How to Have a Successful KDP Select Campaign

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From Publetariat:

If you plan to promote your book through Amazon’s KDP Select “Free” promotion, you can potentially receive exposure that is equivalent to a billboard standing in the middle of Times Square in New York City, or you might not.

There are several factors that can influence how well or how poorly your book fares when given such an incredible opportunity. Because the response to a promotion can vary from one title to the next, it is very important that you get everything right BEFORE you set your book loose.

. . . .

Your Book Cover is the very first thing readers see, so it only stands to reason that it better be AWESOME. Unfortunately, many self-published authors have an unprofessional looking cover, yet expect professional results. Your cover needs to grab a reader’s attention, draw them in, or create enough curiosity to earn a “click”. If your book cover is lame or screams “self-published” you might get far fewer clicks than if you spent a little bit of money on a sweet cover. And in the world of KDP Select promotions, a loss of clicks can mean a loss of several hundred to several thousand dollars. So it is definitely worth the expense.

. . . .

[M]y opinion of book pricing has nothing to do with the value of your book, it has to do with the size of your audience. Therefore, if you’re a newer author, and if you do not have many reviews, or awards, I would not recommend pricing your book over $2.99 during a KDP promotion. Unless your book really catches fire, a newer author is at risk of losing sales when over priced. In fact, check out the top 100; you’ll notice that there are more low priced books than ever before.

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16 thoughts on “How to Have a Successful KDP Select Campaign”

  2. Hi Passive Guy. Thanks for the recent mentions. So your readers know, all of the above quotes are from my book, The Indie Author’s Guide to the Universe.

    What’s really cool is, one of your faithful followers did some digging and found me, and we actually had a phone conversation today that could help us both in the long run. Thanks for doing what you do. And I just subscribed.

    Jeff Bennington

  3. Promotion is definitely a mixed bag and sometimes sales numbers make no sense. I have a short story that outsold my novella and novel the first week it was up, even though I never posted a word about it anywhere online. And I have to disagree with the comment on keeping your book below $2.99–I had my novel at that price for months and barely sold anything after the initial push (which had unimpressive sales as well): When I raised the price to $3.99 and then to $4.99 my sales increased without me doing a thing to promote the story. Apparently implied value works. I have several other things needing some edits and then I’ll be adding them to KDP, but I don’t know if I’ll hook up to Select until I have more to offer. Limiting my sales options doesn’t seem like good business to me.

  4. I have 3 short stories on KDP Select. Today, March 1, I started a 5-day free promotion. We’ll see what happens 🙂

    I’m sure your advice about having a knockout cover is sound, PG, but I find it hard to distinguish good covers from bad. I have spend hundreds of dollars and countless hours on the cover for my thriller (St Patrick’s Day Special) but I’m pretty sure it’s what’s holding the book back.

  5. Thanks for posting this, PG.

    I’ve currently got three books on Amazon. All were published this month. One is a novel written four years ago; the second is an essay collection from my syndicated column; and the third is a brand new novella just released today. I decided to experiment with the free promotion tool on the first two on that list. The third one, the new novella, is not currently part of Select.

    My experiences:

    The essay collection is called “The Honest Truth About Honest Abe,” so President’s Day seemed like a perfect opportunity to do a 2-day free promo. I woke up the first morning and found that the book had already been downloaded 30 times without any promotion. I took to Twitter and Facebook, and as many as 30 people reposted it on Facebook, and many of them told me that their friends said they checked the book out. By the time the 2-day promo was over, somewhere in the neighborhood of 550 copies had been downloaded. It’s sold in the area of 25 copies in the week and a half since.

    For my second book, a novel called “The Best Sniper Ever,” I decided to try something different. Whereas with the first one I did a 2-day promo on a Monday and Tuesday (with the Monday being a holiday), I did “The Best Sniper Ever” as a 1-day promotion this past Saturday, and didn’t say a word about it to anyone. I have no clue how people find these things, but better than 600 of them found it. However, I haven’t sold 10 copies of the book since its promo day.

    So for me, right now, my opinion on Select is mixed. On the one hand, neither of my free promotions has resulted in the deluge of sales I kept hearing about. That may be a mark on the quality of my books; it may just be proof that luck is a factor. I just don’t know. I do know that better than 1,000 people are reading my work, or at least have my work on their Kindles, who’ve probably never read me before. So hopefully that’ll turn into something eventually. But I was certainly hoping for better sales in the immediate aftermath.

    On the other hand, maybe Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith are right when they say promotion goes only so far. I’ve been promoting the heck out of my new novella, “Versus Nurture,” all day long, and have barely got any sales. And similarly, I promoted the heck out of “The Honest Truth About Honest Abe” when it was free, yet I got less downloads into 2 free days for that one than I got in 1 free and unpromoted day for “The Best Sniper Ever.” So who knows how these things work?

  6. Interesting that this was posted here.

    Today, I am making my first book available through Select. It hit near the top of the Amazon charts a couple times as a free book and when Amazon raised the price yesterday, it hit one of the paid best seller lists. I am VERY interested to see what Select does for it.

    I hope you do a follow up, PG. I would love to hear more of the experiences other authors are having. I have seen some on here before, but the program is evolving.

    Splitter

    • C.S., I noticed you have a book on Amazon with 22 reviews, which is a very nice number. Is that the book you’re referring to that hit the paid bestseller list?

      • Yep, JDM, that’s the one. It had a cup of coffee in the top 100 for Humor and then took a holiday. It’s currently puttering along between 5K and 8K in the overall rankings, nothing spectacular.

        I am not sure if I am lucky with the number of reviews or not. The book has over 25K downloads. Honestly, I expected more but understand that most of those were just people filling their new Kindles with free books.

        This is a marathon, right? Please tell me I am right lol.

        Splitter

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