Kindle Books (Free promo days) question

Gurokevin,

If your book is free while on the KDP Select program, you do not get paid. The advantage of the KDP program is that it gets you exposure by people downloading your book for free.

Di

If you have a good promotion, you can often see a bump or a serge in sales after the promotion ends. You'll also have better rankings (for a short period of time) which will also give your book more exposure.

ooohh snap!

It really depends on the topic and subject of your book as to how much momentum you can pick up from KDP Free days...

For example, say you have a book on some pseudo-science like Feng Shui... It is a topic that people might be interested, but not really very excited about reading...

So, when you come off of that free day, there may not be that many people willing to drop the dollars to get your book, even if it is in the top 100 in your niche...

However, a number of fiction titles may benefit tremendously from the momentum created on a KDP Free Promotion Day. With the heightened download rate on the free day, that may carry over to the paid days, and people will be more inclined to spend a few dollars to get your book.

Book marketing is little different from other types of marketing. You must have a product people want to own, and exposure to the people most likely to purchase your product.

If you can accomplish both, KDP Free days can be very profitable long-term, since the free day download numbers can put your book in a position of being more attractive to those spending money.

As others have said, you do not get paid for free promo days. You do however, get paid when people borrow the book.

Free promo days can potentially be an incredible way to get exposure and drive sales to your books. I have gotten hundreds of sales after free promo days - so can verify they can work!

As everyone said above, you don't get paid for free downloads, but free promo days can give you exposure that leads to future sales.

HOWEVER, if your free promo goes badly, it can also cause your ranking to fall and lead to less sales.

The real power of doing a free promo is having multiple related books that are not free that people can immediately purchase when they get your free book. It's a great strategy and it works well.

Make sure to get some reviews, put a call to action at end of book.

Thanx Bill - I'm going to do that right now! Great tip.

If you crack the top 100 free best-sellers list, you should be able to get at least a few reviews and you'll see a good spike in sales after the promotion. I used to do 2 to 3 day promotions to try to get my books as high up the ladder as possible, but recently I've found doing multiple one-day free promos seems to work best. It'll take at least a couple thousand people downloading your book for free for you to get into the top 100. On the weekend it'll take even more.

Test the days of the week you run your promos on to which give you the best results. I've found weekends are crowded and it's harder to gain momentum unless you have a stellar book on a topic everyone wants to read. For the more obscure topics, you may be better off promoting your books earlier in the week when there's less free competition in the marketplace.

Another good thing about the free promo is the exposure it gets you through "people who have purchased this have also purchased," and "people who viewed this also viewed" sections of Amazon.

People usually grab a few free books at once for the Kindle. Then your book shows up on the pages of the other books they got too! Great cross marketing, totally free.

It will boost your rankings in the search results and top paid in kindle store.