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Geektastic KDP Giveaway Stats

Geektastic KDP Giveaway Stats

Published by Kelly on July 22, 2013

Last week, I did another one of those silly book giveaways with the KDP Select program to prepare for the impending release of Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. In total, I gave away 1048 copies of The Redheaded Stepchild around the globe.

Because I am a word nerd who totally geeks out over statistics, here are my geektastic findings from the latest giveaway:

-As you may have drawn from the sharp line on the graph (picture me with one of those presentation wands pointing to the chart HERE), giveaways are most successful on the first day. Why? Because people don’t like spending money, so they will grab up all the free books they can get their hands on, which in the Kindle universe, changes daily.

 – In the free book rankings, The Redheaded Stepchild topped out at #14 in the Coming of Age category, and #18 in the Literary category.

– To my surprise, Friday was a good day to give away a book. Saturday was surprising, too. I figured people would be increasingly ignoring their computers the first 3 days of the giveaway (Friday, Saturday, Sunday) and I would see a spike on Monday, but if you’ll refer to the chart HERE (picture me with magic wand again), my hypothesis proved to be wildly incorrect.

– I got a predictable 1-star review out of the giveaway. Am I surprised? Not really. Literary fiction’s not for everyone. The person who negatively reviewed my book would probably do the same to Jane Austen or Charles Dickens for lack of action. Not that I would dare compare myself to Austen or Dickens. I’m far younger and better looking.

Now, I just need to get ready for my next big promotional craziness – the release of PORTRAIT OF WOMAN IN INK!

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The End of My KDP Select Era

Published by Kelly on April 2, 2012

The end of March marked the end of my three-month enrollment for The Redheaded Stepchild in the KDP Select program. If you’re unfamiliar with the program, I explained the crux of it in an earlier post. There is an option to automatically renew enrollment in the program, but I’ve decided I’m done with KDP Select. Here’s why:

  • Over the 3 months, I didn’t have a single “borrower”. These are people who have Amazon Prime and can borrow from the Kindle Lending Library for no charge, while the author gets a cut.
  • I think the free ebook promotion has worn out its welcome. There are so many independent authors putting their books up for free now that it’s impossible to get to them all after awhile.
  • Author “support” sites have figured out that they can monetize on author’s promotional days, asking them to pay a premium so they can give away more of their books for free.
  • The success of a free promotional day no longer seems to translate to as much success after the promotion is over. The Amazon rankings in “free” don’t carry over to the paid days.

Don’t get me wrong, The Redheaded Stepchild is my first book and I don’t expect to make a fortune on it. It’s just the first step in building my “long tail” of success. But if I really want to get my book into the hands of more and more readers, I need to be on more and more sites. And I think $2.99 is an impulse-friendly enough price that I can keep building on that success. Not to mention that if I decide to offer my book for free sometime, Amazon will price-match it.

Because I am a huge nerd, I wanted to look at the data of my promotions and see what kinds of trends were there:

The first day, the KDP Select giveaway was fairly new, I tweeted like crazy, blogged, and it paid off. The second day, I decided to see how much impact my own efforts had, and only sent a couple tweets. The third day, I stepped up the efforts, made sure I was featured on a few promotional blogs (before they figured out that they could monetize on this process), and again tweeted like crazy. The success was pretty unparalleled, as you can see. I did a 2-day promotion while I was at SXSW because I wanted the people I met to have the opportunity to download it for free. I didn’t have much time to tweet about it, plus the network was overloaded with tweeting nerds, so the success wasn’t as big. I also wanted to see if consecutive free days had any compounding impact.

Also, my best dates were about a month apart. I’ve heard from other KDP Select authors who’ve expressed that subsequent promotional days didn’t yield as big a return as a previous one a couple of weeks earlier. This seems to be the same for me. I did, however, sell more books in February than any other month, so I can’t complain.

It was an experiment, more than anything else, and I wanted to try it out so I could see if it worked. I can’t say it was a total failure or anything, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it again for awhile. I want to get my book back in other channels, and I’m not too worried about how this will impact getting my book into the hands of more readers. The common denominator in all my successful days wasn’t KDP Select – it was me. The more effort I put into getting the word out about my book, the more downloads I had. It’s been fun, KDP Select, but I think we need to see other people for awhile.

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KDP Select Promotion Day 1 Report

Published by Kelly on January 14, 2012

As part of the KDP Select program, which I detailed in a previous post, I get five days within each 3-month period where The Redheaded Stepchild is available for free download on Kindle. You can choose to have 5 adjacent days, 5 spread out days, or any combination thereof.

I chose to spread out my days for some maximum effect. The days I chose were mostly arbitrary, the first one being January, Friday the 13th. In case you can’t count, that was yesterday, and here’s how it shaped up…

I tweeted the freeness of the book 3 or 4 times throughout the day, and I posted it on this blog. I also let my Facebook friends know, but more because I knew some of them got Kindle Fires for Christmas, and I feel like a bastard asking my friends to pay money for a book where they know all the characters. That was it. As far as I know, the free-ness wasn’t mentioned in any other tweets (I have a watch on the phrase “Redheaded Stepchild” on Twitter).

Yesterday, I had over 300 people download The Redheaded Stepchild on Kindle. The actual number is somewhere between 307 and 342. (It was 308 when I went to bed and 343 when I woke up, and I know I actually sold one for money a couple days before). I don’t care who you are, that is fucking huge. I mean, I’ve had some sales here and there, but I’ve never had more than 300 even look at my book’s page in one day before, and I usually knew who was buying on any given day. I probably know 300 people, but I don’t know the 300 people who downloaded my book yesterday.

I know, I know, I don’t make a dime on any of those 300 sales. Do I care? No. I know people like free shit. Hell, I like free shit. A lot. The point is, if all of those 300+ people like it, that’s 300+ people who positively review my book, tell their friends about it, or lend it to a Kindle friend. If all those 300+ hate it, I don’t lose any money when they ask for a refund (suckers) and I get 300+ negative reviews, and my book still has the Gigli effect (people will check it out just to see how bad it REALLY is).

But the bottom line is this – I have over 300 new readers, and books in hands is more important to me than money and sales. Not to mention, I still have 4 more promotion days from now until the end of March, so keep your eyes peeled if you missed this first promotional day. Or spend the $3 instead of getting that large coffee.

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The Redheaded Stepchild available on KDP Select!

Published by Kelly on January 2, 2012

In case this headline doesn’t mean anything to you, allow me to explain the Reader’s Digest version…

Amazon has a new option with its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program that allows their authors to enroll their titles. For a 90-day period, those titles are available in the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, and Amazon Prime members with Kindles can borrow a book a month for free for all titles enrolled in the program.

What does this mean for me? I not only get to offer my book in the Lending Library, I also get to offer my book for free for up to 5 days during this period, getting it into more hands. So if you’ve got The Redheaded Stepchild in your wish list, you can keep your eyes peeled for one of these 5 free days and get it. The only catch is, I have to offer my book digitally exclusively in the Kindle store. Given that I have sold all of 5 copies on my other digital platform, Smashwords, I think I can remove it for 3 months and be okay. Plus, it’s a different way to earn royalties and get more exposure, and this is all trial and error for me, anyway. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!

To learn more about KDP Select, go here. To see The Redheaded Stepchild in the Amazon Kindle store, go here.

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