KDP Select or Not?

[nightdreamer]

I almost can't believe that a search here turned up nothing on this topic. Anyone have experience with it? A general Google search turned up comments both ways, and right now I'm thinking not, but there seem to be some better minds lurking at the Chrons than Google was able to provide. Thoughts?

 

[thaddeus6th]

I went for Not.

To be clear, I self-published through Smashwords, but opted out of Amazon there and published through Amazon directly.

My Amazon sales are much better than elsewhere, but there's always the chance that they'll pick up elsewhere and I prefer not to reduce my outlets for sale. I've also read that KDP Select auto-reaffirms, so you have to actively cancel if you want that to happen (that's not a bad thing in itself, just thought it's worth mentioning).

A perhaps cunning use of it could be if you write a short story specifically for KDP Select to get noticed, and if people like it they'll then check out your other books on Amazon. This'll prevent your big/proper work being exclusive but still give you the benefit of extra exposure through the scheme (I think that's how it's meant to work).

 

[nightdreamer]

You're right about the auto-reaffirm, but that was neither here nor there for me. Neither so much was the exclusivity. I was most interested into the impact of their library loan feature. I'm not a marketing expert by any stretch of the imagination and have no clue if loss in sales that way might be offset by increased exposure. But as I said, I'm thinking not.

 

[Gareth Lewis]

I tried it with one of my books when it first came out, but didn't have much success. The main boost you get from KDP Select comes with the free promotion days (it didn't get any lends for the entire three months), but I had less than 400 downloads, and didn't gain much sales momentum from it.

I probably didn't do enough promotion for it though, not having been on twitter at the time, and the best place to advertise free promotions is on Pixels of Ink, which, despite me submitting in plenty of time, was busy that weekend of my second promotion so I didn't get a mention.

Other writers I know have had better luck. One had 13,800 downloads from a three day promotion last weekend, and sales continued strongly when it went back to priced, having 2-3 months worth of average sales in a couple of days (she'd also dropped the price to $0.99 coming out of the free promotion). Here's her blog entry on what she did - http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/3057534-kdp-free-promotions---a-few-things-i-have-learned.

So if you're good with social media (I'm not), it could give you a useful boost to your exposure. One of the main concerns is that the people downloading free stuff may never get around to reading all of them. Even if they don't, the more downloads you get the higher up you go in the rankings, so the more chance you have of being found by someone who will enjoy your work (this is why multiple day promotions are better, to keep up momentum to reach higher ranks).

 

[nightdreamer]

Garth, thanks for that blog link. It was more informative than anything Google got me to.

 

[Glen]

I tried it when my book was only on Amazon and not Smashwords. There were a bunch of downloads during the free promo period, but nothing beyond that.

I did get an excellent, five-star review which I am pretty sure came from one of those downloads, which was good news. I'm not sure I would try it again though given the need to be exclusive to Amazon.