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Have you heard of Amazon’s Kindle Scout program? I love it! Authors submit their titles to the program in hopes of winning a publishing contract through Amazon. Users vote on the different titles and if a book that they nominated is selected, they get a free copy.
But even if you are not selected for a publishing contract, authors can still win. The people that voted for you are notified when the book goes on sale at Amazon. I have purchased titles this way because I didn’t want to miss out on the story. at Indies Unlimited has all the details.
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Turning Losing into Winning: The Kindle Scout Experience
When I finished my latest book, Finding Travis, a time travel story, I sent it out to beta readers and prepared to self-publish as I always do. But then a friend began broadcasting the news that she had entered her latest book in the Kindle Scout program and was looking for nominations. I remembered that another friend had entered his book in the program months ago, and had won the coveted publishing contract with Amazon. Because I really, really liked this new book of mine, and because I had built up quite a decent fan base, I decided to try Kindle Scout for myself.
The Kindle Scout campaign is a two-pronged deal. Amazon evaluates the book on its own merit, but they also look at the number of nominations a book receives from potential readers. Because Amazon doesn’t ever tell us how it writes its algorithms or how it decides what’s a winning book and what isn’t, it’s hard to know exactly how to go after the win. The only things that were in my control were (1) writing a good book; and (2) getting as many people as possible to nominate the book. So that’s what I did.
Some people might balk at the idea of nominating a book they haven’t read. I totally understand. However, Kindle Scout creates a landing page for each book and includes the cover, a short blurb, and the first chapter as a sample for voters to read. Readers can then decide for themselves if they feel the book is a winner, or they might simply go on the author’s past performance.
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