This post by M. Louisa Locke originally appeared on her blog on 2/25/14.
For the past year there has been a good deal of hand-wringing over the question of KDP Select free promotions. Have they de-valued fiction, do they attract negative reviews, do they even work anymore? As anyone who regularly reads my blog posts knows, I have been a strong proponent of offering ebooks free for promotional purposes, and free promotions have been very good to me in terms of increasing my reviews and keeping my books visible and selling.
However, I also believe one of the distinct advantages we have as indie authors is our ability to use our own sales data to respond innovatively to changes in the marketing environment. As a result, in the past year I followed a number of different strategies to keep the books in my Victorian San Francisco Mystery series visible, including beginning to experiment with the new promotional tool, the Kindle Countdown, that has been introduced as part of KDP Select.
In this post I am going to:
A. Review how successful the strategies I pursued last year were for selling books in 2013.
B. Address whether or not Free is failing as a strategy.
C. Compare the Kindle Countdown promotions to Free promotions.
D. Assess whether or not Kindle Countdown promotions can replace free-book promotions as my primary promotional strategy for 2014.
Click here to read the full post on M. Louisa Locke’s blog.