The official blog of bestselling suspense author Cheryl Kaye Tardif
Saturday, January 28, 2012
The KDP Select Experiment: Part 7 - Enter the Dragon
The KDP Select Experiment: Part 1 - Mission Impossible?
The KDP Select Experiment: Part 2 - Waiting to Exhale
The KDP Select Experiment: Part 3 - Good Will Hunting
The KDP Select Experiment: Part 4 - The Fast & the Furious
The KDP Select Experiment: Part 5 - The Good, the Bad & the Ugly
The KDP Select Experiment: Part 6 - The Untouchables
One thing I've always been is a fighter. Not physically, but mentally. If someone tells me something can't be done and I know it can, I'll do everything to prove them wrong. Some people told me I was stupid to try KDP Select. Some say I don't value my work if I give it away for free. Others say I won't see sales after all those 40,000+ free downloads. Well, they're all wrong.
Yesterday I watched my sales at different times throughout the day. I noticed that my rank was steadily going lower, meaning more sales. Usually after I do a promotion and it ends, the rank rises, and not too slowly.
At 6:30 PM, DIVINE INTERVENTION's rank was 5032 Paid Kindle. It was also #6 in the top 100 books about Canadian Detectives.
By 9 PM, DI's rank was 4038 Paid Kindle, #3 in Books - Canadian Detectives and #89 in Kindle - Police Procedurals.
At 6:30 PM THE RIVER's rank was 907 Paid Kindle, meaning it was in the top 1000 Kindle ebooks sold by Amazon. It was #6 in Books - Technothrillers, #6 in Kindle - Technothrillers, and #20 in Kindle Sci-fi Adventure.
By 9PM its rank was 831. THE RIVER was also #4 in Books - Technothrillers, #4 in Kindle - Technothrillers, and #19 in Kindle Sci-fi Adventure.
I have done nothing else out of the norm to promote these titles, other than a few tweets (which I usually do for my titles every week or two), some RTs by others and one special promo for THE RIVER on the 25th, which was only for the day. Past experience says my ranks should be higher. Since the only other thing I've done that's different is have them in the KDP Select program, I can only deduce that it is what's responsible for my increased sales.
So what kind of increase have I seen? It's not huge, but I'll take it as a sign of what's to come.
I've sold over 380 copies of DI and TR in the past 2 days on Amazon with very little effort or marketing. This includes about 80 sales on the foreign Amazon sites.
Prior to trying KDP Select and the 2 free promos, neither of my titles had sold this month on any other foreign Amazon, with the exception of a handful of copies total on Amazon.co.uk. I've now broken into the .de (Germany), .fr (France) and .es (Spain) markets with actual sales.
One thing I wondered early on was: would my free promos spur sales of DIVINE JUSTICE, book 2 in my Divine series? It appears it has. Today I saw a sudden spike in sales for DIVINE JUSTICE, and again I've done nothing to promote it. I haven't even tweeted about it lately. If the sales rank continues to go lower I'll know for sure it's a result of KDP Select. Otherwise it's just a fluky coincidence, right? :-)
Was this experiment worth it?
The Kindle Select Experiment: Part 8 - Alice in Wonderland
The KDP Select Experiment: Part 9 - After the Sunset
6 comments:
HI, Cheryl. I read all of your posts in one sitting. I'm happy that you got a surge in sales for DI and TR. I'll be following to see if you get more titles sold. However I still remain skeptical. I only have two novels and one short story trilogy to my name. Will I see the same results as someone that has more than five novels? Would it be worth it for me to pull my titles from BN (where my latest thriller Chill Run is outselling my previous thriller by 15:1 with little to no advertising) and the other sites? That still remains to be seen. I'm going to post an open question on Facebook about free eBooks and I'll get back to you on the response. Feel free to join in.
Hi Russell, these are good questions. Though I can't say for sure what your results will be, I can say that my other non-Select titles are selling about the same as usual. The only spike in sales I've seen are with the 2 titles that are in Select and were free for 2 or 5 days.
What this tells me is that my having other books hasn't influenced Select sales, nor has Select influenced my other book sales. Maybe it will though over some time. I feel it's still a bit early to know for sure the full potential of KDP Select.
Send me a link to your FB discussion once you have it set up. I am trying to gobble up as much info on Select as possible--pros and cons. :-)
One of my biggest concerns is that when you place something for free, among hundreds of free eBooks, book addicts will spend all day downloading as many eBooks that they can get. What are the chances of them reading all of them before they download another batch? Very small. A reason why I believe the free eBooks are not influencing sales of your other books is because the consumers of free and cheap eBooks may not necessarily be your target audience. They're downloading these eBooks just because they're free (and also on impulse). Half of these freeloaders may not even remember your name after they've read their tenth eBook. Or it may take weeks if not months before they get to your eBook because they have a backlog of eBooks to get through. One prime example of this came when I contacted book bloggers to help me promote my last novel. I contacted about 80 where it was agreed that they'd post their reviews on Amazon, BN, their blogs and on Goodreads on the release date. Although I contacted most of them 3 months before the release date, I only have 31 on Goodreads, 34 reviews on Amazon, and 17 on BN. What does this say? Maybe some of these bloggers were only there to get free books and aren't taking their blogs seriously. One of them, after I paid to ship her a copy of the paperback, had the nerve to write in her review that she normally doesn't read thrillers and that she wasn't the audience for my book, and this is after I sent her a 3-chapter excerpt to help her decide on whether or not she wanted to read it. She also admitted that she was new to blogging and she was enticed by receiving a free paperback.
Here's the facebook link, Cheryl. https://www.facebook.com/candace.mumford/posts/2606934528648
I hear what you're saying, Russell. you could be right that many people who download free ebooks won't read what they get. But what if half did? What if one tenth of 40,000 readers did?
I can say conclusively that the free promos I held affected my after sales. There is nothing else to explain the sudden increase in sales for these two titles and ONLY these 2 of my 9. And the increase appeared about 24 hours after my free promos ended and continued for 48 hrs.
Book reviewers are a whole other ballgame. You'll never get 100% of reviewers who say yes to review your book. It's closer to 40-50%. I'm sure many had good intentions but life, jobs, kids etc got in the way. Or they read the book and didn't like it. No review is better than a terrible one. And whether you sent 3 chaps or not, it's always the chance we take with reviewers.
I've sent books to reviewers only to find out--even after they read a sample--that it wasn't for them. I've even read books myself based on samples and found I didn't like the book for whatever reason.
I think the only thing we can do is experiment wherever we feel comfortable, scrap the rest and do whatever works for each of us. Right now Select is working for me. It might not work for you and that's fine. I'm sure you'll find something that works. And from the sounds of it, BN already does. :-)
All the best!
Oh, I forgot to mention, my other ebooks are selling as per their normal rates. No noticeable increase or decrease in sales. I'll blog about it if I see this change either way. :-)
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