Amazon's KDP Select

Early in December 2011, Amazon rolled out their new program for authors--KDP Select. Enrolling into this program had a list of pros and cons, which each author needs to weigh before making a decision. If you are happy with your current sales and movement of your book, especially on the other online sites, then opting in to KDP Select might not be in your best interest.

My pros or cons might not be the same list as yours, but you do need to think things out depending on your sales and situation.

CONS:

• the author has to UNPUBLISH each book from the competition's sites, limiting sales to Amazon only
•  your book will be part of their Amazon Prime program that allows for indefinite 'lending' to customers

PROS:

• increased visibility
• ability to offer five (5) 'freebie' days within your three (3) month obligation
• small monetary percentage of all books lent to readers (the #'s they gave were seriously laughable to me, since my books haven't been generating ANY numbers worth mentioning).
• only one place to keep track of your work--trust me, it's time-consuming to hop all over the place promoting and checking your status

For me, it was a no-brainer, as I knew I would enroll one book in this program to see what happened to my sales. I had to do something to shake it up. I signed up and enrolled TO GNOME ME IS TO LOVE ME, book one in The Goblin's Apprentice series.

I check my Amazon stats about every day or two, and usually there is very little change, but for some reason on December 19th, I already had 63 downloads. I had totally forgotten about using my freebies pre-Christmas! GNOME went as high as #4 for Children's free Kindle downloads, with very little effort on my part. I posted a few FB notices and I had a friend retweet the freebie deal, and that's it.

Here are a few observations:

•  By day two/three, the downloads had peaked with 1200 for North America and 300 from Amazon UK. I took the rest of the freebie days and used them after Christmas. There was a little movement, but not much. Don't offer your book for more than 3 days at a time.
• Though I had 'given' GNOME away, Amazon still gave me a little bit of $$, okay, a lot of money compared to the previous $ I earned. Not enough to break even, but enough to give me hope.
• My overall Amazon ranking went from #263,483 to #53,628 (1/16/12). After the freebies, my ranking sat around #6,000 for a couple of weeks.

I tend to download quite a few books to my Kindle and then spend 6 months reading before I look for books again, so I didn't expect to see a trickle down effect from the freebies for at least 4-6 months. I've already seen a little movement in my sales. Still not many, but in the first two weeks of January, I sold more books than I did in Oct. AND Nov.

 Will I enroll the rest of my books?

I really don't know. If I do, I'll wait until my three months obligation is up with GNOME before I pursue the option.

As I mentioned before, every author has to weigh the pros and cons before committing to this program. I'll keep you updated if something interesting happens.

Later, peeps!