Last Sunday I had my day in the sunshine and put Penelope and The Movie Star out for free on KDP Select. The expectation with this experiment was to try out the marketing tool and obviously drum up new readers. Here are some of the results.
Free downloads
Amazon US 310
UK 48
Germany 7
For "Customer Who Bought This Book Also Bought," I now have 95 links. I thought this might be a good thing, but it worries me that perhaps I have just lost my book in another forest of trees. When I look at some of the books in the list, I find that they do not always link back to my book. Another point to ponder is many of the books linked to mine are not related to middle-grade mysteries. I mean is having a tween mystery linked with a book on serial killers a good thing?
I also pulled in 2 real sales out of the experiment. One occurred so close during the give away I didn't see it until the final numbers for the week were tallied. The other came the day after. By day number two things went dead again.
An interesting fallout was with Barnes and Nobles sales. Penelope and The Birthday Curse took off on the same day of the giveaway. While it may be coincidence and I cannot help but see a cause and effect.
Another note is that I have not had any "borrows" yet. Of course, if its free why borrow?
Time will tell. At this point I am not greatly impressed with the results. But this was an experiment and perhaps in a few months I will be singing praises for KDP Select.
I would guess that the B&N sales may be related. When my 101 tips took off (and thusly I sold some of my other books) I also had a surge at B&N, too (not as large as Amazons, but as B&N had been selling 1 or 2, 30 was a surge). Since then B&N sales have held steady, and even gone up, but Amazon's have fallen off.
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping to try to compile a blog for the self published suthor's lounge of people who have tried KDP select in a month or so to see how it is working out. If you don't mind I may hit you up at the time ;)
Let me know what you need!
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