Results of KDP Select Promotion

Crazy busy week guys! My oldest started kindergarten yesterday and mom cried enough tears to fill up a couple of buckets. On top of that, I’ve been trying to get ready for my book signing on Saturday. Flyers are printed, prizes have been purchased and books are ready to go. Now it’s just time to hope that the weather is nice and I have some visitors to my lil’ old stand. If you’re in the central NJ area-come on out to see me! Here’s the link with the info.    

Well, I wanted to talk today about KDP Select. I actually did it. I drank the Kool-Aid. And although it’s killing me to admit it-my first experience with Amazon’s program has turned out pretty fabulous.

When I first published First Visions, I decided against KDP Select. It just seemed to make more sense to offer up my novel on as many platforms as possible. However, each month that went by, I found it hard to ignore my sales figures. I sold at least ten times the amount of books on Amazon as Smashwords and Barnes and Noble combined. After I ran into a distribution issue on Smashwords, I decided to give KDP Select a shot.

To sign up for KDP Select, you have to offer up exclusive rights to the ebook version of your novel for 90 days. During the 90 days, you are allowed to choose five free days to promote your book and the book is placed in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library.

To prepare for my free day, I submitted my book to sites that advertise free Kindle books. I did this about a week before my scheduled promotion. This included Pixel of Ink, eReader News and Digital Book Today. These sites did not charge a fee for submission. Keep in mind though that free submission sites do not usually guarantee your book will be listed. If you want more of a guarantee, you may want to go for a paid advertising option like Kindle Nation Daily. On the actual promotion day, I announced my book was free via my blog, Facebook page and Twitter. I also tagged my book as free on Amazon.com that morning.

When I checked in the morning of my free promotion day, I had a very modest number of downloads. I was still thrilled though because even if I had a handful of downloads, it still means more people are reading my book. Then, suddenly by the afternoon, the numbers of downloads were steadily climbing to crazy high numbers. I’m definitely not the most confident person in the world, so of course I thought it must be a glitch in the system and the numbers couldn’t actually be accurate.

KDP Select has some rules about releasing sales information, but I can tell you that downloads went well into the five figure range. And here’s the screenshot of First Visions when it hit #3 in Amazon’s Top 100 Free!

It’s been a little over a week since my free promotion day and sales have been really great. Through the Labor Day weekend, First Visions stayed within the top 500 to 1,000 on Amazon. Today, I’m around 2,500 in the Kindle Store and still in the Top 100 for Teen Love and Romance. By the way, if you want access to a great tool for authors, check out the free ebook tracker from Kindle NationDaily. It monitors your rank so you don’t have to keep logging on Amazon.com every hour.

Not only did I sell more copies, I’ve made some new fans =) New ratings and reviews have popped up along with a handful of emails from readers who really enjoyed Kate’s story.

I know this is only one experience, so I’m curious about how other authors have fared. Would you renew enrollment? How did subsequent free promotion days go?