Amazon gets it a third right at fourth try, makes The Meyersco Helix partially FREE today, please post liberally

[Andre Jute]

You're a top, too, Kat.

(Like a brick, good.)

[Sharon]

Any time, Andre.

[Andre Jute]

After about 16 hours, with five to go:

Disappointing numbers, despite the misleading rankings not amounting to even 1% of the previous FREE period.

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,822 Free in Kindle Store
#70 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Action & Adventure

All that high rankings mean, when taken with low downloads, is that everyone else must be doing absolutely appallingly badly.

I'm off to bed. Amazon doesn't need my assistance to shut down the FREE programme perfectly on time, if not before...

[Patricia]

One of my freebies this past week was number one in two categories but had very few downloads. The secret is to choose obscure categories, I guess. I thought it might get zero downloads because it's a Christmas story.

[Andre Jute]

9am this morning, which is 1am Pacific time, The Meyersco Helix was still free, but the next time I looked, 03:50 Zon Temple Time, the price was back up to $9.99.

Downloads in around 22 hours that the book was actually FREE amounted to 77 copies, about 1% of the downloads over two days with proper promotion.

But this FREE day was screwed up from the beginning by Amazon. With their track record of confirming scheduled FREE days, and then not scheduling them, it was unwise to promote the FREE day in advance, and with Amazon not making the book free until almost three hours into the day, there was no chance of catching the primary promoters to the most active downloaders.

I'm left to conclude that, if Amazon hadn't screwed up the previous FREE download period by failing to tack this restitutional FREE day onto it, thus making three straight days in a row, Andrew's book would have made 10k copies easily, or perhaps even 13K since there was an accelerating trend when it went off FREE, and over the two days as a whole you could eyeball a geometric trend upwards without any statistical tools. Together with the downloads from the Christmas period, itself grossly messed up by Amazon (the root cause of this continuing trouble), that would have made a total of 15K, twice what I was aiming for from the five days FREE the book would have had on Select if the FREE periods weren't so messed around.

***

Now that I've slept on it, I know what to think, and what I think is this:

The worst enemy of Select is Amazon.

There's nothing wrong with the Amazon customer (writer) service people (in this instance at least). They are friendly, courteous, patient; for all I know they may be competent and it is programmers further back who keep screwing up. For all I know, it may be Amazon managerial policy to make the FREE days so awkward and uncertain that writers forego them and enter Select only for the loan payments.

***

Select works in raising a book's profile. After the previous FREE period, with 6.7K downloads, CoolMain didn't put the price back to the introductory $2.99 but to the full $9.99 -- and still the book sold better than it ever had! This is quite amazing. Those sales have fallen off now, but that doesn't matter — I'm interested in the principle, not the precise level the price has to be set at to sustain a momentum of sales.

The CoolMain books get reviews totally unrelated to their relative sales, and apparently regardless of giveaways through the Amazon fora, Smashwords, LibraryThing, Goodreads, KuForum, Kindleboards, etc. The best return in reviews in relation to time and copies invested is when I or the authors invite those with whom we have social contact to write for a review copy. However, that doesn't mean the other channels are worthless, it merely means that the return is smaller for the effort invested. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that 13K+ copies given away in Select between two books has resulted in a single review.

***

So, will I advise Gemma and our authors to put more books into Select, despite Amazon's inept handling of the FREE periods, which is really the mechanism that makes Select work? Yes, I will, for at least one more cycle to see if Amazon gets it right.

[Sharon]

Thanks for sharing that analysis, Andre. Select will never be the be-all-end-all, it is just one thing to add to one's arsenal. From my days in business I learned that for any campaign if one had more than a 1% return they were doing well. In this case I would suggest that means if 1% of the downloads are read that would be a good result. I suspect we could extrapolate that to reviews. If we get anything close to 1% of review on the books that are read, we would be lucky.

In my own case with Storyteller, which is uber-niche, my first campaign ran Dec.15 & 16, right at the beginning of the Select program, with a rounded 400 'sales'. So, I could probably expect 4 reads. Take one percent of that and it would be a miracle if I got a review. I would be satisfied with 4 reads. I do believe it only takes one exuberent reader for a book to take off.

For Andre's two books, 13K should reasonably engender 130 reads, a small chance of a review or two.

Time will tell if the old paradigm will hold true for book sales...

[Andre Jute]

I'll go with that, Sharon, but I still have to see even the 1% numbers.

Your uber-niche book has done better out of your personal contacts and enthusiastic readers than out of your Select giveaway, seems to me. I expect that to be a pattern.

[Sharon]

Yeah, I'm not holding my breath...

[Patricia]

The second phase (final two days) of one of my giveaways started today and the last I checked only six copies had been downloaded. That has to be a record, and not a good one.

[Andre Jute]

Most indies never sell a book, never even give one away.

Despite my complaints about Amazon's fast and loose way with dates and times, 13K copies plus between two books probably puts the little CoolMain test of Select in the top one or two per cent of all the Select FREE books since the beginning.

So even six books may be cause for envy in some quarters.

[Patricia]

I'm all the way up to ten downloads for the day at this point.

Whatever its faults, KDP Select has had a positive effect on my sales, and the lending library has been good to me as well -- so long as I don't harbor dreams of becoming rich.

[Sharon]

Well, then, I suppose missing the FREE day on Wednesday might not have been a bad thing.

I rolled the Select plan over again anyway, not sure what to do with the 5 days I've got. But I have had one borrow, so that's one interest I didn't have before.

The whole ebook thing is still finding its way, and we along with it...