I’ve pored over various articles of various successful Indie authors proclaiming the benefits of either going KDP Select or publishing on multiple platforms.
I’ve come to a serious, important conclusion:
No one knows what the hell is going on.
Admittedly, many by their own admission. I read a great blog post by Hugh Howey on his forays with exclusivity. He, like many, can see the benefits of going KDP select and going multiple-platform.
Alternatively, Joanna Penn, who I had the pleasure of talking to face to face at Thrillerfest 2015, wrote a great article claiming that if you are making a series, multiple-platform is the way to go. It’s sound logic; the greater visibility you have for book one, the more potential sales there are for later books.
Problem is, I’m not sure we have a great idea for which approach actually grants greater visibility. It seems to vary from a case to case basis.
For me, I’ve been very happy with KDP Select thus far. I’ve made almost as much money on Kindle Unlimited Book Lends as I have with selling the book itself. And I’m sure it helps tremendously in raising my Amazon rankings and getting it out there.
A bit shy of two weeks of results: (published book on Jan. 14th.)
I’ve been pretty happy with consistent book sales day-to-day. I’ve been extremely happy with my KENP page reads. (yesterday was my most, 3600 pages read in one day!)
If someone buys my book, I make about $2.10. If someone reads it cover-to-cover on KENP, I make $1.35. That’s not bad at all for being “free”.
As of right now, I’m ranked #144 in the Dystopian category on amazon, and #229 in Post-apocalyptic. I’m pretty tickled with that for being two weeks in.
I wonder what my numbers would look like if I had not opted for KDP select. It’s impossible to know, really. Though I’d have to be selling a decent amount of books on Kobo/Smashwords/ the rest of ’em. But am I sacrificing long term visibility?
Who knows. I’m just happy the book is doing pretty well thus far. Better than I expected for my first two weeks, anyway. Booya.
-Evan Pickering
Evan Pickering - Author 
Thanks for sharing your experience. Yours seems to be a very good one. I am also experimenting with KDP. If you don’t mind me asking, what steps did you take to promote your book before, during and possibly after the promotion?
Hey Chris, Thanks for the kind words! Sure, I’d be happy to talk about what I’ve done. It’s been a bit of a wide spray, to be honest. I’ve put up stuff on goodreads forums and just generally been interactive, but I’m not sure that has made much difference. Though I did meet some great people and get some great help 🙂
As for before, my only real promotion was through my blog talking about the process, and through facebook and twitter bumps of that blog. That and word of mouth with people I knew.
As for now, I continue to use my blog, my facebook page, and my twitter. I think truly the most useful marketing you can do is ‘grassroots’ marketing or whatever you’d like to call it, where you just connect with people of similar interests on social media and offer them free copies of the book. I’ve met some cool people like that. I also reached out to many former acquaintances of mine through social media and offered free copies of the book, asking them to review it if they felt compelled. I haven’t had lots of reviews yet, but at the least I’m making the book known to people and letting it travel word of mouth if it sparks interest in readers.
From what I can tell, the spam-book-to-the-masses marketing doesn’t have a huge impact. It seems as though social media is largely flooded with that nowadays with the rise of e-pub. Unless the book really piques someones interest as they scroll by, its going to go unnoticed. You basically need to go to the individual or small group, specifically those interested in the genre.
I wish I had better details of where the buys and reads are coming from. Unfortunately, its hard to say for sure. Much of it might just be from Amazon keyword searches and natural growth of the book from KDP lends. Since I can only glean some information about the efficacy of each marketing strategy, I’m left just firing on all cylinders and trying to find more avenues.
Hey Evan, it’s always good to meet the competition. I love post-apocalyptic…not zombies or vampires. I am always hesitant to contact anyone because of the negative reviews some people write although it is obvious when it is in direct contrast to others. I put my first up in September and the third is going live on Feb. 29. Not advertising here, I am just so happy to meet another writer who is in the same genre. Keep on writing.
Cool, yeah PA fiction is pretty legit nowadays! Congrats on getting 3 out there, and good luck to you
Even, yes it certainly is…with all that is going on the subject does have some merit. I must have been looking for something to read and just downlaoded Hood the other night. Great cover. It was a standout. Christine.
That’s awesome, I’m glad you liked it! It came a long way I had to work on it for quite awhile and get some help from better image editors than myself haha. But I’m very proud of it