Kindle Select free days as marketing tool

[Nathan Gottlieb]

I thought some authors who publish on Kindle would like to know this. If you sign up with Amazon for a 90-day exclusive, meaning no other device like Nook can display it, you get several perks. The best of the perks is you receive 5 free days to use anytime in the 90-day window. You can use one here and there, or all five in a row. My friend published his first book as a Kindle Select (name of the program), was selling decently but not great, and then he ran his five-day free download.  In that five days he got 20,000 downloads, and for that week was the number one author for free downloads, and rose to as high as 16 among all eBooks on Amazon. I think those downloads were an amazing marketing tool. At least a few thousand of those people will actually read the book and perhaps review it. He created a fan base for his next book. Also, those who read it and liked it might tell other friends about it. When the five-day freebie was over, those friends had to pay the price. I gave Kindle an exclusive, and can't wait to the end of September, when I give it away free. 'Anybody also think this is a great marketing tool?

[Christine Rice]

It sounds like you've had excellent success from using the KDP Select program! That's good to hear.

[Ashliegh Wolfgang]

Thanks for posting, James. This will be really helpful, next time around. =)

[Jessica]

It is a fantastic marketing tool one all authors should take advantage of for sure. 

[James Calbraith]

As a follow-up to my previous post, I wrote a brief explanation of how to read your KDP reports after Select Free Days - It was confusing to me at first, and maybe I'm not the only one :) 

http://jamescalbraith.wordpress.com/2012/09/19/how-to-read-kdp-repo...

[Pat McCraw]

I chosed Select a while ago but only have experience on amazon.de.

As I have an book series of 7 issues it was fine to make one free from time to time.

People who liked one book purchased the next issues.