Monday, March 5, 2012

Tracking Kindle Select Free Promotion


Tracking Page
Amazon allows you to easily track how many books you are giving away. Log into your KDP account and hit the Reports Link.

Reports are tracked separately for the various Amazon sites. You will find yourself hitting this page very frequently as the numbers pile up!







Exposure
The biggest benefit of giving books away free is the exposure you receive. People who have never heard of you before are willing to take a chance at investing the one second it takes to take a peek and click. Even better, you will be aggregated with other books that are currently being downloaded by those people.

In my case, another book of the exact same Bible Character was being promoted at the same time. What a stroke of luck.







Even better - Amazon maintains separate charts between Free and Paid books, and these are updated every hour. And since the displays are arranged side-by-side, your book, if you hit the top of the chart, will be placed alongside the top Paid books, which are likely to be very popular.

Here I am at the top of the Family Saga charts right next to the PAID bestsellers "Top 100 Paid" and next to the "Hot New Releases" and the "Top Rated":

Translation to Paid:
When you go off Free, you are still associated with your cohorts. So if they continue to do well, so might you. One of the things I did was to ask my tweet team at WorldLiteraryCafe to tweet the both books on Queen Michal.

After a day back to paid, 140 sold, 26 borrowed, current ranking:
I will report back in three days to see how this tails off. But in any case, as a new author, the Kindle Select program has been a boon.

3 days later, Michal's Window ranked above #750 with 251 sold, 37 borrowed.

Michal's Window stayed in the top 1000 until March 9th, with over 550 sold in 6 days after going off free.

4 comments:

  1. It was exciting to watch this. Thanks for the great post on explaining how it all works. So excited for you, and anxious for the updates!

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  2. Great posts, very interesting to see how the system works in real time.

    cheers,
    mood

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  3. That's so awesome! And you're even doing better in the ranking now. (I just checked.)

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  4. Congrats on your success, Rachelle!

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