How Amazon’s KDP Select Saved My Book
From author David Kazzie:
One week ago, my book was dead in the water. And I mean dead. After a promising start last summer, sales crashed, completely, totally and spectacularly, despite wonderful reviews (from people who didn’t even know me!). From December 1 through January 24, I sold 21 copies on Amazon. One on BN.com. And that was it. Barely enough to fund a lunch date for me and my wife. The previous couple months hadn’t been much better. To be honest, I was trying to forget the book even existed as I worked on my new manuscript, my internal doomsayer wondering how badly I’d effed my career with a self-publishing disaster.
Now, I’d first heard about Amazon’s KDP Select Program during the holidays. Here was the deal: In exchange for providing Amazon a 90-day exclusive, authors get their book(s) listed with the Lending Library, which allows Prime members to borrow books electronically. Second, authors would be able to run free promos — for each 90-day period I enroll in Select, I could make the book available for free for up to five days, divided however I liked.
At first, I wasn’t sure what to think about it, especially given the exclusivity requirement. Part of me was aghast — how dare they ask me to pull my book from the other retailers! And then something occurred to me. Between October 1 and December 31, I had sold a grand total of …. ONE book on all the non-Amazon platforms — that one sale on Barnes & Noble.
. . . .
I woke up early again Friday the 27th and checked to see what was going on. The book was back in Paid status, and it had been borrowed through the Lending Library for the first time. I noted a few sales hit as I got ready for work. This was pretty awesome, as I hadn’t been sure what to expect — remember, I’d only had nine sales in January, and I was set to top that while eating breakfast. Now I had heard that the big sales bump for Free-to-Paid came about three days after it came off of Free status, but I didn’t know how accurate that was. Regardless, I didn’t want to get my hopes up on the first day.
Then sales started to pick up. It went from 225,000 to 38,000 to 10,000 on the bestseller list in short order. Then it hit 4,573 (the best ranking the book had ever had), and although sales continued to pick up, it only rose a few hundred spots in the afternoon. I pictured the book doing mighty battle with other books in the 1,000 to 5,000 range, and I wondered if this was the Wall. Was this the place where my book would have to make its stand?
And then it broke through. It hit No. 549 by late afternoon, and No. 151 by dinnertime. It settled at No. 76 by the end of the night, but the sales kept rolling in, even late on a Friday night. It’s currently ranked No. 1 among all Kindle legal thrillers, No. 2 among ALL legal thrillers, and even No. 44 in Fiction and Literature, which I really like because it sounds very official.
. . . .
Early Friday morning, the book continued to appear on the Free bestseller list, even though it switched back to Paid. There was a little bubble above the price marked “Why is This Not Free?”, and if you scrolled over it, you got Amazon’s explanation about it (although I can’t quite remember what the explanation is) — regardless, the now-$2.99 book was getting bestseller exposure even though it wasn’t really a Paid bestseller. This only lasted for a couple of hours, but I think it helped get the ball rolling.
Also, I had so many free downloads, the book began to appear in other books’ “Customer Also Bought” pages. Amazon doesn’t seem to care if these books mix together on the Also-Bought lists, so many more people were seeing the book once it switched back to Paid status, even though all its prior traffic was due to free downloads.
. . . .
The thing that bummed me out the most, though, was the complete disconnect between hits on my viral animated videos and book sales. The videos continue to draw about 1,000 hits per day — amazing, right? But my research suggests that this translated into no more than a few dozen sales — a couple hundred at the very most.
Link to the rest at The Corner and thanks to Greg for the tip.
Advertising-Promotion, Amazon, Pricing, Self-Publicity, Self-Publishing Strategies
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While it’s awesome for David that his book literally hit ‘The Jackpot’, it’s stories like these that feed into the growing fallacy of many self-publishers to think that slow sales are a failure.
I know, we’re trained to think that any book that doesn’t bust out *immediately* must be destined to languish in the sludge at the bottom forever – but that’s simply not true.
Ten sales a month of your novel? That’s GOOD. Write some more, build on it. David has ONE novel out. What’s next? Sales like these, while very cool, aren’t really sustainable.
I think Dean Wesley Smith and Kris Rusch would say that this type of mentality doesn’t build a career. It’s not sustainable. The author could argue that with the sales of this book, he now has the time and resources to keep writing, which I think is also valid. But what if the next book doesn’t break out? Are you a failure then, after the thousands of people who bought the first book have forgotten about you? Will there be another ‘lucky break’ for that title?
Maybe so, but also — maybe not.
I liked the observation that social media didn’t do much, if anything, for his sales. That’s becoming a common (and welcomed) theme.
It’s true that going free at Amazon and having lots of downloads DOES swing the algorithms harder toward your title, resulting in excellent subsequent sales. I wonder how long that effect lasts? It may well be more enduring than the naysayers think. It also could fade fairly quickly.
I’m still quite anti-exclusivity. I like my faucet analogy — though in this case the author took a gamble that he’d be able to get a gusher at Amazon. Others have taken that gamble and actually lost money and sales. http://www.genreality.net/real-numbers
I hope David is hard at work on his next novel and will be able to put up a strong and polished title to ride the wave of the current sales. Soon.
I like stories like this because we are still learning what tools like KDP Select can and can’t do for us. As I don’t have a blog to report stuff here is my limited experience with Select.
In December my small publishing company put out the first book in a science fiction trilogy by an author new to the genre. He promoted it to friends and contacts. In December it sold a grand total of 9 copies on Amazon plus one on B&N. I tried some pricing experiments during that time but even dropping to $0.99 made no impact on sales.
In mid January we published the second book in the series. I convinced the author that giving away the first book made sense if it led to sales of the other two parts. He also has a prequel in the works plus another novel set in the same universe in the planning stage making it possible to sell four books if people liked the first one. The plan was to offer the first book in the series free after the third book was out in February.
Through mid January we moved 4 more copies on Amazon and none on B&N. I decided to try a little experiment. I enrolled the first book in Select and set it for free for the upcoming weekend. I waited Friday night to see if go free. It didn’t. So first lesson learned- Amazon’s pop up calender is not a Sunday-Saturday but rather the European style Monday-Sunday type. I had set the book to be free Sunday and Monday instead of Saturday and Sunday.
I canceled the Monday and left it to go free on Sunday. In the interest of science I told no one about the move. Even the author did not know it was happening. What I wanted to know was how many people would find the book with zero promotional effort on my part. End result was a modest 221 downloads in 24 hours. That volume was enough to put the book into the top 20 of the Science Fiction-Adventure sub-category for free Kindle books.
221 is a far cry from the thousands other folks report but given there was zero promotional effort and it only ran one day limiting the chance it would be discovered and promoted elsewhere I think that is a decent result. When I use the other four days next month there will be more push behind it.
The given away was done last weekend. Since then the first book has sold eight copies. The book had been constantly above 200,000 on the Amazon sales rank and now has stayed below 100,000 except for a brief time mid week. Sales of the second book have also picked up though the numbers are still tiny and I think it is too soon to tell if there will be much buy through from the give away. The first book also picked up its first negative review but that hasn’t seemed to hurt sales.
My initial conclusion is that the give away has boosted the visibility of the book. Certainly it has a bigger impact than playing games with the pricing. As it will be several weeks before the concluding book in the trilogy is ready I’ll have the chance to see if the effect wears off over time.
Thanks for sharing those numbers, Chris.
Do be aware that, depending on sales velocity and time, it takes between 1 week to several months for some of Amazon’s algorithms to kick in — the Also Boughts most particularly. (And yes, I track those things, like a geek.) I’ve observed a BIG uptick in sales at about the 5-week mark for two of my titles that had fairly decent sales out of the gate (average of around 5 a day). Those sales were persistent enough that I gained good visibility on the Also Bought lists, which then impacted my sales dramatically (currently I’m selling around 20 a day, but at the peak it was more like 50+ a day).
I think a lot of the Select success is that it can goose the visibility of titles, pushing the algorithms to work faster. But it’s hard to say if some of the uptick in your titles isn’t just the natural effect of time a title had been for sale on Amazon. This presupposes a moderate number of sales, too.
“But it’s hard to say if some of the uptick in your titles isn’t just the natural effect of time a title had been for sale on Amazon.”
Unfortunately there is no way to control for that. This entire process is an experiment that can’t be repeated. As this is the first genre fiction I’ve published I don’t have any data to compare to. If this ends up near your 5 sales a day number both the author and I would be very pleased.
Should add that this book is Kindle only at present. If sales justify I can quickly do physical copies through Lightning Source. I have also asked the author to let me know if anyone contacts him looking for physical copies or a version on Nook/Kobo/Sony/iBookstore. So far have not heard from anyone looking for the book.
Well, readers can’t contact you for a book they don’t see in their preferred store – it’s invisible to them.
I’m currently having about 15% of my sales at B&N. Apple is starting to really ramp up, and one of my titles at Kobo is featured in the “.99 cent indies” pages (no idea how that happened) so sales there are accelerating, too. I guess I’m encouraging you to not put all your eggs in one basket, at least not long term. I get the 90-day Select plan, but be prepared to move past that.
While it’s great that his book was revived with KDP Select, I still think this move (offering KDP Select) by Amazon is a bit … ominous, for lack of a better word. It is clear that Amazon is trying to monopolize the book industry and I think that competition for Amazon is a healthy thing.
Kris Rusch just wrote a post on this – how indies are ignoring readers, meaning that we give in to exclusivity required by KDP Select for our own personal gain, ignoring those who read books on the Nook or any other e-reader. This is true but it’s also true that indie books sell much better on Amazon, as David says in his post – he had only one sale on B&N in that period of a few months. So, it’s up to each author, I suppose.
As for me, I haven’t succumbed yet to the lure of KDP Select. Instead, I made book 1 of my trilogy free on other platforms, which made it free on Amazon. The downloads are doing well and book 2 of the trilogy is selling as well. So there are ways to use “free” without using KDP Select. But here’s the catch, Amazon will give you a leg up, like they did for David, when you join KDP Select. So it’s a toss up.
In many of these KDP Select stories I think the title should be changed to “How running a free giveaway saved my book”.
You could go free before Select, and you can still go free without Select. It’s a little more awkward – you can’t shift back as quickly and reliably – but it’s still feasible. Giveaways are a powerful tool in gaining visibility.
I think the lending library, by itself, does help visibility, though not nearly as much.
Yep, that’s what I did – made my first book free on other sites and it went free on Amazon. It does work.
Thanks so much to everybody who has posted about their experiences with KDP Select and free promotions!
Has anyone had experience with whether just enrolling in the KDP select increased their visibility?
(I wouldn’t use my free days until I put up the second book – I’m hoping about a month after the first.)
Thanks!
I had very similar experiences with two of my “dead in the water” books, “The Parrot Talks in Chocolate” and “Death by Facebook”. They were downloaded 18,000 and 41,000 times respectively.
My average monthly ebook sales were around 100. January I went over 2000! A week after the promo ended, things slowed down, but I am still averaging now, in Feb, 45 sales a day…way ahead of my pre-promo life.
Meanwhile, I have published two more short ebooks and have republished all of them with links and covers to all my others.
It’s the best $0 I ever spent on marketing, advertising, begging ever!
Thanks for sharing your experience, and please don’t listen to negativity. Good job doing what many can only wish they could they do. You made a BUSINESS decision, and it worked. Sadly, some writers don’t have business sense, which is why they have books that don’t sell. The old “write it and they will read it” doesn’t apply, never did. Marketing works, and having Amazon do it for you is not too shabby of an idea. Happy writing.