I enrolled my fiction, Ten Twisted Tales, a collection of short stories with a twist, a la Roald Dahl and O.Henry, on KDP Select three months ago just to test it out. KDP Select, if you’re new to the term, means you tie your ebook to Amazon for three months; it’s an exclusive contract which prevents you from selling your digital books on any digital media. You can of course sell your physical copies.
I chose KDP Select after reading that there were many authors for whom it made a lot of sense and money and turned them into Kindle millionaires while making them irresistibly attractive to supermodels and blessed them with telepathy and other super powers. For the rest, it delivered as much as a dishonest politician does for his country. It did the latter for me.
I followed the guidelines to the ‘t’, scheduled free giveaways, spaced them out, advertised the promo online through facebook and Adwords but didn’t do much in terms of downloads. All together, the downloads were about hundred and fifty. I was a bit surprised at first as some author accounts waxed lyrical about how the entire population of the hemisphere where the sun was shining while they (the authors, not the population) were asleep had downloaded gazillion copies, and how their ebooks raced up the ranking to the number one spot faster than Usain Bolt. I wasn’t disappointed as it was an experiment. And as experiments go, it was useful in the sense it taught me never to try it again. Like playing golf in a thunderstorm.
I’m back to selling it from my website, and other etailers. I’m currently promoting Ten Twisted Tales through Goodreads advertising. Fair amount of views but no click throughs (also known as close but no CTR). Apparently it works better for giveaways, perhaps I’ll try that.
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