Last week I reported my results of putting my short story, The Valentine's Day Curse, in KDP Select. You can read all about it in this post. Since a week has passed I thought I would update what has transpired since then.
I have sold two, count them, two more copies of my short story. And someone has even purchased my novel, Fractured Facade, which I have discounted to $3.99 for the duration of this KDP Select experiment, ending May 2nd. By far the best thing about KDP was that I did get 11 "likes" and four five-star reviews for The Valentine's Day Curse. Here are two of them:
"This short story is proof that this gifted writer has a fantastic voice and wonderful storytelling chops. What a wonderful ending, too!"
"I loved this story, read it on Valentine's Day. The ending was just awesome. What an excellent twist in such a short story. Thank you author for showing us another side of our human frailties. I enjoyed this so much. A quick read with a punch."
Although by having my title in KDP Select it is eligible to be "borrowed" by Amazon Prime members I never thought anyone would "waste" their one borrow per month on a 99 cent short story. So, you could imagine my surprise when I checked my stats yesterday and found that someone did! Of course, I was honored as I figure someone who borrows the book will definitely read it. But then, the conspiracy monster began to rear its ugly head.
You see, yesterday I "unclicked" the automatic renewal button. If I hadn't, at the end of the 90 day period The Valentine's Day Curse would automatically be placed back into the KDP Select program. Now, since the beginning of the year I've seen one sale for Fractured Facade on Smashwords and one sale on Barnes & Noble. Worse than that there is still only one review on Barnes & Noble. At least my Amazon customers review the darn thing! And Barnes & Noble takes forever to report to Smashwords so I haven't seen a cent from them, so it's not like I feel I'm missing out by not having my short story listed there. I just prefer making the decision myself whether or not I want my title to be included in KDP Select so that's why I "unclicked" the auto renewal.
When I posted on Facebook my shock that someone had "borrowed" the book I wondered if it had anything to do with me stopping the auto renewal feature. A friend said he thought my 99 cent book wouldn't be on Amazon's radar, and that got me to thinking...What if Amazon has some sort of robotic feature that tells them when someone opts out of the auto renewal and that triggers Amazon to "borrow" the book? Frankly I did get a thrill out of seeing that "1" listed under borrows. What if the author thinks, "Wow, this program does work. I got a borrow! I'm going to keep it in KDP Select and hope I get even more." Amazon's mission accomplished. Am I crazy?
I have - at last count - 40 borrows on one book, ten on another, but one only has one. And I haven't opted out of any.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, I do believe certain genres do better with KDP select....
Val, do you have any short stories that have been borrowed?
DeleteI have been contemplating the KDP select program and reading as many people's experiences as possible so I appreciate your input on the subject. As of now I think it will be a long time before I try it if I ever do. The fact that there's no return date for borrowed books kind of defeats the whole borrowing concept in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jen...I didn't even realize there's no return date for borrowed books. If so, and they can only borrow one a month, I would imagine they would return it within that time frame. From everything I've read about people's experiences it sounds like KDP works best if you have a series.
ReplyDelete