The Power of the Kindle KDP Select Free Promotion
Sales with No Promoting on Kindle
So, the purpose of the book I published on Kindle was just to get a feel for how the publishing process works. I hired a ghostwriter for my book, Understanding Food, and published it very easily on Kindle. I originally had the book priced at $0.99 and saw only one sale (not counting my own purchase!) and one KU (Kindle Unlimited) download. I changed the book's price to $2.99 and saw only one more KU download. So I decided I would give KDP Select's option to offer the book for free for five days a try just to see what the numbers would look like. I did no promoting of any kind and I'm surprised to see just how many downloads there are so far!
The Numbers
The free promotion began on March 4th, and I had a total of 106 downloads for that day alone! That;s with no promotion at all! On March 5th, only 33 copies were downloaded. So far today (March 6th), 20 free copies of my book have been downloaded. Additionally, there have been two KU downloads during the free promotion.
This is exciting because when I get ready to publish a book that I really want to promote, I now know that I can expect the KDP Select free promotion to really work should I choose to go that route.
I have the free promotion set to run through the weekend, so we'll see how many more downloads occur and I'll post an update. I'm curious to see how many of those free downloads turn into reviews on Amazon. That's how I'll gauge how useful the free option is.