I recently gave Kindle Select a try and enjoyed some pretty amazing results. I offered my new romance novel, Nickels, free for a Wed. and Thurs. During those days, it had over 29,500 downloads in 6 countries. It ranked #3 on overall Kindle Free best seller list, #1 in Kindle Free Fiction, #1 in Religious Fiction, and #1 in Contemporary Romance.
In the first two days following the free days, I sold over 700 copies and had over 190 borrows from Prime members. My sales ranking has gone as high as #125 in Kindle Paid and #1 in Religious Fiction.
How did I do it? By maximizing the use of my free days and promoting like crazy.
Here’s my checklist to help make the most of your Kindle Select Free Days.
Before Your Free Days
1. Sign up for KDP Select.
2. Schedule your free days. Consider scheduling on a Wed / Thurs or just Thurs to capitalize on the exposure. Big sales days in a week are Fri, Sat, Sun. So don’t give it away free on those days.
3. Send requests to following to get your free book listed. Do this a few days ahead of time to give the site owners time to post your book.
- All Things Kindle (FB) http://www.facebook.com/allthingskindle?sk=wall – Be sure to read the Info page for directions on how to get listed.
- Pixel of Ink www.pixelofink.com
- Kindle Boards www.kindleboards.com (under Book Bazaar)
- Digital Book Today www.digitalbooktoday.com
- World Literary Café www.worldliterarycafe.com – does monthly lists of Kindle freebies – does monthly lists of Kindle freebies
4. Add a Goodreads event and send it to all of your Goodreads friends.
On Your Free Days
1. Post on Facebook pages on your free day(s):
- Free Ebook Deal http://www.facebook.com/freeebookdeal?sk=wall
- Free Kindle Books & Tips http://www.facebook.com/fkbooksandtips?sk=wall
- Any other groups that you belong to
- Your FB Fan Page
- Your FB Wall
2. Add “Kindle Freebie” and “Kindle Free” tags to your book on Amazon page.
3. Post about your free book on your other social networking sites (Linked In, Stumble Upon, Triberr, Google+, etc.)
4. Tweet like crazy.
5. Get authors in your cross promotion group to tweet like crazy (and thank them for it).
6. Send email newsletter.
7. Post about it on your blog.
8. Get your mouse-clicking refresh-button-hitting finger ready to watch the downloads roll in!
After Your Free Days
1. Don’t lower your price. You just did a lot of hard work to generate sales by offering it free. Keep your book at regular price and enjoy the higher royalties on the new wave of sales.
2. Keep up the momentum for a few days. If your free days ended before the weekend, keep up strong promotion efforts (through social networking) through the weekend.
Christian Genre Specific sites:
- Inspired Reads www.inspiredreads.com – Christian bargain ebooks
- Family Fiction http://www.facebook.com/FamilyFiction – Christian Books
- Christian Books by Indie Authors http://www.facebook.com/pages/Christian-Books-By-Indie-Authors/188636394517963
Do you know of any genre specific sites? If you’d like to share them, please leave a comment below. Thanks!
UPDATE 05/31/2012: Before rushing out to sign up for KDP Select, read the rest of my story: The Pros and Cons of KDP Select
UPDATE 01/27/2013: After six months away from KDP Select, I make almost 27% of my income on B&N. I strongly encourage authors to use KDP Select for new releases for the first 90 days, then use other retailers to broaden your reach.
Best-selling self-published author, Karen Baney, enjoys sharing information to help authors learn about the Business of Writing. She holds a Masters of Business Administration from Arizona State University and has worked in various business related career fields for the past 20 years. She writes Christian Historical Fiction and Contemporary Romance novels. To learn more about her novels visit her website: karenbaney.com. Authors can find tips and information on self-publishing and marketing at: www.myauthorservices.com.
Karen and her husband, Jim, also run several online businesses. They make their home in Gilbert, AZ, with their two dogs.
Her latest book, 10 Keys to eBook Marketing Success, is now available on Amazon.
Connect with Karen on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.
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Thanks for a complete work guide and checklist – You made my WEEK!
Thanks for the free kindle promotion tips. I’ve listened to 2 different webinars on selling on kindle recently. Your tips are just as good, even better in fact, than those I heard on the $997 sales effort! I am going to write a few books myself and give it a try!
Okay, I followed all of your recommendations and here are the results: 267 free downloads in two days (last Wed. & Thurs), moved to number one (1) in the Kindle Ebook Store for Sports Autobiographies, zero (0) purchased downloads in the days following the free promotion. I have increased the amount of twitter followers quite substantially, and maybe that will help for the future. I can only hope that those who downloaded my book, read it, and leave me positive reviews. So far, I have not had a new review since the promotion, but I did get four (4) likes on the page. Thank you for your advice.
Last week I did another free promotion on my Howl of the Wolf novel and got only 668 downloads. Another friend did their first free promotion for two days and got about 800. These numbers are far below what we were seeing in Feb. Are the free promotions losing steam? Or did the East week do us in? Does anyone else have input on this?
I did a free KDP Select promotion of my novel Secrets From The Dust 5-6 April and had over 7,600 downloads – 95% of those were in the USA. I did a lot of free promotions via Facebook. Find an author on FB who does similar novels to your genre, and look at the FB profiles, or pages they have liked. Where those pages are for promoting ebooks, then like them also. Some will allow you to post about your free ebook on their Walls, and others you have to contact and ask them to post – read the instructions for all the pages you like. The highest rankings I recorded during the freebie were:
USA: Best Seller Rank: 36 Literary Fiction: 1 Drama: 2
UK: Best Seller Rank: 113 Literary Fiction: 6 Drama: 1
Once the freebie ended, the ebook fell back to 131,741 in the USA bestseller ranking, but it has been edging back up with increased sales, and this morning it is at 7,200 Best Sellers and 45 Drama. Hopefully being in the top 100 of a category will mean Amazon emails details to buyers of that category, and this will help sales even more.
Good Luck with your future promotions.
Hi Karen,
This is a tremendous help, so thanks!
But, is it as effective if you only have one eBook out…?
Kind regards,
Col
Ps. I also thought Scott’s contribution was pertinent.
I’ve had other friends use this method successfully with only one book. Having a series just encourages a reader who likes your book to buy another, so write the second one and do another promotion.
Good shout. Cheers!
Thank you! This gave me a good start to trying the free days. My book is part of my ministry and if I can get it into the hands of hurting women for free, I want to do that!
Mel – so glad you found this helpful.
I have two series, a mystery and a sci-fi/fantasy. I followed Karen’s list and put the first book of each one on 2 free days one week apart. I gave away 4391 free 3-books of Howl of the Wolf 2/15 & 16 and then 5225 copies of Murder Caribbean-Style on 2/23 & 2/24.
I got high on the paid sci-fi list after Howl went free, but there are only about 25K books on that list. I did not get high on the paid mystery list which has double that number. I’m still getting sales from both lists, including the #2 books in each series.
In two weeks I’ve sold 285 books which is more than I’ve done in six months previous for all books. My name is getting recognized, so I think this was good for me. I’ve also got more Twitter followers.
I wish I had spaced the promotions further apart because I’m exhausted. I’ll wait a good while before I try any free days again. Thanks for all the help.
Thanks so much for sharing your results with us Diane. I agree – back to back promotions take a lot of energy and time!
Very smart advice. I didn’t think I would even use the free days, but you’ve got me changing my mind.
Wagging Tales
Thanks, Karen. Some good info here. I was able to use it to give away 16,000 copies of my spy thriller, LETHAL CIRCUIT, in a two day promo. If anyone is interested, I blogged about the experience here: http://www.larsguignard.com/?page_id=90
Some good info here,Karen. I headed your advice and was able to give away 16,000 copies of my spy thriller, LETHAL CIRCUIT, in a 2 day promo. For those interested in the numbers, I blogged about my experience here: http://www.larsguignard.com/?page_id=90
Lars – thanks for sharing your results with us. Congratulations on a successful promotion!
I gave away 4390 books on my Howl of the Wolf free day last week and sales are ticking along. My mystery novel Murder Caribbean-Style will be free for two days 2/22 & 23. So I hope everyone will grab a copy and help me break my record.
Maximizing Free Days on Kindle was a godsend. I hope you all appreciate the great advice.
Diane – Thanks so much for sharing your success story with us. Glad you found the advice helpful.
Hi Karen, thank you so much for sharing. I found your advice a couple of hours before my free promo started & immediately scurried to follow as best I could. Some great ideas. I know a lot of peeps say this kind of thing, but I mean it: I’m not in it for the money. I’m writing the sort of books I’d like to read. When a connection’s made between the words on the page and another’s imagination, that’s amazing.
Thank you again for sharing so generously.
If anyone wants to connect on twitter – I’m @tinksaid and happy to help other authors get the word out.
Julia
UGH! Karen, let me be the first to say that you are WRONG! While your advice seems logical on the surface, you have left a considerable sum of money on the table just to “conserve” promotional days for later use.
So who am I and WTF do I know? I happen to be one of the authors who hit it big on a 5-day promotion of my children’s book My Little Pet Dragon. So you say that you gave away 29,500 free copies in 2 days? That’s impressive. I gave away 56,800 in 5 days. Since your giveaway rate/day was far higher than mine, I can only imagine what you could have made (perhaps 80,000?).
But let me give you an idea: In the week following the end of the promotion, I sold 2,000 copies and had over 1,000 borrows. It catapulted me into the Top 100 overall, peaking at #97 (#90 in e-books) and seizing #5 in all children’s books (I had to compete with The Hunger Games and War Horse that were entrenched in my genre). The tail from this promotion has been phenomenal, ensuring that I never had a day less than $100.
Of course, all I have is a cute, little picture book. You have a novel. By being catapulted into the Top 100, you have a much better chance of staying there, and that’s what this is really all about. It’s NOT about conserving days, it’s about obtaining visibility. Once you have visibility, sales will skyrocket like never before. And what if you were able to stay in the Top 100 for a week or month? Would you care that you had to use up all of your promotional days just to get there?
The best advice I can give you as a peer is this: Do the 5-day promotion, but schedule it 1 day at a time. Each day should have its own separate entry. On the first day of the promotion, if you do less than 1,000 copies, you can cancel the other days and save them for later use. If your promotion goes gangbusters (10,000 copies or more), keep with it! This is your chance to hit it big! If you have to sacrifice a weekend, do it (my promotion was from Wednesday – Sunday and I still had huge sales).
Since Amazon views giveaways and borrows as unique sales, you have that many patterns to match against in its recommendation system. Recommendations are integral to future sales. The more patterns Amazon has to match against, the more likely your work will gain visibility with new readers. The borrows also help you achieve a higher ranking which ultimately leads to higher visibility and sales.
If I seem overly zealous in my views, it’s because I keep hearing people parrot the same thing based on the limits of their experience. Trust me, GO BIG! What do you have to lose? In another 90 days, you’ll get another 5 days of promotion.
Scott – Thank you so much for sharing your experience. It sounds like we did some things the same way, with number of free days as an exception. Congratulations on achieving such great success.
I like some of the points you made – especially the idea of scheduling them 1 day at a time (even though they are consecutive days) so you can bail out easier if you’ve reached your goal. This is a very good idea.
One of my goals in conserving some days was to provide another promotion opportunity in the 90 day cycle. I’m a firm believer in what Jeff Bennington calls layering promotions and my KDP Select Free Days are just one of the tools in this approach.
I’ve seen other authors have great success with the approach you’ve outlined. As I said, it’s a good idea and one that I’ll consider in the future. Thanks again for your comments.
Sorry for coming across like an ass. I’m so passionate about this subject, that sometimes my emotions get the better of me. My philosophy has always been to spare no expense and go for the blockbuster. I don’t hesitate to use all of my days to achieve maximum exposure. I’ve found that parceling out the days just doesn’t have the same effect. I can understand the need to do “effective promotion” for steady cash-flow, but since you’ve obviously got a blockbuster on your hands, why not go for it?
Currently I have a title on a 5-day promotion that just hit #58 overall. With 3 1/2 days of promotion remaining, I have a good shot at hitting the top of the list. Here’s a link to the book (a compilation, actually) in case you are curious:
http://tinyurl.com/7bvqdx4
Scott – sounds like you’re doing good. I really appreciate you sharing your experience with us–especially because you’re trying something different. I like hearing about different approaches and I’m sure other authors do too.
Hey Karen. I suspect that I may be a bit of an anomaly. My friends have tried my tactics, but none of them have been able to duplicate my success. My 3 biggest free promotions went like this: #2 overall, #3 overall and #35 overall. I’ve done very well with the sales afterwards, and on April 1st I’ll be a full time author.
I suspect you would have done better by using all your days, but it’s possible that this tactic is better suited for children’s books, not novels. I will continue providing feedback in case you are interested.
Scott – that’s fantastic! And congrats on becoming a FULL TIME author!
I’m working on another article as a follow up to this one. Since writing this, I’ve now done a promotion on my series. I’ve also run into a few negatives of going KDP Select (increase 1 & 2 star reviews, borrows taking away from sales). I’ll post a comment to this thread when I release that article.
Thanks for sharing your wisdom, Scott, and well done on going for it!
I’m processing all the advice out there, as I’m also in the select program, but only have one book out at the moment, so not sure if it’s the right time to go free yet.
Regards,
Col
Col – I say do it, but be smart about it. If you go free for a few days (or all 5 as Scott suggests), then you’ll get a lot of exposure. The key is upping your price after you come off the free days. This lets you capitalize on all the exposure you just gained. What I’ve found is that KDP Select helps generate a short term boost in sales. It’s not necessarily lasting, but it is a great way to get your name out there.
Karen,
Thanks so much for the informative articles. I signed up for KDP a few weeks ago and kept thinking I need to do something, but couldn’t figure out what. I thought according to the Amazon rules you couldn’t tweet it. Need to go back and read that again; happy if we can.
Tara
Tara – I just double checked and didn’t see anything about twitter in the KDP Select T&C’s: https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=APILE934L348N#Select. You can promote on Twitter, Facebook, other social media, etc. The one limitation that many authors don’t like is that Amazon doesn’t allow excerpts of the book on any site.
They will allow (I confirmed this with customer service) links on other sites to the Amazon Product Page for your book. For example, my first two books are on a site that lists 4 star books. As long as that site links to the Amazon Product Page for my book, it is allowed.
Hello Karen–Thanks so much for all the valuable info you provide here. Quick question: You say that if KDP Select is used, Amazon doesn’t allow excerpts of the book on any site. Does this mean the first few pages of the book can’t be shown on Scribd, etc. Also, can you give me the link to the part of the KDP Select agreement that refers to this limitation. Thanks again.
Rick
Check the thread below on Goodreads, as one poster has had email from Amazon saying you can post samples of your book on your website. Not sure how it applies to other sites.
Message 557 – Steve: I contacted Amazon and asked whether or not samples are allowed on author websites or elsewhere. Here’s what they had to say. ‘Hello, You may offer a sample, excerpt or teaser of your KDP Select-enrolled book on your website, as long as it doesn’t include a substantial portion of your book’s content. Up to about 10% of the book’s content is a reasonable amount. Keep in mind that a sample of your book is also available on your Amazon.com detail page, and we recommend linking to your detail page from your other sites…
George – thank you so much for sharing the response from Amazon with us. I wish they would update their FAQ to include this. It would save some confusion. Anyway, it’s good to know that excerpts are allowed.
Rick – I wasn’t able to find anything in the T&C’s this morning. In Section 5.2.1 Marketing and Promotion under the general T&C’s of KDP (not select) there is some verbiage that could be where a lot of the chatter around excerpts originated.
My 2 free days on Howl of Wolf are 2/15 & 16, so I’m anxious to see if all the work pays off. I’ll let you guys know how it goes. Thanks for the great blueprint to follow.
Diane – you’re welcome. Best of luck and let us know how it works for you.
God Bless you Karen Baney.
You are Terrific!
Thank you,
Paul
Awww! Thanks Paul!
Karen:
I just completed a *very* successful promotional weekend, wherein I used your article as my “script,” and I want to tell all of your readers that everything Karen says in this piece is true, and if you follow her instructions exactly, and if you have a quality product to give away and sell, buyers will come in droves.
I mention your article in Part 1 of my experiment and in this, Part 2, the Conclusion:
http://wp.me/poNhZ-xN
** There should be an indie award for Most Helpful Blog Post on Leveraging KDP Select to Its Fullest Advantage. If there were, Karen Baney would win it. Thank you, Karen, for such a helpful and insightful blog post.
—Chris Orcutt
Author of A REAL PIECE OF WORK, The Dakota Stevens Mysteries
Chris – HOORAY!!! I’m so happy that these same steps worked for you. Thank you so much for spreading the word.
Karen,
This is excellent – thank you! I’m curious about the length of time to go free. I have scheduled my first promo for three days – is that too long, in your opinion? I am aiming for Wed-Thu-Fri. Really want to do this right to maximize the potential of the program.
If others have advice, I’d love to hear it.
No matter what, though, thanks for putting this together. It is a HUGE help.
Tina B
Tina – Some of my indie author friends are doing 3 days or even all 5 at once. I think it depends on where you find your book at the end of day 2. If you aren’t as high in the charts as you want to be, then I say go for the extra day. Just make sure you continue to promote it.
If you find your numbers falling at the end of day 2, it may be best to save those free days for another time and build momentum around it.
I have friends that have been successfully with the longer promotions, but they’ve also had a great support system tweeting & retweeting, Facebooking, and posting on StumbleUpon. The more people helping you get the word out, the more likely you are to have successful free days for a longer period.
Hope that helps and best of luck on your promotion!
What great advice. I just signed up for KDP and had no idea what to do next. Now I have a wonderful checklist and a lot of hope. Thanks so much. I’ll come back and tell you my results.
Diane – so glad this helped you!
The one problem I have with Amazon is they give you no way to track where downloads are coming from, i.e. what work off of Amazon is working, etc.
Thanks for sharing the great news and information, Karen. It will come in very useful the next time I list a book for a free day.
Lots of great ideas here, Karen – and I can see I messed up my first promo!
You might consider Kindle Family Fiction (FB) too. It’s for authors and readers. Authors can promote their products in moderation, but need to stick to the same “thread”. It’s for any books that would be considered suitable for both adults and children to read.http://www.facebook.com/groups/KindleFamilyFiction/
DM – thanks so much for sharing this FB group with us. Will definitely check it out for my next promo.
As someone who got to #10 on the FREE best seller list, and #69 in paid Kindle, I can attest to not posting a free day too soon after the initial promotion. It hurts your ranking.
Excellent post, Karen. I’m bookmarking this one!
Best,
Peter
(AR)
Any idea how important it is to go free for 2 days? (I’m not sure my nerves will hold out for 2 days!)
I went free for one day with very pleasing results – #11 in Regency romance paid chart, but I gave in and lowered the price. I’m now wondering if it helps to have 2 free days to really boost things up. Other people have said that it annoys readers, seeing the book go free too often – especially if they bought it earlier that week.
Grace x
Grace – by the end of my first day, I was #26 on the overall Kindle Free best seller list. By doing 2 back-to-back free days, I was trying to get as high as I could on the charts. Since I made it all the way up to #3, I’m pretty happy with those results. The higher you get in the overall charts, the more some of Amazon’s background programming kicks in for you (i.e. Customers who bought this book also bought…, etc.)
I think the thing to be careful of – is putting it free again too soon. Since you have 90 days to use the free days, I think it’s a good idea to space them out over that time frame–perhaps even waiting until sales start to lag again.
Excellent article and a great checklist. I just did a free promotion as a test run, but I did not have all the pieces in place. Next time I will do better. Another old dog learning new tricks. LOL
Andy, Edward, – glad you found the article helpful. Thanks for stopping by.
hey karen,
wow! cool post, GREAT sales,
good to know famous folks…… keep on truckin’
a