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…
KDP Select Free Promotion: Discoverability Experiment, Part Two
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 5 rank in the Kindle historical mystery bestseller category. Their ranks had dropped to between 18 and 24 after Amazon added hundreds of titles to that category just before Christmas. The experiment in light of this goal was an unqualified success. I used KDP Select to offer the Kindle edition of Maids for free for two days, December 30th and 31st. When the free promotion ended, Maids of Misfortune was at #1 in the historical mystery bestseller category, and it has stayed there. In addition, Uneasy Spirits, a sequel to Maids, rose to #8 during the promotion of Maids, and by the end of 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…
My Alternative to Blog Tours: Two Week Vacations
One of the reasons I was hesitant go the traditional route in publishing was the horror stories I had heard about book tours, from my friends who were published authors and from authors’ blogs. (You know, the headaches of organizing tours, the long car rides, bad hotels, bad food, and hard-to-find venues, and the embarrassing book signings where no one shows up or those who show don’t buy any books.) However, when I decided to self-publish, which meant that my books would be sold primarily as ebooks, on line, I discovered that a new method of marketing had emerged, called the Virtual Book Tour, or the Blog Tour. I first read about this in an informative piece on Publetariat in 2009 called What’s A Book Blog Tour? In the past few years, doing a blog tour when you launch your 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…
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