Wow. Can’t believe the first month of 2015 has already come and gone. Craziness…
So my newest release, Star Brigade: Odysseys, came out in early January. The sales have been a bit slower than I’d hoped, but I’m planning to give them a boost by way of the KDP Select Kindle Countdown Deal.
Now I did go exclusive with Amazon for the first three months of my last book and used the 5 Free Book Days Promotion with great success. This time around, I wanted to try out the Kindle Countdown Deal for a few reasons:
1.) The KDP Select Free Promotion was great, but doesn’t have as much impact on the Kindle Paid Book Charts. With the Kindle Countdown Deal, if my book moves up the charts, it will be on the Paid Charts and not just the Free Charts.
2.) I’m curious to see if this promotion will result in any residual sales for my first book, Star Brigade: Resurgent.
3.) Will sales also result in readers joining my mailing list? I purposely put links in the front and the back of my eBook. Curious-er and curious-er.
I’ll have more thoughts in early February after the Countdown Deal is complete.
However, this will probably be the only time I ever do a Kindle Countdown Deal Promotion to several sever e limitations Amazon has put in place:
1.) Unlike the KDP Select Free Day Promotion, an author has to wait a full month without changing a book’s price before being able to use the Countdown Deals.
2.) With the Free Day Promotion, your free price days reflect across every market your book is available in. But the Kindle Countdown Deal is only available in Amazon US and Amazon UK. Even worse, once you’ve created a Countdown Deal in one market, it does not reflect in the another market.
3.) This was the biggest WTH for me and its something that I found out the hard way. With the Free Day Promotion you can spread your days out across the 3-month Amazon-exclusivity window. With the Countdown Deals you can only create one promotion in Amazon US, and there are any days left, one in Amazon UK. In short, an author cannot spread out their 7 Countdown Deal days throughout their KDP Select Window, which is rather limiting and unfair if you want to give your book more than a few boosts.
Therefore, I’m doing the Countdown Deal once. And after my KDP Select window expires, I’ll never go exclusive to Amazon again. As large as Amazon’s eBook market share is, it would be foolish to be dependent on just one e-retailer for my my sales and eBook exposure. For my next release, I’ll probably plan out a rolling release across all the major e-retailers over the span of a few weeks and see how that works compared to my recent launches. Till next time, folks!
Leave a Reply