First Visions Is Free Today and Other Notable Dates

First Visions: Second Sight Book One will be free today! Visit the novel's Amazon.com page to download the book to your Kindle.

The next free day will coincide with the release of New Revelations: Second Sight Book Two. I'll post a reminder on the release day.

I'm also hosting my first ever tour. On October 15, stop by for my review of Anderson O'Donnell's Kingdom. The blog tour is through First Rule Publicity.

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?    

Paid Book Promotions-What Works and What Doesn’t

Since May 1 when I released First Visions, I’ve done a number of book promotions. This has been really a trial and error process for me as I tracked sales in correlation to each promotion. This is only my personal experience and many indie writers could have very different results.

Virtual Book Tours

I can’t rave enough about doing a blog tour for your book. I had such a great experience during both my tours and they probably offered up the best value as far as paid promotional opportunities. A month long tour through Reading Addiction Virtual Book Tours costs around $100 and includes 20 stops. For a two week tour through Bewitching Book Tours, you’ll pay around $50 and stop at 10 blogs.

Why do a blog tour? Because you’re expanding your readership at each stop on your tour. Tour stops can include an interview, excerpt and guest post. My favorite part of my blog tours is that many of the blogs reviewed First Visions. When you don’t have that many reviews, this can be extremely helpful.

As far as sales, I did see a significant jump. During the tours (which I scheduled back to back for six weeks), I was selling about double the number of copies I had been averaging before the tour started.

Kindle Nation Daily Sponsorship

This promotion is definitely one of the priciest of the ones I tried. However, if you have the budget, I HIGHLY recommend it! The package I purchased included an ebook of the day sponsorship and a free excerpts email blast. The ebook of the day post includes a widget and sample of your book featured on Kindle Nation Daily, Book Gorilla and Book Lending.com. The email blast sends out a 5,000 to 20,000 word excerpt to 30,000 opted in email subscribers. Cost of the package was $300.

On May 31, my email blast was scheduled through Kindle Nation Daily. On the day before my sponsorship, my Amazon.com sales rank was 24,093. The day of my sponsorship, First Visions peaked at 5,364.

For the August 1 ebook of the day sponsorship, my Amazon.com sales rank the day before was 10,246. During the sponsorship, First Visions peaked at 3,550. Sales did well following the sponsorships as well.

Google Ads

I’ve heard authors that like Google ads to market their books, but I’m unsure if I will use it for my next book. The major advantage of Google ads are they are ideal if you’re looking for a low cost marketing opportunity. You can deposit $20 and set a low daily budget to keep your ads running for a few weeks. They also have plenty of promotions for first time users (I had a $100 free credit for my first ads). I earned a significant number of clicks and impressions, but didn’t see a huge jump in book sales. However, if you’re only paying $2.00 a day, selling only one extra copy a day of a $2.99 ebook would make you break even.

Blog Ads

For me, blog ads didn’t have a major effect on my sales. I signed up for a week-long promotion and chose four different book blogs for my ad to appear. The cost was $50 and prices were based on the number of site views each blog averaged daily. To be honest, the ads were pretty expensive and I didn’t see any difference in the number of the copies sold during that week.   

After careful consideration, I decided to enroll First Visions in the KDP Select program for three months. Although I have mixed feelings about the program, it’s hard not to admit how the vast majority of my sales come from Amazon.com. I also feel it would be a good way to introduce readers to the series before my second book comes out in October. My first free day will be August 28. Here’s the link to the Kindle version: First Visions: Second Sight Book One.

Ways to Self-Publish Your Book

Today is unbelievably enough the 16th day of the 28-Day Blog Challenge for Authors (newbies can learn about the challenge here) and the prompt is:

Did you publish your book as a traditionally printed book, an eBook, or both? How did you come to your decision? Which company(ies) did you use for printing and distribution? How did you select them?

I published First Visions as both an ebook and as a paperback. Originally, I was only going to sell through Amazon as an ebook and enroll in KDP Select, but decided to forgo that route. I know some writers who are huge fans of the program, but I find it kind of lame of the retail giant to block other competitors and force you to give exclusive rights for three months in exchange for five free book promotion days.

After uploading my book to the Kindle Direct Publishing system, I created a seller account on Barnes and Noble's PubIt platform. I had to do some slight re-formatting to publish it (i.e. PubIt doesn't recognize page breaks), but otherwise the process was straightforward enough. On PubIt, for a $2.99-$9.99 eBook, you earn a 65 percent royalty rate compared to the 70 percent rate offered through Amazon.

Smashwords is an awesome platform for indie writers. Things I love about Smashwords: multiple supported formats, ISBN assignment, premium catalog distribution to sellers like Apple and Sony, and coupon generator. Royalty rate is approximately 85 percent. Their easy to follow guide also made publishing a cinch.

These are the three ebook retailers I've used for my book. Sales have been by far the best on Amazon, but my book has done fairly well on Barnes and Noble as well. Smashwords sales fluctuate and only about five percent of my sales have come from the bookseller.

I decided to publish my book in paperback mostly for promotional reasons. I've given out paperback copies for giveaways and to family members. I had less of a familiarity with print publishers and used Createspace due to the company's connection to Amazon. I have no complaints and the royalty rates offered seem fair. I didn't see a reason not to offer up my book in print when you can do so without having to pay any upfront fees. Createspace does not charge you anything for listing your book on Amazon.com and their own bookstore. Expanded distribution allows bookstores and distributors to order your book. You pay a one-time fee of $25. However, the royalty rate is very low. For each $9.99 book I sell on Amazon, I receive $2.38, but only $0.38 if I opted for expanded distribution.

Curious to see what other writers have to say about this topic!

KDP Select: Will It Save or Ruin Indie Book Sales?

Besides having anxiety attacks from formatting my book and uploading it onto Amazon.com this weekend, I had to make the decision of whether or not to enroll First Visions: Second Sight Book One into the KDP Select program. The gist of the program for those unaware is for giving a 90 day exclusive to Amazon.com on your ebook, you get five promotional days where you can offer your book for free and your book is entered into the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. If your ebook is sold on other sites or large excerpts are printed online, you must remove them to comply with the terms of the program.

When faced with the decision whether or not to opt into KDP Select program, I kept hearing this little voice in the back of my mind that kept telling me I shouldn’t limit the number of platforms my book is sold on. First Visions has only been on sale for a couple of days, but I’ve had a handful of sales through Smashwords. Although my sales have been higher on Amazon, how can I be sure entering KDP Select will be more advantageous than using other retailers?