Amazon sells around 60% of the books sold on the market today. That's a huge percentage, and translates to 3 out of every 5 books sold. As a result, any author who is starting out, especially those of us who are self-publishing, have to learn about, use, and play nice with Amazon. Luckily for us, Amazon is pretty friendly and supportive of authors. There are issues of course and things I wish were different, but plenty of things work in my favor.
One of those is the KDP Select program. Click on the link to read all about it. The basic gist is that if you sign your ebook up, it's available for free for 90 days to all Prime members. They can read it on their Kindle for free, which can be great for marketing. BUT! You also get to select 5 days out of those 90 where you can make it free to everyone to download.
And that's where the marketing comes in. There are 2 main ways you can leverage these free days.
1. Kindle-friendly Blogs & Social Media: There are lots of blogs, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages dedicated to spreading the word about free Kindle books. Some are really sophisticated, like Pixel of Ink, and some are just cobbled together. But if you put in the time to promote your free days on all of them, you move a lot of books.
2. Coordinate with other marketing efforts: If you're doing a blog tour, it's a great idea to have one of your free days be on the day you are speaking or writing on the big or biggest blogs. If you have a radio interview, same thing. Etc. Anytime you have a high profile online or offline media gig to promote your book, use a Kindle KDP Select Free Day and you'll get lots of downloads.
The advantages to getting lots of copies of your book downloaded for free are:
1) You can move up the Kindle Free Book Top Download List. It's like the bestseller lists, but the books are free. And a high ranking can carry over to sales.
2) The more people who can read your book, the more people who can tell a friend, blog about it, tweet about it, etc. Getting it in the hands of avid readers is great to spark word of mouth marketing.
3) If you have a series, giving the first book away for free can make a significant impact on hooking people in and getting them to pay for your second book.
Have you used Amazon KDP Select days? What was your experience like?
Image source: randomduck via flickr
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