From December 27 to December 31, 2013 I made my first attempt at a KDP Select Promotion and I was happy with the results.

It was for my book Enormity (Part One) which is the first installment of my novel Enormity.

For the uninitiated, a KDP Select Promotion is the five days of free download you earn for your book if you sign up exclusively with Amazon’s KDP Select program, which means you must sell exclusively through Amazon for a three-month period.

As Amazon are the only eBook service that does not demand an American tax file number, I have been happy to sell through them (the IRS rejected my application – Australian authors keep in mind that they do not accept an Australian Justice of the Peace signature as verification of photo ID photocopies. If you don’t have a passport, you’re totally screwed).

If you’re in the same boat as me and are trying to promote your eBook outside of a five-day-a-week-nine-to-five job, then you need a little bit of outside help to run a successful KDP Select Promotion.

The goal is to get as many downloads as possible.

Giving away your book for free is essential to kickstarting sales and launching your bid for global domination.

Do not be afraid to give your book away for free – word of mouth and Amazon reviews, blog reviews etc are crucial to reaching a wider audience.

The secret is to get your free promotion mentioned on as many free ebook websites as possible.

There seems to be thousands of them out there, each with a large following of Kindle owners who are keen to fill their ereader with lots of free books.

I went to Ebookbooster.com – for a fee of $US40 they will submit details of your book to about 50 free ebook websites.

It’s a small expense and saves you a lot of time.

I also went to Kindle Nation Daily and paid for their $US29.99 “Free Ebook Highlighter Service”.

I also bought some social media exposure from The Kindle Book Review, which cost $US20. They tweeted my promotion nine times in the five days of my promotion to their 12,724 followers and these also received a number of retweets from their affiliates and followers.

The result?

In five days, Enormity (Part One) received 2616 downloads.

This was a lot more than I was hoping for.

This helped me reach #7 on Amazon’s free science fiction ebook list (see screenshot)/

Has it kickstarted sales?

Not in a massive way – it has led to about 60 sales of Enormity (Part One) and about 20 sales each of Enormity (Part Two) and Enormity (Part Three).

It’s also led to about 10 sales of Enormity (Complete Edition).

These aren’t massive numbers but they are better than zero.

It means I have readers where I didn’t before, and also means that my book is now on 2616 readers, waiting to be read.

It’s also a long process – Enormity is about 460 pages.

It takes time, so the flow-on effect is likely to be slow.

I chose December 27 to December 31 because I had a theory that many people would get a Kindle for Christmas, party on Boxing Day and then jump online to get some books on their Kindle from December 27.

Whether this theory is true or not is open to debate.

I also used a flyer on both Facebook, Twitter and instagram, using hashtags like #freeebook, #freeebooks, #freekindle, #kindle, #amazon, #indieauthor etc etc.

NEXT PROMOTION

My next promotion starts from February 21, 2014 and runs for five days until February 25.

I am using the same promotional services as last time.

But I hope to receive help from more free ebook Twitter services.

As I have been stumbling across free ebook Twitter accounts, I have been adding them to a Twitter list for easy reference later.

I’m also seeking out some more paid services and will blog about my findings and experience again after the upcoming promotion.