The Internet Marketing Spy

A few weeks ago, I reported to you that I just launched my new ebook, Reset Your Mindset, on Amazon’s Kindle platform. After applying my magic to the book, I realized that very few sales were coming in. This was really disappointing as the previous times I used this secret ninja technique, I had an immediate surge in sales. Even more disturbing is that ALL of my books were selling at really low rates. One book that was selling as much as 20 copies per day gradually went down and down until one day it went down to ZERO for the first time in over 3 months!

So the other night, I decided to hang out on the Amazon publishing forum and see if other people were having this issue. Sure enough, two days ago another author started a thread saying the same thing. Then others started chiming in. Yes, this was a site-wide problem. 

Now sometimes, Amazon is a little behind in it’s reporting, but when you sell 400 copies of a book one month and the next month you have only sold 8 copies in 2 weeks, you start to ask yourself what’s going on.

The person on the thread questioned whether or not they were being punished by Amazon for not including their book on Amazon’s new KDP Select program. Then it clicked. I was listening to NPR the other day and they were talking about how Amazon was actually selling the new Kindle Fire for a lot less than it is costing them to manufacture and market it. Why? Because if they sell it at a particular price point that will allow more people to purchase it, they can sell a lot of ebooks, apps and other items in their catalog along with it. Buyers will get the sense that their dollar is stretching a lot farther.

The KDP Select program was launched shortly on about the 10th of December (at least that’s when they sent me notification that I’m invited to share in it). If I understand correctly, KDP Select corresponds to the buyer’s program called Amazon Prime, which allows members to get special discounts and even free deals on books that are part of the KDP Select program.

Amazon has allotted $500K/month for the next 13 months for this program. If your book is available for free on KDP, then you get put into a pool to divvy up this $500K depending on however many books you sell during that month. In the example they use, if there are 100,000 books borrowed in the KDP program and 1500 of those borrows are of your book(s), then you get $7,500 for that month. This is POWERFUL! Or at least it has the capacity to be. Your book is still available for regular sales during this time, so it’s not like you’ll lose out.

Now here’s the catch. During the first 90 days that your book is available in the KDP Select program, you are not allowed to make it available for digital download on other places like Barnes and Noble or even your own blog. If that happens, they can shut your account down or at least remove you from the program and you’ll forfeit your earnings. You can, however, have your book available in print including from services like Amazon’s own Createspace platform.

Since I don’t really sell much through any other outlets, I decided to pause those accounts and try to take advantage of KDP Select’s program. If this works, DANG! What a wonderful way to end 2011!

What about you? Have you published on Amazon? Did you enroll in KDP Select? I’d love to hear from you.