KDP Select Free Promotion — Discoverability Experiment: One Month Later and Feeling Fine!
As stated in Part One, my goal in joining the KDP Select program had been simple, to get my two Victorian San Francisco historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits back up to the top of the Kindle historical mystery bestseller category. And, as I wrote in Part Two, not only did I achieve this goal, but I also had fantastic success in selling my books immediately after the free promotion was over. In addition, I was now selling a significant number of books in Kindle, UK, and I had started to have a large number of borrows of Maids of Misfortune, all unexpected but delightful consequences of enrolling a book in the KDP Select program. While not everyone has had the same kind of success using KDP Select, a number of authors have reported large numbers of downloads, Read more…
KDP Select Free Promotion: Discoverability Experiment, Part One
Ok, I confess I stuck the term discoverability into the title since it seems to be the new marketing buzz word. As a professional historian who has spent most of her life in the past, I am getting rather a kick out of riding the wave of change within publishing — even using new words for old concepts like marketing, promotion, and publicity. In this blog I have frequently posted about these issues, the importance of branding, the possibilities of blog tours, and the use of tags and categories, all describing what I have learned about how to sell books as an indie author. The bottom line of all those posts has been about how an author can get potential readers to discover their books, when they don’t have the same opportunities available to traditionally published authors (publishing house book Read more…
Categories, Key Words, and Tags, Oh My: Why should an Author Care?
Two weeks ago I published my second historical mystery, Uneasy Spirits, and in the process I was reminded of how confusing it can be to determine the best category and key words I should use on Amazon to describe my book. Since there are several other authors who have been wrestling with the same question in the Historical Fiction Authors Cooperative (HFAC) that I belong to, I decided to write this post on how to use categories and keywords to maximize ebook sales. For the purpose of this post I am focusing on ebooks on Amazon, in part because that is where I have the most experience, but also because Amazon is definitely ahead of the other ebook stores in its sophisticated approaches to helping readers find books. My understanding of these issues is based on my experience as a Read more…
Ebook Publishing and the Great Price Debate: My numbers tell an interesting story
Before Christmas and the great Amanda Hocking success story hit the blogosphere, the general wisdom among ebook self-publishers tended to be that $2.99 was the sweet spot for selling and profiting from sales. Particularly after Amazon instituted its new 70% royalty offering (which didn’t apply for books priced at under $2.99), anything lower than that was seen as reserved for short stories or novella’s or at the most a brief promotional launch. However, the success of Amanda Hocking and a growing number of self-published authors selling their books at 99 cents changed the debate. They proved that you could sell so many books at that rate that it would more than make up for the loss of the 70% revenue. An additional upside to the 99 cent approach was that the sheer volume of sales at 99 cents would put Read more…
What is a fair but competitive price for audible books?
Recently I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog, mostly because I am furiously writing away on my sequel to Maids of Misfortune. The title of the sequel is Uneasy Spirits, and I have over 90,000 words written. My goal is to finish the first draft by the time of the Historical Novel Society Convention, which is meeting mid June in San Diego. (If you are going to be there let me know, I would love a chance to meet you.) But, today I read about a new service Amazon is providing with its subsidiary Audible called Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX) where it is going to make it easier for self-published authors to produce audio books. For the year and a half that Maids of Misfortune has been out, I’ve kept saying to myself that I should produce an audio book. Read more…
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