KDP Select: To Giveaway or Not To Giveaway - Guest Post from Author Intisar Khanani

KDP Select: To Giveaway or Not To Giveaway

By Intisar Khanani

There’s been a lot of controversy and discussion over the value of enrolling in the KDP Select program since the algorithm changes began around May of last year, with most authors finding that the free promotion days garner them only a few additional sales. My first novel debuted in May, and I’ve had the depressing experience of watching each promotion achieve less and less in terms of immediately driving sales. When the option came up, I opted out of KDP, first for my novel, then for my new short story. So why do I still plan to enroll my upcoming titles in KDP Select?

For me, the answer is giveaways. I see KDP free days as nothing more than a really, really big giveaway. The point of a giveaway, to my mind, is threefold:
1. To reach readers who might not otherwise look at your writing and make a friend out of them, one who will come looking for your other writings;
2. To increase word-of-mouth about your title so that, over time, people who have heard about your book 3 or 4 times from different friends and websites then make the commitment to purchase it, and
3. To get much needed reviews for a new title by specifically asking readers to leave a review and providing them with a link at the end of the story

Clearly, the challenge with your average blog giveaway is being able to assess its efficacy at accomplishing the above. It’s very difficult to know whether those Facebook “likes” or Twitter “follows” really mean anything, or tie directly to sales. At a certain level, you have to trust that putting your book forward in multiple venues and interacting directly with potential readers increases the likelihood that they will buy your work. You are building your brand, to use a marketing phrase. I do know that personally soliciting reviews from winners of blog giveaways has gotten me more reviews than any KDP free promotion I’ve run. And I’ve had great luck building my newsletter mailing list, which I do consider a strong point since this is what I use to tell readers about new releases (among other things).

On the flip side, we can track the efficacy of KDP free days (and I highly recommend you watch your sales carefully after a promotion). With the multiple algorithm changes in 2012, it seems as though, if you are going to see an uptick in sales for the title in question, it will start about three days after the promotion ends, and taper off soon after (unless you manage to hit the top 20, in which case your sales will stay elevated a few weeks). But, if you’ve included teaser materials for your other works at the end of your book file, you should see a slow increase in sales of your other titles as readers who like your work start buying.

I tested this out with a short story I specifically wrote to give away, The Bone Knife (TBK); I had a very minor uptick in TBK sales following each promotion, but a nice, gentle rise in sales of my debut novel starting about a week out after the promotion. Still, I haven’t had enough actual sales of TBK to make keeping it in KDP useful. It was a great way to start out, especially as I needed my first reviews and wanted to make back at least a part of what I’d put into producing it. But now I’m ready put it on Smashwords, price it at zero, and see how that drives sales of my debut novel on all platforms.

To my mind, KDP has its use in allowing you to do a giant, time-limited giveaway. Depending on your pricing strategy, borrows via the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library may pay more than you would earn from a sale—or less. There are a  number of authors who have posted about how, depending on whether they enroll in KDP Select or not, their borrows equate to lost sales almost exactly. So that’s a debatable issue. But KDP does limit your ability to share your works on other platforms, which means it limits your readership. Every author is going to have to assess where the benefit lies for them; for me, I feel that a starting run of 90 days with KDP is well worth it, but that’s it.

In closing, I wanted to offer a few tips on planning your KDP Free Days to get the most out of them:

1. Plan your promotion at least a month in advance and put your marketing in place. Contact websites that specialize in promoting free kindle books. Follow their submission guidelines to tell them about your free days. I’ve included a list of websites that I use at the bottom of this post as a starting point; I’d love to hear what other websites you might use.
2. Make sure that whatever title is up for a free promotion has those first teaser chapters included from your other writings. If someone has gotten to the end of your free story, there’s a good chance they like your writing. Give them a taste of other stories they’ll want to sink their teeth into, and look for your sales to improve at least slightly in those titles.
3. Social media the heck out of your free days: tweet, Facebook, use your author mailing list, set up a GoodReads event, etc. etc. etc. And, while you’re at it, don’t just invite people to get their free copy; ask them to tell their friends.
4. Keep track of the effectiveness of your KDP Free Days. If you are seeing only a tiny uptick in sales following even a large promotion, both of that title and/or your other titles, then thank KDP kindly, and opt-out. You can always put one of your titles up for free permanently via Smashwords, ask Amazon to match it, and drive sales on all of your platforms. Don’t have another title? Consider taking the time to write a short work specifically to serve this purpose. Just make sure that that it links to your other writing—stand alones might not work so well for this.

So, what is your experience with KDP promotions? Do they drive the sale of other titles? How do you approach blog giveaways? And do you intend to use KDP in future?

Who is Intisar Khanani?

Intisar Khanani grew up a nomad and world traveler. Born in Wisconsin, she has lived in five different states as well as in Jeddah on the coast of the Red Sea. She first remembers seeing snow on a wintry street in Zurich, Switzerland, and vaguely recollects having breakfast with the orangutans at the Singapore Zoo when she was five. She currently resides in Cincinnati, Ohio, with her husband and two young daughters. Until recently, Intisar wrote grants and developed projects to address community health with the Cincinnati Health Department, which was as close as she could get to saving the world. Now she focuses her time on her two passions: raising her family and writing fantasy. Intisar's next two projects include a companion trilogy to Thorn, following the heroine introduced in her short story The Bone Knife, and a novella series set in a fiction world of eleven kingdoms all controlled by a corrupt Council of Mages. Thorn is her first novel.


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