many of those have resulted in sales of the book."Chalk one up - I bought it after watching the trailer ;)
We had a long debate about whether to put The Ghost of Mandy Rosental in 'Lesbian' for this reason. The plus is that it is quite a small category... the negative is that anyone browsing that category is probably not looking for a fairly uncompromising study of addiction and downfall set in 1920s England!
I won't put my books in a misleading category. I think that hurts you in the end.The categories are not all available during the Kindle publishing process. You need to set it to "unclassifiable" and then contact support and give them the category listing you want, which you can find by looking on te category tree down the left-hand side of the Amazon pages (open it up by pressing the search button).
J.S. wrote: "Chalk one up - I bought it after watching..."Did you really? Brilliant! Wow! Thanks, and thanks for letting me know.
I've read several articles that say you should pick a category without many books in it, because you'll get greater visibility but that seems like a massive over-simplification to me.1. Some categories are browsed more than others.
2. If there aren't enough sales in a category, I don't think Amazon bothers to chart it.
Rosen, I agree - just because you are at #20 in an obscure subcategory doesn't mean you get more visibility than being at #90+ in another category. That obscure subcategory may seldom be visited by browsers compared to the other category.
(thanks, Patti...)Hello,
I put Theo Mallier's manifesto on for free the other day, though I want to put it out free all the time, but can't as I am enrolled in KDP.
What I thought of was, to put it piece by piece on my author blogs on here, every couple of days, to try and drum up support for his party, and therefore story. There's lots of sections to it and I could put the whole thing on eventually.
But, does anybody know, how would that affect the KDP Select terms and conditions? It would never be on here as the full thing...I don't really know if I should do it or not.
Any help would be great.
Thanks,
Andy.
ha ha...thanks...I guess they would all be excerpts, though. I'm not going to put the full book on, just most of the manifesto that is part of the main book. I guess I would end up with about 80/90% of it on here eventually.
As for the main book, I will probably just put bits and pieces of that on.
I think you'll find you are NOT allowed to put excerpts of your select books on your blog or anywhere else for that matter. Unless KDP have altered it recently.
I saw 1 borrow in 3 months - you betcha bottom dollar I got it out of there asap.
I remember reading something about not posting any excerpts anywhere, but I looked through the terms again later and could not find it - do check, though, as I may just be going blind ;)
I think, for the manifesto, I am going to wait until the ninety days is up and then unpublish it, and probably put it on smashwords for free, and just keep putting 'normal' blogs on until then. Thanks for the help.
Andy.
M wrote: "I think you'll find you are NOT allowed to put excerpts of your select books on your blog or anywhere else for that matter. Unless KDP have altered it recently."I remember reading that too. I don't think that's changed either.
I contacted Amazon about it. They said it was okay to have samples from books enrolled in KDP Select on your website as long as they were no longer than the sample provided by them. So 10% is okay.
Thanks very much for finding that out, Steve. I started thinking about it because there were a couple of parts I definitely wanted to put in a blog and just thought, why not the whole thing?
so.....ten per cent.....
I dug out the email from KDP. Here it is.--------------------------
Hello,
You may offer a sample, excerpt or teaser of your KDP Select-enrolled book on your website, as long as it doesn’t include a substantial portion of your book’s content. Up to about 10% of the book’s content is a reasonable amount.
Keep in mind that a sample of your book is also available on your Amazon.com detail page, and we recommend linking to your detail page from your other sites.
I hope this helps. Thanks for using Amazon KDP.
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Rachel Abbot has a great post on her blog about how to market kindle books. http://rachelabbottwriter.wordpress.c...
In it she discusses the benefits of putting your book in a smaller category. Also the ability to give away books using KDP select can increase your visibility as for some reason you come up on lists of "customers who bought this book also bought " although you gave yours away free.
Finally people who download a free copy of your book and leave a review will come up as "verified purchaser" although they got it for free.
The payout per borrow for April was $2.48 I believe which is actually higher than what you earn if your book is priced at $2.99.
Hope that helps :-)
Steve, thanks for clarifying what's permitted.Ellie, thanks for the link to Rachel's blog post and for your added notes. :)
I've just done a couple of promotions. Earth Magic, a love story was free for two days and had 214 downloads (plus an extra 28 tagged on a week later) in .com and resulted in zero additional sales. .uk had about 260 downloads plus another 30-odd added later. Pretty pathetic really but I did very little in the way of promotion of the free promo. I have had a handful of sales which I might have had anyway, and those sales have slowed right down.Then I put Death in Spigg's Wood up and I had about a fifth of the number of downloads in the UK compared with my first (brilliant)promotion, but the .com downloads were almost as good. A good side effect was sales of the other crime novels in the series.
Post promo I have had a boost in the UK but nothing like it was the first time... it just didn't catch the wind, even though it got into the top 100 free-to-downloads.
On .com I have had a handful of additional downloads.
I'm not sorry I put it up because I got an increase in sales and visibilty all round. What I want is for the books to promote each other so that someone buying one will be attracted to another. It's beginning to happen. But sooooo sloooooowly.
~~~
People seem to be confusung "Borrows" with "Free Promos".
A book in Select can be borrowed on permanent loan by .com Prime customers only. They are restricted to one a month so are more likely to borrow the more expensive books. I have had very few borrows.
The free promotion applies everywhere the book is sold.
Yes, you lose revenue when people grab it for free but you gain revenue in increased sales afterwards.
What I won't do is put the next in the series on free promotion. (Or so I say, but then I hadn't intended to put DISW up but I'm glad I did.)
Used wisely and with a lot of luck, the Select programme can still work but it's not guaranteed to be a success.
I alerted ENT and POI a month or so before I went free this time with Dark Seduction. ENT posted on the first day, and POI on the second. The ENT promotion netted about 1400 downloads, and the POI has added another 2000 to that number. The book is currently hovering around 133 in the free chart on .com but will finish it's free run in an hour or so. I will have to see whether any sales result from it or not.
Yeah, they changed the excerpt clause in the TOC! :-)
M wrote: "Yeah, they changed the excerpt clause in the TOC! :-)"Sorry? Huh?
I think that happened some weeks ago. Section 1, right?
I can't find the change. What's happened?
I wonder if part of the post-select sales 'bump' is due to people coming in from third-party sites and clicking without noticing that it isn't actually free any more?(I had two sales this morning within hours of a promo closing, one of which was refunded almost immediately, so I assume the buyer thought it was going to be free, and then got a refund when they realized it wasn't.)
Anyways... I'm out now - following Harrison Davies into iBooksLand, where I hear the streets are paved with gold!!
KDP Select has worked well for me so far. Better than I was doing before at least. However, the great 'gold' rush that used to happen definitely isn't there cause of Amazon's changing algorithms. Basically there are three different lists that people see and you have to guess what list you are seeing. This post breaks it down a bit.Understanding Amazon's new algorithms is as easy as abc
Well, I just enrolled The Hunter Inside into the Select programme and plan on doing a giveaway probably next weekend as it's my birthday, so will let everyone know how I do!
I am in two minds about KDP Select. I think it works better if you have more than one book. Am currently running a short sales promotion where the price has been dropped to $1.99 and .99p. The free promotion will be a last resort - the reason being that we are mainstream published and have, so far, always been paid for our writing. That probably sound weird and old-fashioned!
So I was going to take my book out of select as so far I have seen no benefit for the exclusivity but the yesterday I get some loans from the library. Not many but they are my first:) I am now very excited. Personally i am not sure about the "free" days. I MAY consider it when I add book 2 but I am not sure. I do like the idea of having a cross platform book as anone eithout a kindle or kindle app cant buy it. I am not expecting huge sales but it is nice to see people getting it.
I have no idea how the KOLL pot works but will see. I expect unless you get a lot of borrows it may not seem worth it. For now my Select runs out at the end of next month so I may think on it then.
George wrote: "My concerns:1. Will restricting access to an ebook in other formats lead to an increase in piracy in those formats.
2. If readers download your books under the free promotions, it does not seem th..."
As far as I know even if you opt out the Slect runs over to the end of that term. I have disabled the automatic renweal but still tied into it for the duratuon of the 90 days. I still cant add my books anywhere else for that tiome but I can get loans and promos
I'm not a fan of Select. I keep the price of my books pretty low as it is - if you can't be bothered to pay 72p for a copy of my work, I can do without you as a reader to be honest. There's a 10% sample after all, and there's no shortage of my work online. I've seen the free promotions work for a few people, but recently not so much. Anecdotally, a friend of mine who is a ridiculously big name in comics recently released his first novel with a big fanfare and several free days. He got thousands of free downloads, but so far only eight reviews back from that, and his sales ranking is plummeting. If this can happen to an established author who can pack out signings and has topped bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, Select's not going to do much for a slim volume of short stories about haunted photocopiers.The only people who really benefit from Select are Amazon, trying to build market share by locking people in to the Kindle system after they download a whole library of free reading material.
That's great business strategy for Amazon, and obviously I wouldn't be a member of this group if I didn't like the Kindle, but I want my work to be available across platforms (even if I've only sold 3 copies on iTunes to date), and I'm not helping anyone to build a monopoly.
I'm still a fan of Select. My book that is available on Smashwords, etc. has lots of sample downloads, but they rarely turn into sales, especially not on Smashwords. This month, my YA fantasy was not selling well on Amazon, (in fact, sales had stopped completely) so I had a two day free promotion. I gave away relatively few compared to other promotions, but it is now sitting on the Epic Fantasy Bestseller chart for Amazon UK. As long as it's still working for me, I'll stick with it.
Alexandra wrote: "So I was going to take my book out of select as so far I have seen no benefit for the exclusivity but the yesterday I get some loans from the library. Not many but they are my first:) I am now very..."I was wondering if many authors had been lucky enough to be 'borrowed' - a big part of the Select marketing – but so far, apart from best-selling ebook authors, I hadn't come across anyone else who had managed it....
I've had 3 borrows recently. No idea why it's taken a while to get any!
Nicola wrote: "I've had 3 borrows recently. No idea why it's taken a while to get any!"Thanks, Nicola. It's good to hear that there's a British author able to share in the $600,000 fund.!!!
I'm not British (Australian), but I had 75 borrows last month - the most I've had. Usually it's less than 20.
Katie wrote: "I'm not British (Australian), but I had 75 borrows last month - the most I've had. Usually it's less than 20."Congratulations Katie. That's fantastic news. Well done!
Did you try reporting the malicious reviews to Amazon?
I've been so lucky to avoid sharp practice on Amazon so far (as far as I can tell, anyway). I've seen some shocking stuff on other people's books though. I'm slowly climbing the reviewer's greasy pole and am up to 67,000th or something on the reviewer ranking.
I've only had one Kindle Select borrow since I published my book on March 22nd this year. Must be because it's priced at 77p. Readers borrow the more expensive books, of course.Will probably leave the Select programme at the end of this second term.
Natasha wrote: "I've only had one Kindle Select borrow since I published my book on March 22nd this year. Must be because it's priced at 77p. Readers borrow the more expensive books, of course.Will probably leav..."
That's one more than I've had! (On two books!)
I agree with Natasha: it's the more expensive books that tend to get borrowed, naturally enough. But I also think the visibility associated with the free promo days helps a lot. For me, Select is still proving to be the most powerful promotional tool ever.Last month I had a successful free week for a book priced at £1.99 ($3.10), which was downloaded 40,000 times. Since then have had over 80 borrows, far more than the one or two my books usually get. So it seems there's a direct connection between the two.
Gulp. That's amazing, David. Well done. Do you broadcast your own Select promo days (and if so, do tell us how and where!), or do you just set up your promo days and watch the downloads? ...
I definitely broadcast them - I think this is the key to making them work! If you can get onto any of the US promotional sites like Pixel of Ink or ENT, that's what tends to result in a sudden surge in downloads. And that does inevitably lead to increased sales for a few weeks afterwards.Tony Slater started a very useful thread on the KUF forum which lists a lot of places where you can promote your free book:
http://www.kuforum.co.uk/kindleusersf...
Hi David, The kuforum link looks great. Thank you so much for sharing it. I'll definitely use it for my next promo days. I might avoid Pixel of Ink, though. It's looking rather too wholesome (Christian). I don't think they'll be snapping up my title too readily. ...
I will be leaving at the end of the respective periods. I don't get many borrows and have never had much success from the free promos. So Smashwords beckons I think!
UK Amazon Kindle Forum
Books mentioned in this topic
The Mutilation Machination (other topics)Dark Seduction (other topics)
Revolution Earth (other topics)
The Hunter Inside (other topics)
Dark Seduction (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Harrison Davies (other topics)Michael Wallace (other topics)
I'm ..."
Linda, I did get an email from Amazon a while ago saying 'If you liked
Mark of the Dragon Queen (my own book), you might also like...and then a list of books, including two others of mine that were in Select, but not the one that wasn't. I don't know why they sent it to me, because I've never bought MotDQ. And it didn't seem to make any difference to sales.