So the third story in the series has expanded in scope a lot more than I anticipated. As a result, the editing process has been a lot longer than planned. I’ve had this cover sitting around for a while now and may tweak it before final publishing.
What do you think?
While my two stories aren’t in the top 1000 kindle books at this moment, there was a brief time when my first one, Kill Log: Vigilante, was. It sat up there for about a week, selling copies and making me very happy. Nothing makes you feel more accomplished than having your work rank above professional authors published by the big publishing houses. Of course, all good things must come to an end and I saw a drastic fall in ranking as the weeks progressed. It probably hasn’t helped that I haven’t really gone around advertising my series actively, but I have plenty of time to do that later. Books are forever. My immediate need for writing comes first.
Today I wanted to share a little trick that one can do coming off of a KDP Select promo to help boost their sales rankings (albeit, only temporarily). Of course this comes at the risk of shooting yourself in the foot if you’re not careful. So I am sharing it more for information’s sake than actually recommending it. Knowledge is always good, so take it as you may.
I’m roughly a month into my first month of Kindle Select and I have been diligently recording details of my progression so that I may provide a detailed report at the end of the 90 day period. During this time, I’ve been keeping track of KDP Select’s Lending Library payout announcements from Amazon and calculating the numbers to see whether my participation in KDP Select puts me at an advantages or a disadvantage. I did a KDP Select Terms and Conditions post a few weeks back which covered the legal pros and cons of the KDP Select program. Today, I wanted to cover the numbers side of the game.
Breaking it down as simple as you can go, the following people are the types who will likely benefit the most from participating in KDP Select:
1) If you are a new author looking to try to get some exposure in the market place.
2) If you price your books under the $2.99 (70% royalty) threshold.
3) If you are Amazon.com
As a freshman author in the self-publishing world, I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what would be the most effective distributing system for my work. I started with my Smashwords and enjoyed seeing the initial spike of 80 views within day one. Sadly, there were no takers on following through to purchase. My views dropped to 20 in day two and then only 1 view on day three. By day four there was nothing left. Amazon fared no better on the purchases. Their tracking system isn’t very effective so I could only see the number of downloads, not page views. I honestly didn’t expect anything though. I didn’t do any specific advertising on purpose and had simply let my work sit on the sites.
I’d heard some really good and really bad things about KDP Select, so I was cautious to use it right away. I haven’t had much experience with self-publishing and it seemed foolish to completely exclude a distribution system for 90 days. After my views through those alternate distribution systems stopped showing any signs of life, I decided to take a closer look at the Terms and Conditions for Amazon’s exclusive program.
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