Kindle Countdown

My Kindle Countdown Deal Epic Fail

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This post by Juliet Rich originally appeared on her site.

Over the Black Friday-Cyber Monday weekend, I offered The Flaming Geeks Book of Geeky Trivia for .99 on an Amazon Kindle Countdown Deal. I didn’t have tiers, so it was 99 cents the whole time until it went back up to the list price of $2.99.

As I did when I offered it as a Free Book Promotion, I only marketed it by sharing it on my personal Facebook page. I did this a couple of times during the promotion.

The results:

Free Book Promotion – ~150 free downloads (no money for me), followed up with ~5 sales immediately after the promotion ended (yay money). Plus it netted me my first review (yay review!).

Kindle Countdown Deal – no downloads, no sales, no new reviews

 

Why didn’t it work?

Reason #0 – I need to do more marketing in general. But that was true of both cases.

Reason #1 – Everyone who follows me on Facebook who wanted it already had it.

 

Read the full post, which includes four more specific reasons plus analysis, on Juliet Rich’s site.

 

Is Kindle Countdown the new Free? Keeping Books Visible in 2014

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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.