If you don’t know what KDP Select is, it’s a service from Amazon Kindle which you can sign up to which makes your eBook exclusive to Amazon for a period of 90 days. During those 90 days you are not allowed to sell your eBook on any other platforms, so you will have to unpublish it from everywhere else you have it for sale. If you use Smashwords this is just a simple click of the unpublish button, if you have uploaded your eBook to all the different retailers individually then it’s a bit more time consuming.
I will be posting my opinions on KDP Select at some point in the future, but for now I wanted to give you my 5 top tips to get the most out of KDP Select for those 90 days.
1. Choose your 5 free promotion dates well – Don’t just pick and choose the dates willy nilly, that won’t make the most of the 5 free days you’re given. Start by sitting down and working out a schedule of when a good time is to have your eBook available for free. There maybe certain dates that people are more likely to buy your eBook, for example my late Grandfather’s book is about WWII and PoW’s, so a good time to do a free promotion would be around D-Day or similar. Also you need to decide whether you’d like to offer 5 days in a row or just one-off days throughout the 90 days.
2. Promote your eBook well before your first free promotion – Before you offer your eBook for free you need to do a lot of marketing and promoting. There is no point making your eBook free but not doing any marketing, people won’t find it if you don’t market it. You can find various websites where you can add your free dates, and then on those dates they will promote it for you – some are free, others require payment.
3. Keep a track of paid sales and free downloads – When you’re signed up to KDP Select you can view your paid sales and your free downloads. What you need to do is keep track of these and see whether your free promotions are causing a spike in your paid sales. By keeping statistics over the 90 days will help you decide whether you want to continue with KDP Select for a further 90 Days. If you don’t keep detailed figures, how do you know whether it’s been successful?
4. Try and have some good reviews before you sign-up – People don’t tend to download eBooks without checking out the reviews first. You should be always looking for ways to get reviews for your eBook, even before you launch it. You need to be thinking about pre-release reviews, which means sending out your eBook to reviewers before publication – most successful authors do this as standard.
5. Utilise social media to market the eBook and free promotion days – Social media is where you need to be marketing your eBook, this is where things go viral, this could make or break a self-published author. You can create events, set-up groups, join conversations, create profiles for your eBook on the top social media networks. You need to create hype about your eBook, about your free promotion days, and on those days you need to be at your computer pushing it out there.
If you can manage to cover all the basics of KDP Select and market your eBook using these top 5 tips you’ll gain plenty of free downloads, rise up the Kindle chart and hopefully get a huge spike in paid sales.
KDP Select only works if you put in the effort, planning, promotion and perseverance!
For more tips have a look at this post – KDP Select: Is it worth it? (6 Takeaways From My Experience)
As usual, A very interesting post, thanks.
Thank you James! 🙂
Ah, who says self-publishing is easy? And that’ s just the marketing process.