My book, Agile Discovery & Delivery: A Survival Guide for New Software Engineers & Tech Entrepreneurs is one-year-old as of last week! To celebrate, I took advantage of KDP Select’s Kindle Countdown book promotion and I’m offering the eBook for $1 through Wednesday this week. The promotion was so easy to set-up that I think it’s worth running through the basics of the KDP Select book promotions in case you’re a new author looking to take advantage of all of the features of the KDP Select program.
KDP Select Program
All of the promotions I talk about below are only available if you are part of the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program. If you’re unfamiliar with KDP Select, I’ve got a lot of useful information about the program and requirements here. In a nutshell, you can make your eBook available to Kindle Unlimited subscribers for free and Amazon will pay you by the page when readers read your book. Along with being part of the KDP Select program, you have the ability to offer some neat eBook discounts once every three months that you participate. Here’s what you can do.
Kindle Countdown Deals
I just set-up my first Kindle Countdown deal and I did it in about two minutes. It was so easy! Kindle Countdown deals allow you to price your book at a discount for up to 7 days. You can also incrementally raise the price along the way, incentivizing people to buy your book sooner rather than later. To start your Kindle Countdown:
- Go to your KDP Bookshelf page, navigate to the book you’d like to discount and choose “Promote & Advertise”.
- Choose to create a Kindle Countdown deal.
- Fill out the information on your Kindle Countdown page. You’ll pick a market to discount the book in, a start and end date, a starting list price, and how many times to increment it.
- Save and you’re ready to go.
If you choose to increment your book price during the countdown event, the price will automatically increase in equal increments until it gets back to its original price at the end of the event. I chose to simply discount it once for the entire seven days so people can get the $1 birthday price any time during that week.
Free Book Promotions
You can also choose to make your book entirely free for up to five days each quarter that you’re part of the KDP Select program by setting up a Free Book Promotion. I haven’t tried this promotion yet, but it is even easier to set-up than the Kindle Countdown Promotion.
- Go to your KDP Bookshelf page, navigate to the book you’d like to discount and choose “Promote & Advertise”.
- Choose to create a Free Book Promotion.
- Pick your start and end dates.
- Save.
I’ve been listening to a lot of The Creative Penn podcasts for self-published authors. (Side Note: They are so inspirational and definitely worth checking out.) From this podcast and other research I’ve done, it seems that free book promotions likely work best when you have multiple books. For instance, if you have a series, making the first book free to get readers interested in the others makes a lot of sense. But I’d encourage you to play around with the promotion to see what it can do for you.
I may do a free book promotion at the beginning of the semester to allow my students to get the book we use in my Computer Science Capstone course for free. Universities are way too expensive and I’m sure they will appreciate buying one less book!
Is KDP Select Worth It?
It’s hard to answer that question for your book(s) as every book is different. Some books may find wide readership on Kindle Unlimited and some may be lost in the vast amounts of self-published material out there. I’ve been in the program around five months now and I am making way more money selling books than I am on Kindle Unlimited. However, because I wasn’t planning to publish my eBook outside of Amazon anyway, it’s kind of a no-brainer for me to be part of the KDP Select program for now. Being able to offer these discounts has made it worth it. I do get a small amount of money each month from the KDP Select program.
If you’re interested in more information about self-publishing, I created a whole series of articles on the topic. You can find them here. This post on the overall process and timeline has been very popular and is likely a great starting point. I hope this was helpful and inspires you to get moving on your book project (or next book promotion)!