Kindle Select or not Kindle Select?
DAY 16. Week Four: Mon. 11 Dec. to Fri 15 Dec.
What has to be done by the end of this week?
Writing. Use timed writing sessions to work on the manuscript and increase the word count.
Publishing. Kindle Select or not Kindle Select?
One of the options you can select when you upload a book onto the Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing platform [KDP] is to enrol the book in Kindle Select, in addition to normal distribution to Amazon online stores.
The Benefits of Enrolling in Kindle Select
- Your book will be shared with readers through the Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, as well as on Amazon Kindle stores.
Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service for readers where they pay one monthly fee and they can download as many eBooks as they want.
The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is a collection of books that Amazon curates. Amazon Prime members who own a Kindle can choose one book from the library each month with no due dates.
Effectively you are expanding your audience and readership by enrolling your book in Kindle Select. These readers will not buy your book. Genre fiction fans, such as cozy mystery and romance readers, are prolific consumers of eBooks, and programs like Kindle Unlimited give them access to as many books as they want.
- Extra Payments
The reader does not buy your book, so you are not paid the purchase or download price. Instead, every time a reader actively reads a page in one of your books, you get paid a share of a KDP Select Global Fund. You are paid by the total number of pages read in any given month. Currently this is about 0.5 cents US a page but this can change monthly.
Each author receives a portion of the Global Fund proportional to how many pages of their titles were read. The more pages read the bigger the payout.
Hence the popularity of Boxed Sets of books. More pages. More Kindle Select payments.
- Special Kindle Select Promotional Opportunities
There are two extra promotional tools which are only available for eBooks enrolled in Kindle Select:
*Kindle Countdown Deals, time-bound promotional discounting for your book while earning royalties at list price, and
*Free Book Promotion where you can offer your book for free for up to 5 days out of each 90-day KDP Select enrollment period. Because your book is available for free during a free book promotion, you won’t receive royalties for it while the promotion runs. You can run all 5 days at once, go one day at a time, or offer your book free for multiple days in a row. This can be particularly useful at a ‘soft launch’ of your book where you want readers to download a free review copy.
For more information about Kindle Unlimited, click here and for more information about Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, click here.
The Main Disadvantage of enrolling in Kindle Select
You have to agree to publish that eBook exclusively with Amazon for a period of 90 days. You cannot therefore make the eBook available on other digital publishing platforms like Kobo, Apple, Barnes and Noble, Google Play etc. But you can distribute printed copies.
This is the big challenge.
There are fiction, and non-fiction, readers who do not want to read a Kindle book and prefer to read on their Kobo ereader or buy their book on Apple iBooks or other alternatives.
Some authors feel uncomfortable putting all their eggs in one basket and ignoring the opportunities to expand their audience outside of Amazon.
Conclusions?
For me it comes down to one word; Discoverability.
Where are my readers most likely to go to find new cozy mysteries to read?
For me, the answer is Amazon, which is now one of the largest product search engines in the world.
I want and need to get my book infront of readers and help them to know that it exists. They won’t have heard of me or my past work. It is all down to organic searches and using search engines such as Amazon to make my book cover and title pop up.
So I plan to launch this book on Amazon and enrol in Kindle Select.
Now back to the writing. Have a good one! Nina.
