KDP Select Promotions Analysis

In order to help promote indie and unknown writers, Amazon has allotted money toward the KDP Select program which allows the author to distribute e-books through the Kindle Owner's Lending Library and still receive a royalty. Additionally, authors are allowed to offer their e-books as free downloads for five days at a time in order to offer readers samples of works they would most likely not purchase.

I gave the free promotion a try with four different short stories I've published for Kindle. The following are my results of the promotion.

The four stories I offered for free were The Train, The Concourse, The Decision and A Forest in Forever. With the exception of The Decision, all the stories are from the compilation, Of Trains and Other Things. This promotion was available in the USA, the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy.

In the month of February - my promotion ran about 2 weeks - my stories were downloaded a total of 1291 times. Of that number, 1073 were downloaded in the US. UK came in second with 199 downloads, Germany third with 19 and France last with 1. There were no downloads in Spain or Italy.

Of those 1291 downloads, 1262 were free. 31 were paid downloads. In other words, there were 31 purchases of my e-books in that time period. One of those purchases was made by me as I wanted to see how the work displayed in Kindle. So there were actually 30 unique purchases of my e-books.

Total cost for download including both free and purchased books was $456.29. I use the word "cost" for analysis purposes - technically, it didn't cost me anything, at least not out of pocket - to give away e-books for free. However, those would still be considered a cost in accounting terms and I will do that here as well.

Total sales of purchased works came to $13.23 which includes the $2.07 royalty I received for buying my own book to check the formatting.

Conversion of free downloads to purchased downloads is 2%. In terms of response to direct mail or coupon advertising, this is not a good return on investment. Typical returns on direct mail pieces are expected to run 4%-5%.

Once the free promotion ran its course, there were a few purchased downloads, but those have come to a stop about a week after the last book stopped being free.

As a promotion, from my point of view, I'd say it was not successful - especially in the short term. Long term effects cannot be measured at this point.

Two people left a review from the free download. I am somewhat suspicious as to the origin of the reviewers because even though they had different identifying names, the reviews themselves were similar in wording.

There are some who would argue that the real value in offering freebies was the exposure received. That those who are willing to download something for free would not have bought it in the first place. There is merit to that argument, however, I am afraid that the existence of Kindle and e-book formats may actually be responsible for devaluing authors' works.

The reason I say this is because I have spent time on Amazon forums where I have read Kindle owners complaining about the cost of some e-books being similar to the cost of hard copies.

There seems to be a fallacy of thought that because the e-book is no more than electrons displaying on a screen, in other words, there's no physical substance, then it should not cost as much as a printed book. This mentality reduces an author's skill, creativity and long hours of writing to absurd levels of price expectation.

Unfortunately, there is a great evolution going on in publishing, and I can see both advantages and disadvantages in it. But that's really a blog for a different day.

I may toy around with offering up some more freebies.

But if my current results are accurate, I can't see a lot of benefit to it. Just 98% of the Kindle owners getting something for free.