KDP Select Free Promo Update

Hello all. Thanks for stopping by at Self-Publishing Central.

Today, I feel obligated to give you an update on the Amazon KDP Select Free Promos I've held since my last post.

You may recall that my first giveaway through KDP was successful beyond my wildest expectations. That giveaway was for The Covert Element, Book Three in my James Becker Suspense/Thriller Series. Please review the results of that giveaway in my last post.

PROMO #2 -- A HIGHER COURT

The next book I offered as a two day Free Promo was my stand alone spiritual fiction book, A HIGHER COURT. During the free days I managed to give away more than 15,000 copies, mainly in the U.S. The book reached the Amazon Free Kindle Top 10 about 6:00 pm on Day 1 and remained in the Top 20 for the duration of the freebie.

During the seven days immediately following the giveaway, I sold more than 1,600 Kindle copies of A Higher Court at $6.99. During this period the book reached #115 on the Amazon Paid Kindle Bestseller list and remained there for three days. It also reached the #1 paid spot in Spirituality, Religious Fiction, and Literary Fiction during these paid days. These sales compare to a sales ranking of  >100,000 before the promo.

PROMO #3 -- THE 19TH ELEMENT

About a week later I offered Book One of the Becker Series on a two day promo. I gave away more than 20,000 free books during this time, reaching #11 on the Free Kindle charts. Unfortunately, I went fishing for five days while this promo was in process, so I don't have lots of details. However, I can say that I sold >900 copies of The 19th Element over the next seven day period at $6.99 each. I'm not sure where these sales placed the book on the Bestseller list -- probably somewhere between 500 and 1,000.

PROMO #4 -- A HIGHER COURT (Second Promo for this Book)

A few weeks later I wanted to find out what would happen if I offered the same book as a Free Promo twice. So I did this with A HIGHER COURT.

During the Free Days, the book reached #8 overall in Free Kindle, #1 in Spirituality, #1 in Religious Fiction, and #1 in Literary Fiction. I gave away nearly 17,000 copies. Once the book went back into the paid column, it peaked at around #435 on the paid Kindle Bestseller list, and reached the Top Ten in the same three categories I have just mentioned above. Total paid sales in the seven days following the promo were a little over 600 copies at $6.99. As of this writing, A Higher Court is ranked at #1685 in the Paid Kindle Store.

CONCLUSION 

As you can tell, I have had pretty good success with these free promo days. And as you can also tell, running a second Free Promo for the same book has yielded measurable benefit for me, though not nearly the impact of the first time around.

I recount this experience for the same reason I share everything here at Self-Publishing Central -- to let you know what's working and not working for me. Maybe you can learn from my experiences.

BTW . . . I plan to depart the KDP program when my 90 days are up. Even though it appears I could have 1,000 or more borrows a month, I really want to make my books as widely available as possible. So I'm going back to broad distribution to see how that goes this time around. Who knows? Maybe I'll be back at KDP Select sometime in the future.

That's it for today.

Cheers!

John