Is Kindle Countdown the new Free? Keeping books visible in 2014
For the past year there has been a good deal of hand-wringing over the question of KDP Select free promotions. Have they de-valued fiction, do they attract negative reviews, do they even work anymore? As anyone who regularly reads my blog posts knows, I have been a strong proponent of offering ebooks free for promotional purposes, and free promotions have been very good to me in terms of increasing my reviews and keeping my books visible and selling. However, I also believe one of the distinct advantages we have as indie authors is our ability to use our own sales data to respond innovatively to changes in the marketing environment. As a result, in the past year I followed a number of different strategies to keep the books in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series visible, including beginning to experiment Read more…
Don’t Panic: KDP Select still works, you just might have to work it a little differently
I haven’t posted for awhile on any topic, including on indie publishing, but that is because I have been working steadily on writing Bloody Lessons, the third book of my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series (if you want an update on my progress go check out my facbook page.) I also felt I had pretty much exhausted what I had to say on the ins and outs and pros and cons of using KDP Select. However, with the change in Amazon’s rules for Associates, a whole discussion has erupted about what this means for indie authors. See this balanced review of some aspects of the discussion. See, in addition, this good overview of the issues around free as a selling strategy and Amazon. One result of this change and subsequent posts about it is I have had a number of requests to comment Read more…
Report on my latest KDP Select Free Promotion: Getting into that Holiday Spirit
Well, Amazon announced its new Kindles devices this week, and the first of the new Kindle Fire HD devices ship as early as next week, with the rest rolling out in October and the end of November. There is no telling at this point how many of these new devises will be bought as upgrades or additions by people who already have Kindles, but if the past two holiday sales patterns are any indication, authors should expect a growing number of new users to start looking for Kindle books over the next few months, culminating in a book buying frenzy in the months after Christmas. At least that is my hope. In December 2009, my first book, Maids of Misfortune, had just been published, my Kindle sales were miniscule, and unless you typed in “Victorian mystery” as a key word Read more…
What I love about being an Indie Author: I can shift course on a dime!
Despite the gloom and doom of some of the blog pundits, and despite the relatively weak effect of my last KDP Select promotion at the end of March, which came in the midst of Amazon’s shifting algorithms, I decided to put the two books in my Victorian San Francisco mystery series, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, up for another round of free promotions this month. While my goals have remained the same, my strategy changed in response to the changing algorithms, and, as a result, my outcomes this time around improved. Goals: As usual, the primary goal for my promotions was to push both of my novels up on the historical mystery bestseller list and to get them as high as possible on the historical mystery popularity list. I have written numerous times about my conviction that keeping my Read more…
Simple Steps to a Successful KDP Select Free Promotion
If you have read my previous posts on Amazon’s KDP Select Program, you will already know that I joined this program primarily for the five free promotional days Amazon gives you in exchange for selling your ebook exclusively with them for three months. (You may take these 5 days at any time during the three months.) You will also know that my participation in this program (both through borrows and free promotions) significantly pushed both my historical mystery books up the bestseller ranks in numerous categories, resulting in a substantial increase in my sales. What you don’t know is what steps I took to ensure these promotional days were as effective as possible. That is what this post is about. My goal here is not to persuade you to sign your book up for the KDP Program (I still think Read more…
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