Any authors in the KDP Select Program? Showing 351-400 of 1,505

[Lee]

One other thought - prompted by Daniel's posts: the most effective KDP Select giveaway may be giving away the first book of a series. I'm trying that and the jury's still out. The theory is that if the first book is really good, people will pay to read the others. I wish now that I had more than 2 books in the series already published. I will publish numbers 3 and 4 this year. So far there does seem to be some boost for book 2 from giving away book 1.

[Daniel]

Good points, Lee. I agree that the biggest potential for cross-sales is in making the first book of a series free.

However, I've thought about this a lot and concluded that using KDP Select with a series is a bit tricky.

If you want to make the first book free to spur sales on subsequent books, ALL of the books in the series should probably be in Select. It doesn't make sense to have books 2 and 3 available at B&N if readers can't buy book 1 there.

Adding *new* books in the series to Select as you release them may help you get the word out about the new title, but would it translate into sales for the earlier volumes? It seems like a free campaign for book 2 would mostly benefit the readers who have already read book 1. Would someone who has not read book 1 grab book 2 even if it were free?

I don't know the answer to those questions, but I'm going to give Select a go with volume 2 (just for 90 days though) and see what happens. After that, I'll add it to the other venues alongside volume 1.

[Lanie]

Lee, making friends and participating in community discussions may not be the fastest way to gain fans, but it does create reliable, long lasting relationships, and those will help more in the long run than any "instant" sales tricks.

As for my ad, I put $30 in my account around Mother's Day. I didn't get many hits at all at first. I changed the wording a couple of times until I found something that seems to work. From the last week in May until now my sales have doubled and my account is almost empty. But like you mentioned, this isn't all that grand when you consider the fact that I was already only seeing double digit sales.

The idea that a second book helps promote the first, I believe is a sound one. I think if nothing else it can help people who just stumble across your work see that you are trying to make a serious attempt at making a career of writing. As far as whether or not KDP Select will prove useful in that situation remains to be seen.

[Lee]

Daniel, my plan is to only give away book 1 and not enroll the rest of the series. Once I get enough of book 1 out (about 5,000 downloaded so far) or giveaways numbers fade (which may already be happening), I'm going to pull it from Select and put it back up on Nook.

[Paul]

Has anyone here put a book not enrolled in KDP Select for free on Amazon for 2-3-4 days to see if that generates sales?

[Beth]

Paul -- my understanding is the only way you can offer books for free on Amazon is if they are free elsewhere and you ask Amazon to "price match" it.

[[deleted user]]

I am not in the Select programme, in fact its introduction spurred me to distribute my books through Smashwords, so they are now available virtually everywhere from Apple to Sony. I have twelve books, some of which are in a series. All are at $2.99. I have subsequently made two books free. One is a stand alone Romance, the other the first part of a four part Science Fiction Fantasy. Both are free practically everywhere and are now being price matched as free on Amazon. I have several reviews for the Romance and one or two for the Science Fiction story. Both have been downloaded in numbers at both Amazon, Barnes & Noble and elsewhere. The Romance is around 30 in Romantic Suspense and the other three parts of the Science Fiction series which are still priced at $2.99 are beginning to see sales on B&N. Apart from being involved here I don't do any marketing whatsoever. I am in a waiting game.

My advice? Write several good books and cross your fingers...

And no, I haven't made any money from my writing to speak of.

David

[[deleted user]]

David wrote: "I am not in the Select programme, in fact its introduction spurred me to distribute my books through Smashwords, so they are now available virtually everywhere from Apple to Sony. I have twelve boo..."

I'm really not trying to be rude but how does that advice help if you haven't made any money? You should writer several books but crossing your fingers? Marketing in conjunction with having your book everywhere is what helps.

[Don]

It seems this thread has moved to KDP select and marketing, which to me is awesome! For months now I have been trying to figure out good marketing ideas and when I look at my attempts I'm not really coming up with much of a decent answer.
I do sell triple digit books almost every month from the start and have tried using FB, Twitter and all the author and book sites I can find to push sales. To be honest though I don't think any of them have worked well so far. I also haven't had a give away for a couple months but my numbers were still decent. So I'm not sure how well they work either. I see people here quoting tens of thousands in giveaways and then only having like 20 sales. I sell in the hundreds every month and when I did do giveaways I only gave away like 500 in two days.
I spent about 12 hours over two days talking to a friend of mine. Now neither of us are experts but we have done marketing before and for the life of us we can not figure out where my sales are coming from. the only answer we thought might come close is from Amazon itself and the push they give you in the recently bought section or maybe your ranking on the best selling list. Other than that all the other things I've mentioned (FB, Twitter, book sites, blogs) have given me probably at most a hundred sales total I'd guess. So the question that was kickin' our asses was, well where do the rest come from?
I know this has been kind of rambling but my point is that I think a lot of it isn't marketing so much as it is ranking and a good amount of random sales. I know that sounds stupid but there are a good amount of people out there will pick up the "You may like this book if you bought this book" Just because amazon told them they may like it.
On another note to the people that got tens of thousands of DLs during free giveaways and can't figure out why you have no reviews. The friend I was working on this with said something that may be relevant... "Yeah, 500 people downloaded it, but how many actually read it? A kindle can hold a lot of books and people could have just downloaded it because it was free, doesn't mean they read it or ever will." He is a bit blunt at times but it does make sense.
Anyway, I'll finish this up now and if anyone actually comes up with a tested marketing idea please feel free to fill us all in because I for one would love to figure out what to try next. My sales have sucked this month.
Thanks for your time. :)

[[deleted user]]

very interesting Don, you gave me so much to think about!

[Paul]

Isn't it true that summer isn't historically the best time of year for books to sell? Ebooks don't have a very long history, but maybe the same applies.

[Jill]

My book has sold steadily since joining KDP Select, until we got to June ie., when sales have all but ceased. It must be the time of year.

[Don]

I do so hope it's a summer slump.

[Jill]

Don wrote: "I do so hope it's a summer slump."

That's what I'm telling myself. I like to be positive.

[Helen]

Virginia, my results are similar to yours so far, downloads 3500, sales 36 (four days later) no borrows, no reviews.

Better than nothing but not really inspirational!
Hoping for a late surge!

[[deleted user]]

Janiera wrote: "I'm really not trying to be rude but how does that advice help if you haven't made any money? You should writer several books but crossing your fingers? Marketing in conjunction with having your book everywhere is what helps..."

@Janiera,

I know what you are saying and I don't think you are being rude. My point, maybe not very well put across, is that you can have your books available for free on Amazon without the exclusivity clause through the price matching system.

The other thing is that I get more reviews from books downloaded from other retailers, or through links from here at Goodreads, rather than from Amazon because, as many have said, freebes are often downloaded from Amazon in great number but are then just added to the TBR pile. Many may actually never be read at all. On B&N and other online retailers that is a little diferent. People actually seem to read what they have downloaded.

Also, I wanted to point out that doing everything that everyone says here may still not work. If I remember rightly John Locke's success was more to do with an unplanned comment to a friend on a football forum than it was to do with any planned marketing strategy.

My view is that you need to get as many books out there available on as many outlets as possible and also work on your marketing and promotion skills. Many people here can and are doing things like that in a far better way than me. My only concern is that the Select programme limits your visibility, and the recent views that Amazon is adjusting its ranking programs to limit the impact of cheap and free books is also worrying.

[Olivia]

I'm finishing up my 90 days with KDP Select, and I've been happy with the results. I've not given away any books, but I have played with pricing some. I released the book at $2.99, then bumped it to $3.99 when I saw it was holding its own in its category and the competing books were priced in the $3.99-$6.99 range. I then lowered the price to $ .99 for two days when I reached 2,500 sales. That wound up bouncing the book back to the topic of its sub-categories for a couple of days.

My sales overall have been good. Quadruple digits for the first two months and near quadruple for the third month. What I think may have benefited me most was the lending program. I've had close to 400 "borrows" over three months and several reviewers on Amazon and GoodReads have mentioned borrowing the book, rather than buying it.

While I'm going to spin my first book off of Select tomorrow, I've got no complaints. My second book is due out in August and I plan to go the Select route again. It's working for me.

[Karen]

Daniel wrote: "The closest thing I've seen to "real time" tracking is the ebook tracker on KindleNationDaily.com. If you visit the site and click on the EBOOKTRACKER menu item, you can set up a ranking monitor fo..."

Hi Daniel, I was wondering if you've advertised with KindleNationDaily and if you think it was worth while? Did it generate more sales for you?

[Steven]

Lee wrote: "Steven, would you mind being a little more specific about your experience with web ads? It's so hard to tell which sites are worth the money. Where did you place? Cost? Results? Thanks very much if..."

OK, so now I am responding to this. I run ads through Project Wonderful, and a guy named Garrett Gilchrist created an ad campaign for me at extremely reasonable cost. He designed the ads and then tried out various web pages for advertising and stuck with a campaign that got hits. He can be found through Orange Cow, his production company (http://orangecow.org), and I recommend his services. I would sometimes put up ten or fifteen bucks and get a lot of hits, and if I were willing to spend $30 or so I would see hundreds of hits to my website. Don't hold me to this, but I would generally sell between 2% and 4% of total hits when the book was at full price.

So I combined my Project Wonderful ads with my free giveaway. I made announcements at all of the giveaway sites, and I've had over 8800 downloads as of today (which is the 4th day, so I will have 9000 downloads by the end of the day). The announcements came out on the first and second days, and so on those two days, I had about 3000 downloads per day, and the remaining days seem to be almost entirely the result of my Project Wonderful campaign. (I know this is the case, because when my credit card had a problem at 1 pm today, my downloads slowed to a crawl.) My book went to about #45 on the giveaways list and has sat at #1 on the historical fiction and westerns list since the first day. By today, although it was still #1 on the two specialized lists, it has dropped a lot in the rankings.

If anyone would like to see what my ad looks like, check it out tonight on http://www.mspaintadventures.com. But I think I'll turn it off this evening - 4 days is enough, and I'm getting a little bit of sticker shock!

I will report on whether this helped my sales later this week.

Best, Steven

[Richard]

In my experience KDP Select serves two purposes. Exposure for unknown authors through free promos and borrows for formerly published authors who have converted their books to electronic format.After free promos are over, low priced eBooks have little chance for borrows since customers are only allowed one borrow per month. After 90 days one is better off leaving KDP Select (if getting few borrows) since more free promos will be counterproductive. In a side issue, can anyone here explain to me why Goodreads members go out of their way to accumulate hundreds of friends when there is no way to communicate with this group as a whole as one can with Facebook or Twitter? What would I do with a thousand Goodreads friends. I'm not going to look at the books they are reading since that would number in the thousands. Don't get it.

[Eric]

Olivia and others. So far my experience with KDP Select has resulted in few sales. I would be interested to know how you and other promoted your book. Where did you send blurbs, offers, etc.

[Steven]

Eric - Author Marketing Club gives you one page where you can announce your giveaway to all the free kindle websites, like pixel of ink, and I think about 8 others. Once a few of them announce it, it gets picked up elsewhere. Then Project Wonderful gives you a gateway to advertise broadly on numerous websites. (see my post above.) I found that project wonderful worked much better and for a much lower price than facebook ads, for example. That's advice on how to drive free downloads. I don't yet know from firsthand experience whether this'll lead to sales.

[Eric]

Olivia, I think you have hit on a good way to use the KDP Select program without offering your book free. I've never thought to changing the price from time to time to create interest and customers. Good idea.

[Olivia]

Hi, Eric. I've got my member page here, obviously. I've also got a combo web/blog site, a twitter account and Facebook (as well as Pinterest, but that hasn't really impacted my visibility much). I've got my website set up so anytime I update the blog portion, it automatically spiders out to Twitter and Facebook. With that, I don't update them as much independently.

The biggest thing that made a difference for me, as far as I can tell, was a review from a well respected online site.

I write m/m romance. ReviewsbyJessewave.com, which specializes in that genre and which, according to their web counter, has had close to 1,800,000 visitors, was kind enough to take a chance and read my book. They gave me 4.75 stars out of 5. Overnight, my sales tripled. Redemption (the book in question) has sold (as of today) 4,024 copies in three months. Reviews are the key, as far as I'm concerned. No question. I have a second book coming out in August. I plan to send it to Jessewave, as well as several other sites that review my genre. I also plan to query some of the more influential reviewers on Good Reads and Amazon and see if they might be willing to read an advance copy and offer an honest review. I think readers are open to that as long as you make it clear that you're not trying to influence what they're going to say.

Hopefully, they'll say nice things. :-)

[Eric]

Thanks Olivia, very helpful. I've been slow to offer my book to reviewers thinking that a lot of it is artificial. I ask those who contact me with thoughts about the book to consider putting up a review, but obviously I don't have influential reviewers. Something to ponder.

[Lee]

Steven wrote: "Lee wrote: "Steven, would you mind being a little more specific about your experience with web ads? It's so hard to tell which sites are worth the money. Where did you place? Cost? Results? Thanks ..."

Thanks, Steven.

[Olivia]

Eric wrote: "Thanks Olivia, very helpful. I've been slow to offer my book to reviewers thinking that a lot of it is artificial. I ask those who contact me with thoughts about the book to consider putting up a r..."

I think it's easier to make that ask with a second book than it is with a first. I plan to take the tack of "You were kind enough to leave a positive review when you read Redemption. I wonder if you might be interested in reading my new book. I'm happy to send you an advance copy. All I ask is you leave an honest review."

I also think it's simpler when you know your readership. I write in a fairly narrow genre. I'm not someone trying to break into thrillers, which has a far greater readership and lots of subgenres (romantic thriller, political thriller, etc.). The downside is I'm unlikely to get a publishing deal with one of the big six. The plus side is it's easier to figure out where the readers are and what's working for them.

Or at least that's my theory!

[Grant]

I’m in the midst of a pretty successful freebie promotion with KDP for Deacon Leeds and the Pyramid of Symbols. I decided to try 3 days, starting on Sunday, July 1st and ending on the 3rd with the hope of boosting my book’s ranking just before a holiday and maybe collecting real sales afterwards. It’s almost noon on the second day and I have a little over 3,000 downloads and ranked #2 in Contemporary Fantasy, #72 in the free Kindle store.

This is the most successful campaign to date. My previous attempts earned mediocre downloads, around 500 or so for two days. I believe the key is to get as many of the free Kindle websites to list your book. I submitted my info to several large sites about a week before the promo began: Pixel of Ink, Ereader News Today, Free Books Hub, and Book Gorilla listed my book on the first day and the downloads exploded. It’s also important to have at least a few 5 star reviews beforehand in order to be considered for the listing.

I also mentioned the promo on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest and I have the good fortune of knowing some enthusiastic social media buddies who’ve passed the info on to their contacts. Whether this promotion will translate into real sales is still left to be seen. I’ll be sure to report the results on this thread once the promo has concluded.

I welcome any authors who wish to add me as a Goodreads friend and join my social media circle.

[Autumn]

I did it. I thought it would be good to market my book for five days for free. I wrote the book out of love, not really to make money but if people buy it, that would be fantastic. I feel if people lend it then that is great too...the book is being read and that is my #1 goal.

[Eric]

David,

What did you mean by; 'you can have your books available for free on Amazon without the exclusivity clause through the price matching system.'

[[deleted user]]

Eric wrote: "David,

What did you mean by; 'you can have your books available for free on Amazon without the exclusivity clause through the price matching system.'"

Amazon will not be undersold, so they will match a price that is set elsewhere.

[[deleted user]]

@Virginia -
I never did that.

[Scott]

The bottom line is whether there are enough "lends" under the KDP Select program to make up for the sales you lose on other platforms by making your work exclusive to KDP. My experience has been that I made more money with the work available to all the available platform. Three titles so far, but I'm about to regain the rights to three of my earlier titles that were published by Penguin. I plan to lower the ebook prices, put them up on all the platforms, see how it goes, and then make them exclusive to KDP to get a better sample.

[Scott]

By the way, I gave away almost 12,000 books during a five-day free promo and it hasn't helped sales a bit.

[Daniel]

Virginia said: "In some cases, you can mention that your book is free elsewhere several times and they never get around to changing it. It never worked for me..."

Going free through the Amazon's price matching algorithm is tricky. Amazon does not price-match to all vendors. They don't price match to Smashwords, for example.

The most reliable way I've heard to make your book free on Amazon without KDP Select is to distribute your book to B&N through Smashwords, and then make your book free on Smashwords. Although Amazon won't price match to Smashwords directly, they will price match to B&N when your price change flows out to them.

The problem is that you have very little control over the timing of going free, so you can't really plan a promotion event with any degree of accuracy. Historically, it can take days or weeks for your Smashwords price change to show up on B&N (Smashwords is supposedly improving this turnaround), and it can take days or weeks for Amazon to price match (if they ever do).

To do a free campaign with price matching, you pretty much have to wait until Amazon finally price matches and then start promoting. Many of the sites you should notify about going free need lead time, so you might have to leave your book free for several weeks.

When the promo is over, you probably want to raise your price back up, but just as going free can take days or weeks, so can getting your price reverted to whatever "normal" is for you.

So, yes, going free without KDP Select is possible, but it is far from predictable.

Of course, going free *with* KDP Select isn't that predictable lately either. Amazon routinely messes up the campaigns, which means you might plan a big promotion around going free only to discover that your title did not go free after all. That leaves you looking like either a liar or a fool.

[Steven]

What I've heard is that if you did a giveaway a year ago, you could first of all get many more downloads because there was less competition. But also I've heard that Amazon is treating giveaways differently now. Back then if you'd get thousands of downloads, Amazon would include you in suggestions and emails and so on just as though you'd sold thousands of ebooks, but now free downloads have a minimal impact on the Amazon algorithm. This might make sense from a client service perspective, if Amazon customers don't want their recommendations list dominated totally by Indie ebooks that people gave away. But it'd be bad news for Indie authors. Does anyone know?

[Daniel]

Steven wrote: "...This might make sense from a client service perspective, if Amazon customers don't want their recommendations list dominated totally by Indie ebooks that people gave away. But it'd be bad news for Indie authors. Does anyone know? "

Yes. Amazon changed their algorithms relating to going free in April or May, and things haven't been the same since. The sales bump is still there for many people, but it is a shadow of what it used to be. Some authors don't see much of a bump at all. Others see a few sales that taper off quickly. Going free definitely is not what it used to be.

The authors I communicate with are split with regard to whether or not Select is still worth being exclusive. The ones who have decided to stay with Select seem to mostly do so because they get borrows through the Kindle Owner's Lending Library (KOLL). In many cases, those borrows earn the authors more than they got through other channels back when they weren't exclusive. For them, the real value of Select is in the KOLL, so the loss of the free sales bump is not as significant.

I plan to leave Select when my time is up later this month. I got a nice sales bump after going free in June, but it's going away quickly and it wasn't enough to keep me in the program. Also, I haven't gotten any KOLL borrows, so that feature of Select has no value to me.

[Steven]

Very helpful, thanks very much. I got a small and very brief bump, but you're correct that it's nothing like the bumps I've heard about. Oh well, just a bit behind the curve I guess. Next, maybe I'll invest in the white hot real estate market.

[Cynthia]

From everything I've been reading lately it seems the KDP Select program is the way to go when you're publishing with Amazon.
Unfortunately I didn't know that when I first put my novel Demon Hunter out early this year.
My question is, because of the exclusivity required, can you pull your book from other sites (B&N, Smashwords) and then put it back up after the 90 days without losing all your info?
Bad example but for instance you can temporarily delete your Facebook page and then when you want to bring it back all the info is still saved. Just wondering if B&N or Smashwords has something similar.

[Eric]

My experience with KDP Select has not seemed to result in continuing sales. I ran 4 free promos for two of my novels and one for a non-fiction self-help book. That generated 2860 free downloads of the novels and 135 of the non-fiction.

But the resulting sales quickly plunged. Only sold about 30 with 3 borrows.

One possible positive is that it gave me exposure even in the UK, Germany, France, and Spain. I had one download from the Filipines and one from the the Congo that I know of!

So I'll probably go off select and get back on Smashwords, etc...while continuing to promote my Amazon books by telling people about reduced prices for a limited time.

[Nikki]

Coming in late to this discussion but...I'm on KDP select and have done one giveaway and am planning another...an author friend recommended listing my book on two sites that list e-book giveaways--one is e-reader news and the other is pixel of ink...she says that you need to list your book a month in advance on pixel of ink..e-book news only about two weeks ahead...I haven't done smashwords but as soon as this 3 month period is over I plan to...

[Cynthia]

Thanks Virginia. It's worth a try. I'm bummed I missed out on it when I initially published on Amazon.
At the moment I have all my titles on sale at Smashwords. I'm curious to see if doing that has a similar effect.

[Markham]

Also coming in late. My titles, and my partner's (and our co-written works) - as e-books: KDP exclusivity of course doesn't apply to print, thank God - are all on KDP, and, where eligible, enrolled in KDPS. My experience, for what it's worth, is that, if you write nonfiction, you publish to significant anniversary dates (e.g., our Titanic book on April 13, 2012), which is one reason to go with KDP, and with KDPS, you can further pinpoint promotions also to relevant dates, other than just to the usual market / sales calendar. One caveat, though. My partner & I decided to a one-day free promo in June, when things had slowed a bit from the first rush, and on all titles; and, since he's a Brit, he scheduled it for the Jubilee weekend. Unfortunately, two blogs I'd asked to promote the book (AoSHQ & Instapundit) chose, without our knowing it, to promote it on that same day. Good news: vast number of new downloads / readers. Not so good: about 405 of them were for free. Moral: choose carefully. (Other moral: God smiles when people who download a free e-book review it. He gets tetchy when they don't - I hope.) Nevertheless, we averaged, by our standards, a good month, averaging a non-promo non-free download and a half per day, that month, across the board, all titles, US, UK, FR, and DE sites. (For history, and niche history at that, that's not half bad.)

[Nan]

Karen wrote: Hi Daniel, I was wondering if you've advertised with KindleNationDaily and if you think it was worth while? Did it generate more sales for you?

Karen, I've advertised twice on KindleNationDaily. Once in April, once in May. Each time my book was free on KDP. Saw a big boost in downloads/placement in April, less so in May, which tracked the KDP results. I do love the data KN Daily provides on their Sponsorship Results screen. I can't prove if my follow-up sales came from that or from word-of-mouth, but my gut feel says it was worth it at the time.

[Nikki]

just wrote a blog about all this--it's hard to know what to do with all the options! and someone said that readers are just waiting for the promos so they can get free books--that's fine because that's what they're for but maybe occasionally they could spring for the $2.99?

[Eric]

I'm trying out a $2.99 promo for one of my suspense books this week. Will see how it goes.

[Nikki]

Eric wrote: "I'm trying out a $2.99 promo for one of my suspense books this week. Will see how it goes."
$2.99 is what mine is listed for without a promo--at least my e-book..have you done the freebie? I wish you luck!

[Eric]

Yes, Nikki, I did the freebie and had 2600 downloads but poor followup sales.

[Nikki]

hope you get some sales this time--2600 downloads sounds pretty good!

[Helen]

I had 3500 downloads over 3 books but only had 75 sales afterwards...the odd thing was that they were ALL on amazon.co.uk, not a single one from .com, although most of the downloads were from there. Does anyone have an explanation...or a guess?