NEW AMAZON KINDLE PAPERWHITE VIDEO AND THE POWER OF ADVERTISING by John A. A. Logan
Near the end of
2012, Amazon contacted me to ask if they could feature a page from my ebook,
The Survival of Thomas Ford, in the new video advert for the Kindle Paperwhite
on Amazon UK.
The video is at
the top left there on the UK page where the Kindle Paperwhite is sold.
Page
one of The Survival of Thomas Ford is onscreen from 3.00 to 3.06 in the video
as the example of a UK book exclusive to Amazon Kindle Select.
Someone
is shown reading page one of The Survival of Thomas Ford as the narrator says:
“…and then there
are thousands of books you just can’t find anywhere else like more than 180000
titles exclusive to Kindle.”
It’s quite odd
to see onscreen, a Kindle held by a hand resting on a turquoise towel,
displaying Chapter One, page one, of your book, with the words alongside:
“180,000 +
titles exclusive to Kindle”
It also made me
remember that I had The Survival of Thomas Ford in Kindle Select but I hadn’t
done a free promotion of the book since April 2012.
That free
promotion had gone well, with $1600 worth of sales coming in over the two weeks
following it.
I had felt
cautious ever since April, though, hearing stories about KDP Select free promos
no longer being effective, so I hadn’t wanted to try it again, perhaps not
wanting to find out for sure.
But by December
2012 Christmas Spirit must have overwhelmed me, I signed The Survival of Thomas
Ford up for a 5 day free promotion, from 21-25 December.
This Free Promotion
felt a bit different than the 2 day one I had done back in April 2012, and
which I wrote about here in, A Note From Frankenstein’s Castle:
This Christmas
promotion there seemed a LOT more free books out there, naturally enough.
I soon realised
that those 5 days are probably the most competitive of the year for a free
promo.
The Survival of
Thomas Ford stayed in the Top 20 free UK books for most of the five days,
though never quite catching up with Rosen Trevithick’s The Ice Marathon, which
stayed just ahead every day, as though we were in a latter-day episode of The
Wacky Races and I was playing Dick Dastardly to her Penelope Pitstop!
(Or maybe I was
playing Muttley…Heh-heh!)
On 26 December,
when The Survival of Thomas Ford went back to $2.99 I didn’t expect much to
happen, as I had believed those stories about KDP Select no longer being
effective.
But by 29th
December I’d had $900 worth of downloads.
By 31 December,
though, I saw them slow down…
Until an idea
popped into my head, which surely must have come from The Survival of Thomas
Ford’s inclusion in the Kindle Paperwhite advert.
I started to
look up info on Kindle advertising.
I’d made $900 in
4 days; so why not invest some of that back into my business of finding new
readers for The Survival of Thomas Ford?
But how much
money? And what ads could I get at a day’s notice?
I
bought a Kindle Book Review Twitterlicious Social Media Buzz advert for $40
It
appeared on 1/1/13
Here
it is:
http://www.thekindlebookreview.net/2013/01/01/exceptionally-detailed-and-hauntingly-suspenseful-thriller/
http://www.thekindlebookreview.net/2013/01/01/exceptionally-detailed-and-hauntingly-suspenseful-thriller/
On
the same day I bought a World Literary Café, Today’s Hot Titles ad, for $25,
like the ones at the top of the page here:
http://www.worldliterarycafe.com/
http://www.worldliterarycafe.com/
So
I’d laid out $65 of the $900 I’d just made, on the two adverts.
By
2 January my downloads had picked up again, though, they had paid for the ads
and I was back into profit, soon passing the $1200 mark.
I
had reached new readers with this combination of free promo and ad promo, 13
new reviews came in, including:
5.0 out of 5 stars A DARK AND
GRIPPING TALE, January 5, 2013
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Survival of Thomas Ford (Kindle Edition)
This is the best novel I have read
in a few years. I can't believe I got it for free and found a consummate
writer. This tale was nothing short of riveting. It is rich in character
development, mood and atmospherics.It is a story of evil, greed, power that
corrupts(not in a political context), and the domino effect of trying to cover
up the initial crime that may have been less serious than what follows. Folks,
this is great literature and a first class story told by a magnificent
craftsman.I have no interest whatsoever in the book, but I urge you to buy this
one.
*********************
I did notice
some differences in this KDP Select free promo, compared to the last one I’d
done 8 months earlier:
1) More USA sales, so that I started to think in dollars and focus on USA ads
2) Also, over $500 of the income was from KDP Select “borrows”…something, again, I could not have tapped into if I wasn’t exclusively in KDP Select with the book.
1) More USA sales, so that I started to think in dollars and focus on USA ads
2) Also, over $500 of the income was from KDP Select “borrows”…something, again, I could not have tapped into if I wasn’t exclusively in KDP Select with the book.
Claire Ridgway's meticulous links below were extremely helpful to me during the free promo and after:
http://www.interviewswithindieauthors.com/my-kdp-select-success-stor/
http://www.interviewswithindieauthors.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/KDP-Select-Free-Promo-Report-Updated1.pdf
http://www.interviewswithindieauthors.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/KDP-Select-Free-Promo-Report-Updated1.pdf
Thank-you to Claire for
such a valuable resource.
This
Christmas/New Year promo led to the 30000th download of The Survival
of Thomas Ford, so thank-you to each new reader who gave the book a try, and
All Best for 2013!
Comments
The pricing on loans is interesting isn't it? I've noticed that the returns on a loan are greater than on a sale, so definitely worth enrolling in Select.
A great post and very informative. Very generous of you to pass on your experiences, and back them up with statistics.
Best wishes
Margaret
Food for thought that the advertising worked so well.
warmest
Christine
Finally - I am one of those that downloaded your book over Christmas. It is only the second book I have ever read on Kindle and I am thoroughly enjoying it! My husband will read it next and I'll be sure to ask him to post a review! I'll post one too - though have no idea whether Amazon will apply the brakes since I'm another author - I truly hope not. Karen
But I've never done KDP Select and never given any of my books away for free (other than review copies of course). It's not something I've ever really considered to be honest.
Just tried one of the ads you did, John. It will be interesting to see whether it generates sales on its own.
I tried KDP Select with episode 1 of my novel, My Memories of a Future Life. It got thousands of downloads but didn't translate into sales. On the other hand, when I SELL copies of episode 1, I see an upsurge in people buying the whole novel (which is cheaper than getting the remaining episodes). So whatever I've done with KDP Select giveaways has reached totally the wrong audience!
In any case, I think 'free' is no longer an effective strategy. Speaking for myself, I don't get round to reading free books. But I definitely get round to reading the books I've chosen and paid for!
I'll be very interested to see how Debbie gets on with her advertising.
Nail Your Novel, though, seems to market itself pretty well - so perhaps it's not all bad news.
Thanks, as always, for generously sharing your experience.
John is a personal friend so I don't think he'll mind my making the following point... The trouble with advertising is, unless there's a massive spike, you never know if the ads did the trick or whether your sales would have gone up anyway. Kindle sales are notoriously variable.
I've now heard many authors bemoaning the January drop-off, but my sales have continued strong through Jan (between 100-150 a day) and I'm not advertising and I've never enrolled in KDP Select. I don't know what's selling the books but I think it's mainly Amazon's amazing marketing machine, which means once you start selling, you then sell because you're selling.
Infact my sales are stonger now than they were over Xmas. Why should that be? Female readers (my market) are now less busy perhaps? Some of my books were mentioned in end-of-year round-up book blogs, but that wouldn't be selling the books in mid-Jan.
So I'm not decrying John's magnificent efforts, rather I'd like to encourage those who don't want/can't afford to advertise and who don't want to give away free books. Sales success can be achieved without that kind of financial investment - but I'm afraid I don't know how it's done. But I've done it. Or more probably, Amazon's done it. (Thank you, Amazon.)
I had decided not to do anymore free promos but might now reconsider.
I've found that optimising the Amazon book page, with good covers, keywords and blurb, and then having one free book riding high in the thriller charts (at the moment it's The Wrecking Crew) has been the most consistently effective way to sell my other books. Right now, I'm selling lots of copies of the second book in that pair (The Defector).
Amazon provide much better tools for us to do sales and promo than the other sites and retailers, but I'd like to see them go further still. Perhaps some access to the other sales tools that seem to be used by major publishers - being able to buy an electronic mail-out to the people who have bought one of your books would be an obvious example. Even if they let Indie authors buy just one a year, that would be fantastic...
Sales seem very unpredictable. They were almost nil through December but are now picking up.
I've given books away, but it hasn't seemed to improve my paid sales, so I've stopped doing it.
I use the tags on the Amazon pages, and that does seem to help a little. I suppose I could do more promotion - but then I do less writing! I don't sell enough to be able to afford to pay someone else to do the marketing. The dilemma of the self-publishing writer.
And just in case some people think my books don't sell because they're not good enough: I have won national awards, such as the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award, and have been consistently well-reviewed as a 'paper-book' writer. I can write! I just can't sell.
Making a book free will get it on to someone's Kindle but it doesn't get it read and until the book's read, it's just a one-off sale. Not terribly useful. What we should be trying to do is build a following so we have a market for everything we publish. One book should sell another - or as the saying goes: "Your first page sells your book. Your last page sells your next book."
Obviously you need to have a good book in the first place, but in addition we must get people talking and enthusing about our books. Free review copies sent to bloggers (print - they're less interested in ebooks) and to book forum members can lead to a book being talked about many times in a year. My books have been mentioned in forums like RISI as new ebooks, new pbs, in end-of-year round-ups and on various other occasions. (Yesterday my books were mentioned in a RISI discussion of "comfort reads".)
Forums are our friends and it's easier to make them our friend if we put in some time joining in (genuinely) with discussions or offering to do a Q & A with members. (A book giveaway always goes down well. Blatant self-promo doesn't.)
It's labour-intensive, but I think it sells more books than Twitter. (Hands up anyone who's ever bought a book as a result of a Tweet.)
I blogged about what I call "self-promotion by stealth" for the Alliance of Indepent Authors here - http://selfpublishingadvice.org/blog/guest-post-independent-authors-and-visibility-by-linda-gillard/
Peace, Seeley
I have eleven of my out of print children's and Young Adult books on Kindle, and most of them are also on KDP Select. Sales have not been brilliant - children's books are apparently harder to sell. I will very soon be adding a Y/A fantasy novel to that list - THE GAME, which I've just finished editing and updating. Coming back to it after a long time. it's a book I'm particularly proud of, and it's as meaningful now as it was when Walker first published it. I'm seriously considering a new print version, or even sending it out again.
Back in November, I was tempted to take a few of my books out of KDP Select, because I wanted to publish for other readers, such as the Kobo. However, we had problems with Kobo, so I've put this on hold. Going down the advertising route feels like a whole second career, but I'm so grateful to John for the links, and I will certainly investigate.
Best!
Hunter