When I published my novel 'Threshold Shift' and
short story
collection 'Five Byte Stories', I hummed and harred about enrolling them
in
Kindle Select for about three weeks. For those of you who don't know,
Kindle
Select is an Amazon service where for 90 days at a time the digital
rights of a book can be registered exclusively to Amazon. During this
time it can be loaned out for
free to Amazon Prime members, like loaning out a book from a library.
For every loan the author gets a
share of a pot of money set aside that month by Amazon. This doesn't
affect
sales of your book, (although recently Amazon have announced that to
get 70% of profits for sales in India you must be enrolled in Kindle
Select
otherwise you only get 35% of profits for that region). Also as part of
Kindle
Select, Amazon offer a five day free book promotional period. The idea
being
that an author can make their book free for anything up to a five day
limited
period during the 90 days. (Amazon doesn't allow you to publish free
books, but
it will price match if you are offering your book for free somewhere
else.)
Being new to the world of self-publishing my initial thought
was to offer 'Five Byte Stories' for free perpetually and put in a sample
chapter from 'Threshold Shift' in the hope of enticing readers in. I also
wanted to put Threshold Shift into Kindle Select and go for the five day promo.
There was my dilemma, by putting a sample chapter in Five Byte Stories I would
be breaking the terms and conditions of Kindle select exclusivity if I enrolled
Threshold Shift, so in the end I decided to hold fire on publishing Five Byte
Stories elsewhere and just enrolled them both in Kindle Select.
Without really doing any research I released Five Byte
Stories for three of the five days just to see what would happen. In that time
I was surprised how with no advertising at all Five Bytes was downloaded 400 times
across all Amazon published countries, with the main concentration being in the
US. Admittedly this peaked the second day and then levelled off on the third.
Being quite pleased by this a month later I released it for the final two days.
During this time I put into action a promotional plan of advertising it on
twitter, websites and facebook groups like Pimping Indie. My facebook account was duly locked for 30
days for spamming, (which made me very unhappy, especially as I couldn't figure
out what alarm had been tripped and why other people seemed to be doing the
same thing quite happily. ) Anyway to cut a long story short in those two days
five bytes was downloaded just 25 times. I came to the conclusion that my advertising
was basically ineffective and all the downloaders from the first three days
were the majority of the downloaders I was going to get.
30 Days later, with facebook unlocked, I tried again, this
time with Threshold Shift. I was locked into Kindle Select anyway so figured I
had nothing to lose. My sales of Threshold Shift were just about this side of
abysmal anyway. Feeling a little blasé I didn't advertise the book on any websites
prior to release. I did advertise heavily on twitter as I did previously during
the second Five Byte campaign and when advertising on facebook I left out web
addresses, which stopped me being locked out again. Thing unfurled very
differently and over the five days, a Tuesday to Saturday, my book was
downloaded a total of 1553 times, again mainly in the US but only just, the UK
was very close behind
I had decided after the awful second campaign that this time
I would run the five days consecutively rather than splitting them up. I had
the biggest push of downloads in Day 2, and overall during the entire period I
peaked in the free charts with the following:
Day 3 of the Campaign:
US : 742
US Sci Fi: 19
US Sci-FI Act Adv : 11
US Act-Adv : 17
Day 4 of the Campaign:
UK: 136
UK Sc-Fi: 2
UK Sci-Fi Act Adv: 1
UK Act-Adv: 4
Overall Downloads for the entire five day campaign were the
following:
US: 796
UK: 722
DE: 33
FR: 1
IT: 1
Without knowing how Amazon works I have no idea why I
managed to get more success in the UK than in the US. The download quantities
were very similar, but I obviously picked up a higher percentage of total free
downloads in the UK than in the US by a considerable margin. I have no idea
why, even though I am from the UK, my book isn't advertised as a UK book.
During the campaign I noticed free sci-fi books that were below my ranking in
the UK were well above me in the US.
I'm speculating it was down to factors like my blurb and
cover which I thought were good but maybe just didn't appeal to US tastes and
did to UK ones. I'm also speculating that UK tastes for Science Fiction books
are also a little different. Threshold Shift has always been a strange mix of
sci-fi and western. In the US I was seeing mainly Young Adult books, Zombie
apocalyptic books or Space Opera books dominating the charts. The story wasn't
quite the same in the UK, at least from my perspective. It's also interesting
to note that the sales I have had since the campaign have been mostly in the UK.
So what happens now? Well it was interesting, and I note
that both Five Byte Stories and Threshold Shift are now thoroughly embedded in
Amazon 'Customers who bought this item also bought' science fiction lists which
can only help sales.I also have a better, if still a confused idea, of how Amazon
sales work. As of this week I am not in
Kindle Select anymore and am going through the stages of publishing on
Smashwords,which will eventually expose my books to a wider audience. I
definitely think Kindle Select wasn't a wasted opportunity and it did get my
books downloaded around 2000 times between them. That's 2000 potential readers who may like
the books and tell their friends. How can that hurt?
