I signed REDUCED up for the KDP program; I give Amazon a 90-day exclusive on Kindle (as opposed to other e-books/readers), and I have five days to promote REDUCED as a freebie. Freebies can be good – theoretically, people will download the book and write glowing reviews – and then MORE people will buy your book!
Now, I’m new to this so I can’t say absolutely that it works like it’s intended, or even, really, that it works at all. I have about 15 reviews on Amazon, in a month’s time, and one (maybe two?) is a result of the first free promo I did the beginning of September. Hard to say.
I’ve heard, from two authors at least, of free Kindle downloads in the tens of thousands for just one weekend. Sadly, I haven’t experienced that myself.
My first promo was a 24-hour deal; I had just over 500 downloads. As I said, I may have gotten one or two reviews from that. I saw absolutely zero spike in sales afterwards which, several authors assured me, would happen.
The second promo just finished – over a three day period, there were just over 200 downloads. No reviews yet, of course, it just ended last night! But I’ll be watching to see if this precipitates any sales.
Yes, I’m a little disappointed. And I doubt I’ll continue my KDP exclusive beyond the 90 days, but mainly because I want to expand the e-book format into Nook, Kobo, and others. But, more than likely, REUSED will also have its trial run at KDP.
At any rate, REDUCED is doing well in the sales department, paperbacks continue to sell, e-books are slow but steady. I certainly haven’t given up!
I think those are actually pretty good odds being your first book and only being out a few months. My book, Are You Sitting Down?, has 32 reviews to date. It came out in 2010 when there was no KDP. It got 5 reviews its first year and only 2 reviews in 2011. The other 25 came this year and the majority of those were posted after a promo. 15 reviews in two months is excellent!
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Well, that makes me feel better! I did send a few copies off to reviewers today, too, so that should help. My numbers aren’t where I’d like, overall, but…patience was never my forte!
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Hi there this is kinda of off topic but I was
wanting to know if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you
have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding knowledge so I wanted to get guidance from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!
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Some bloggers do use HTML, and I occasionally insert something myself; mostly, though, it’s WYSIWYG, esp. here on WordPress.
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