Tag: KDP Select

Beyond KDP Select Pt. 2

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been trying to find a way to duplicate the results I had with KDP Select’s free promo earlier this year. In other words, I’ve been trying to find readers for my self-published novel, My Temporary Life. KDP Select has been very good to me but as an author with only one book, the effectiveness of its free promo has waned.

On Oct. 10th I ran a promotion through ereadernewstoday.com. Ereadernewstoday is one of the two key sites that list free ebooks, and their reach is phenomenal. They have a gazillion subscribers and Facebook followers, so when they announced their Bargain Kindle Books promo, I wanted in. Continue reading “Beyond KDP Select Pt. 2”

Beyond KDP Select

I joined Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select in February, and ran a free promotion. I was one of the lucky ones. It was early, and the magic hadn’t faded yet. Through KDP’s free promotion, I managed to get my book to a whole bunch of readers, over 50,000 of them the first time around. Since then I’ve been trying to re-conjure the same magic with varying degrees of success. In this post I’ll tell you what worked and what didn’t work for me, before and after KDP. These results are based on the fact that I have one book published; authors with a series of books or multiple books have had different results, as reported in Rich Meyer’s excellent post here. Continue reading “Beyond KDP Select”

Preparing for Your KDP Select Free Days by Rex Jameson

[Editor Note: This step-by-step list is a great guide for promoting your free book through KDP Select. We used Rex’s methods to promote BAD BOOK at the end of June and had good success.]

Back when I first started using KDP Select, I used the Squidoo list by theinformationlady to promote my KDP Select promotion periods. I have had some pretty lousy results from Select recently, and I decided to revisit this and try to ferret out the proper way to do this. Here is my current process for promoting KDP Select titles:

Step 1: Make sure you have reviews BEFORE you settle on your promotion dates

Shortly after I published The Goblin Rebellion, I scheduled a KDP Select 2-day promotion over a month later and informed all the major sites without having any reviews for the book in place. I didn’t receive any emails back from ENT or POI, but I was in conversations with 2 book bloggers and had given away 50 copies at LibraryThing to try to garner some reviews. There were at least five people, counting the book bloggers, who told me they should be able to hit the promotion deadline.

None of them came through. Continue reading “Preparing for Your KDP Select Free Days by Rex Jameson”

The cost of free – Experiment #1?

I have decided to try an experiment. I don’t remember the steps of the scientific method – something about a hypotenuse – so, it will be a very qualitative experiment. Here’s the deal. I recently published my second novel, The Biker, on Kindle. My first novel, Joe Café, still sells here and there, but it’s not flying off the shelves. I plan to release The Biker on Smashwords and Createspace, but, for now, I’m happy with leaving Joe Café on Kindle. So, I met at the crossroads with some marketing folk from Amazon and we signed some KDP Select documents in blood.

Continue reading “The cost of free – Experiment #1?”