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KDP select, what'cha think?
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The problem with Select are the sales I'm missing from other venues. Free days 'after sales' wear off after 30 days. Then you have to do it again. It's not a cycle I'm comfortable with on a long term basis.
As a launch - I intended to experiment.
I've heard it is better if you have multiple books, so I am going to have my fourth ready as soon as this promo is over. The Maze is free to download on March 3 and 4, Saturday and Sunday.http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0061SB3TC
It's not rolling like the first one did, but I forgot today was Saturday until about 6 p.m.
Virginia, you brought up another question. Does anyone have data on whether or not the day of the week you run your free days is better than others?
I just picked Saturday and Sunday thinking people would have time to look for a book. My second two day freebie was a disappointment. 154 US vs. 819 the first time. 25 UK vs. 72. 6 De vs.14. And not one single cross sale or borrow. My numbers for cash sales have been slowly and steadily rising and now I so feel I am in the tank.
Virginia wrote: ""My numbers for cash sales have been slowly and steadily rising and now I so feel I am in the tank. I ran for three weekends in a row. don't recommend this as I had the same fall off in freebies. I was also disappointed in follow up sales. Now it has been three weeks and I'm starting to see some sales. I guess it was vanity that expected readers to dive right in and NOT wait three weeks to come back.
In the future, I'm going to space out the freebies into one day events maybe 3-4 weeks apart. On both occasions where I did two days, I would estimate the freebie downloads were 15% of the prior day.
Subsequent weekends didn't work either.
For the record, I am no longer enrolled but I will re-enlist when ready to do another promo in about a month.
Don't be discouraged. Have you picked up any tips from this thread? If nothing else, I looked up your book on Amazon and immediately recognized the cover of The Maze from another discussion on book covers. Its memorable.However, I was going to post the cover in this reply but it didn't come up in the add book/author. This tells me you might need some technical assistance of some kind to increase visibility. Just guessing, though. you could be an international computer hacker and I don't want you mad at me.
OMG!! I got my first "borrow". Whole new spin for me. I was so up I went on a bunch of those advertise your work blogs. Yeah, I used to be an internationally known hacker but was not so good at it. When I click the link it never comes up so I have to search my name and then go back and reclick the link and there it is. Some glitch somewhere. Thanks for looking though.I never heard that about my cover. Nice.
Notice also how absolutely arbitrary the profile pic is. Site is too complex I think.
Day of the matters quite a bit, weekends are better for paid sales usually so my next three day promo will be during the week. First run saw 6332 downloads in two days and hitting #2 in civil war history paid. The slide has already begun but three weeks later itis still in the top 10 in that category and selling well.
friend of mine went KDP Select... her first day of downloads - 22,000 !good grief!
The only thing that bothers me is the exclusivity.
I hadn't published in any other format so it was a no brainer. Last month's share of the borrows pot was $2.01 per borrow and I had 105 borrows for the month.
That's a lot of borrows!May I ask how much your book costs? I've heard speculation that Amazon Prime members are more likely to borrow more expensive books, which would make sense. (I'm not saying they wouldn't flock to your book in any event!)
Phillip wrote: "I hadn't published in any other format so it was a no brainer. Last month's share of the borrows pot was $2.01 per borrow and I had 105 borrows for the month."
I'm at the beginning of my KDP Select experiment. It has definitely made a difference in sales, but I had so few sales my first month, that wasn't too hard. I had a handful of ebook sales the first month the book was out. I did KDP Select at the very end of the month and had 1800 downloads during a free two-day promotion, pushing my novel, Sleeping Tigers, up to #16 in contemporary fiction. I think that made the book more visible on other Amazon pages; after that, I started selling. Not huge quantities--but I've sold 25 books and had 4 borrows already in just a week of the new month, so for me that's a big increase! I'm going to do my free promo again in April for two days after I get more book reviews (they're all just starting to come in now) and after I do a blog tour (which ends March 26). I think it was a good thing for me to do, but would have been better if I had also run some promo to let people know the book was free during those days through the various ebook publicity channels (tweeting, facebook, pixel, ereader news, etc.) which I was too dumb to do. I guess the nice thing about all of this is that you can always learn as much from what you didn't do as you learn from what you did! Thrillers and mysteries do the best with KDP Select, I think, but it can definitely work for literary/contemporary fiction.
I still hate the exclusivity of it. I like being able to give book reviewers free digital copies by letting them have a smashwords coupon that lets them download the books in any format they prefer. Not sure how I would replace that if I switched.Also, I have my book for sale in print, too. Does that mean I could still leave all the summaries and teasers out on the internet that I have in different places if I just linked only to the print copy from them?
I could still have both books on my own site as well, since I have Amazon links for which I am a an associate, right?
KDP Select doesn't limit any kind of print sales. I actually give most book reviewers paperback copies of my novel, because they seem to prefer it; they often then use them for giveaways on their blogs. And you can still have the links for both books on your site. The other thing about KDP Select is it's only for three months--then you can decide whether to stay in or opt out. Hope that helps.
That does help, Holly. Thank you for clarifying. I'm prefer to give reviewers e-book copies because most of the ones I work with have e-readers, so that will be something for me to consider. I'm also a few months out from releasing the second book in the series I'm working on. I guess I'll have to decide what kind of timing would be best if I'm going to give it a 90 day try as far as that next book coming out. Thank you again. I have a lot to think about.
One more thing, can you gift your e-book on Amazon. For instance, could I give copies to reviewers that way? I'm just trying to decide how I would replace the Smashwords coupons I currently use for that. Any insight?
I've never actually tried it, but yes, I believe you can. They're pretty good about answering questions if you want to ask through Author Central to find out how to do it--or through KDP.
Thank you for that. I'll see what they have to say about it. :)
Yes, you can gift your book and it will count as a sale once the person redeems the gift. Some people use this as a method of upping sales briefly for rankings purposes. I have my book at 3.99 and yes, the higher the price the more borrows you get, so the lower the price the less likely to have it borrowed but exposure seems to mean more for either than just price. If you have your book at .99 or 1.99 you actually made more last month on borrows since it is based on a share of the pot over individual price.
When your book is on Smashwords, you can download .epub and .mobi copies of it. Even after your book comes off Smashwords, you'll have those copies, which you could send to reviewers. Whether that violates KDP Select's terms, I don't know.
Good to know. I'll have to look into that. Thanks.
I just uploaded my short story, "My Lovely Wife, Edith," in KDP Select. We'll see how it goes!
Definitely go with KDP if you want to sell books! I'm into my third round with the program and LOVE it!
I went with KDP Select in July, because my Nook sales just weren't cutting it. Very happy with it... I think the borrow option gives authors a great impulse buy opportunity.When BN.com decides to invest in their website and make it more user-friendly and reviewer-friendly, I'll go back to them, but right now Amazon is working harder for my business as an indie author.
My sales through SMashwords are higher than they EVER were with Pubit. It doesn't make a lick of sense. But we're in a crazy business.
KDP Select results are starting to tail off according to the people in the business. Too many people watering down the program.When it started out, there were few enough people that an individual book could get noticed. Now there are so many books in it, that the "noise" level is almost as high as in the regular market. It makes it difficult for a buyer to actually find your book unless it manages to migrate to the top -- which takes sales, which is what you were hoping for in the first place when you signed up with KDP Select.
Holly wrote: "Definitely go with KDP if you want to sell books! I'm into my third round with the program and LOVE it!"I think I'm in my third go around too and I have seen steady progress in sales, royalties, and rankings. What I see is my sales rankings jump after a promo and then they taper off but they don't drop to the prior levels.
Al wrote: "KDP Select results are starting to tail off according to the people in the business. Too many people watering down the program.When it started out, there were few enough people that an individual..."
Even with the promotions KDP Select does? I would imagine that would give you a leg up on the general market. But then again maybe I'm wrong on that one.
If you put a low-rated book on KDP Select, it will show Prime for free, but it doesn't boost you in the searches. I don't know what the Prime members get as far as promotional materials are concerned, but when we ran a very successful book through KDP, we got almost no "borrows" and no new sales until we started doing some of our own promotion via the "free giveaway" program and some aggressive marketing.And our results for our last promotional program were much lower than we've had in the past. I asked one of our advertising partners about this and she says everyone is noticing the drop-off in results.
Again, it's all about the field getting crowded. When you're competing against 100 other romance books, your romance book (position 238,675 in paid sales) has a good chance of being noticed. When you're head-to-head with 10,000 of them (many in positions in the low thousands or even hundreds), your problems get MUCH bigger and your results disappointing.
Lesson: there's no "easy fool-proof" way to market books. You have to work at it and innovate, rather than lock into one method and expect it to work forever.
So, stay light on your feet and don't be afraid to try something new (within your ad budget).
Virginia wrote: "It will show Prime members can borrow for free. If you do a free promotion, which, on Amazon, you can only do if you are enrolled in KDP, it is free for anyone to download. That includes people n..."The folks on the German site seem great about taking free stuff, but we've never had a sale from that country. U.S. Military stationed there on a budget?
If you can't give away at least 1000 copies, you're not going to get much of a bump in real sales. That's where the hard work comes in. AND where the competition is getting nasty because everyone and his grandmother is doing it. Too much free stuff dilutes the pool and you end up in competition with too many people for even the freeloaders to find you. That's my point.
I wonder what the next "big thing" is going to be and how long before it gets saturated.
Al wrote: "If you can't give away at least 1000 copies, you're not going to get much of a bump in real sales. That's where the hard work comes in. "I seldom give away more than 300-400 in a one day promo. My sales rankings have consistently improved. The freebie hovers in the low to mid 20K in overall but will taper off into the low 40K after about three weeks. I usually hit the second page of the top 100 in 'free historical fiction'. The freebie is 'teaser' and have led to sales of the 'real' books at an increasing pace. I would say all three have increased by 100-120K in overall sales rankings since starting select. I'm not sure the sales rankings are all that accurate. One of my books has four sales less than the other this month and the ranking diff is almost 20K.
For laughs I tried to find my book using the keywords I put in, the categories I picked and the tags on the page. I couldn't find it after going in ten pages. I don't think a reader would browse much deeper than that so I have to attribute the Select as the catalyst.
I' coming out with another book in a different genre in probably November and I will do a teaser giveaway on it, too. Hopefully the books in separate genres will drag each other up the ladder.
As for military in DE, I think they probably still use US of A for internet. The DE site is in German, after all.
Ken wrote: "Al wrote: "If you can't give away at least 1000 copies, you're not going to get much of a bump in real sales. That's where the hard work comes in. "I seldom give away more than 300-400 in a one d..."
We're not happy unless we can get a book to the first page of a search by keyword. You're right that when your book gets further back, your chances of being seen diminish rapidly.
Don't worry about the day to day fluctuations in your sales position. It can vary by several thousand positions during the day based on a flurry of sales followed by a lull. Amazon's calculation seems to be updated often. As long as you're below 100,000 you're at least selling something on a regular basis. If you're above 200,000, you're wasting your time in this racket -- at least for that book.
I'm outta here. I don't really belong since I work for and represent a publisher.
Good luck with self-publishing. It's a tough way to break into the market and a LOT of non-writing work, but there are just enough people (small minority) who do it BIG to keep writers dreaming of "making it" that way. Who knows? The next success story may be about someone in this group.
Here's my verdict on KDP Select now that I have enrolled "My Lovely Wife, Edith" in it. Basically what it does is make it available to Amazon Prime members to download for free in exchange for you making the work available exclusively through Amazon for 90 days. Amazon Prime is a membership through Amazon which gives you, among other benefits, one free borrowed Kindle ebook per month. When Amazon says you can earn money through KDP Select, it is these borrows you will be paid for. Now, after three weeks of being enrolled in KDP Select, I have seen 0 Amazon Prime borrows, but I attribute that to the fact that "My Lovely Wife, Edith" is a short story and who is going to waste their one free borrow a month on a short story when they can have a full length borrow. All the while this is going on, your ebook continues to be for sale to non-Prime members at your regular price.
For enrolling in KDP Select, Amazon gives you five "free promotion" days. These kick your ebook from the "Kindle Paid Store" to the "Kindle Free Store" for 24 hours. You can schedule the five days in a row or scatter them to your choosing. I would recommend scheduling your free days during the week as I saw very little activity during weekend free days or on Labor Day. My verdict on this is the "promotion" part of it that Amazon does is fairly weak. I noticed on my first free promotion, when I posted it on Facebook and Twitter, I had 80 free downloads in one day, but when I was silent and left Amazon's promoting to its own devices I was lucky to get 5 free downloads. So I've concluded Amazon doesn't do much to market your work despite the way they make it sound. Fortunately, I did notice some carryover business on my other ebooks, "Sorrow and Demons" and "Waves and War" when I started my free promotions on the first short story.
In conclusion, if you're getting great sales from other markets like Nook and iBooks, the cost of sacrificing those markets to give Amazon exclusivity is not worth the benefits KDP Select offers. However, if you have several works out there and the sale of one is lagging, you might as well put it in Select for the extra exposure and hope the free downloads will build interest in your other titles.
I've got two books up there, one because I don't want to make anything from it, the purpose was to promote fairy tales from a region in Japan I worked in.I've put the second book on KDP to see if it helps in promotion. I'll review it after 90 days and seeing if the 5 promotion days do anything for downloads.
Very interested to hear how others are doing with using KDP.
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The free days on Kindle Select have been my most effective sales tool so far. This weekend, my book Fast Times in Palestine is free for Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00513NHNI) -- hopefully it will go as well this time as last time!