I was just watching a webinar by the nice folks over at Bookthority.com.com. Karen and Steve have a nice site full of resources. If you haven’t checked it out yet take a moment and do it.
During the webinar someone brought up a question about Amazon KDP Select. I mentioned in the chat that I recommend that if you are in KDP and want to take advantage of the system you put your book for free every 18 days. Since KDP gives you 5 days every 90 days this is a great way to spread it out.
You can set it all up at one time and taking only a few minutes of your time. Make note of when your KDP sign up date is and when it renews. Make a note in your calendar every 90 days to reset up your free days.
Now I know that most book promo sites don’t allow you to submit every 18 days so what I do is have 2 spreadsheets set up and one time I select certain sites and then the other one on the next day. This way you are only submitting to the site every 36 days. If some sites have a requirement for more time I will put them in a separate column and submit them as their site requires. Using our sites as an example you could submit to AwesomeGang.com and Pretty-hot.com the first time and then BookReaderMagazine.com and DiscountBookMan.com the next time. This way it is spread out every 36 days.
I like working smart and having my stuff set up way in advance. Having the book free every 18 days also keeps your book rankings on a more steady pace. Since you will have a few more sales with it between free days. This also helps with page reads since you will have more readers actually reading the book.
This works very well with new books that have no reviews also. You can pick up more reviews because your book will be promoted and free every 18 days.
Get New Clients Every 18 Days
One of my books was written with the purpose of getting clients for one of my sites. This strategy has worked well for years as my phone usually rings from clients looking to hire me for search engine optimization work.
If you don’t want to do the math and you still want to get your book out for free on a steady basis you can pick a day of the month and set your book up to be free on that day. Since it is a 90 day plan lets just say you pick the 5th of the month that will use up 3 days. You can then take the other two days and pick two other dates. You will just miss out on the last day of the month. Lets say your second date you pick is the 20th. Your book will always be free on the 5th and 2 times on the 20th.
Let me make it more clear. Lets say for simple example your KDP starts on January 1st. Using this example your book would be free Jan 5th, 20th, February 5th , 20th and then again on March 5th. That is 5 days and then it will start all over again on April 5th. You loose a little time between March 5th and April 5th but it is an easy system to remember.
This system also allows you to set up your social media way in advance. You always know your book will be free on the 5th. You can make Facebook and Twitter post for a year if you wanted to.
In case you don’t know I have been using Dragon Dictation to write all my books lately. I talk very fast as most New Yorkers do so this plays very well for me. I was turned back on to Dragon after numerous fails because the software didn’t like my Brooklyn accent.
Over the years I have heard from numerous authors that they want to be on all the Awesomegang family of sites but didn’t want to fill out the forms on each site. They also wanted to be on the sites starting on different days. This way they take advantage of being in 4 different newsletters across 4 days.
Do Black Friday Book Promos Work?
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I just completed moving Awesomegang to a new server. It seems like our site just keeps growing month after month and it was time to take the site to a new level when it comes to hosting. I didn’t think we would have to do this for a few months but after the traffic we have been getting over the last 3 months it was necessary to do now.
Traffic was up 17% over last month. (Dec 25th – Jan 25th) This is pretty good considering we had a lot of new kindles and other reading devices purchased over Christmas. 31% of the users to the homepage were first time visitors. Remember though most of the traffic from the newsletters land the user on the individual page for that book.
arauders MC
Jackie Weger has been writing romance novels off and on for thirty years. Meeting her characters is like meeting and making new friends. She’s earned a little money writing and found that all of the things she’d hoped one day to own no longer appeals. What she enjoys is destination travel–going to new and strange places, meeting natives, learning their customs, their foods, how they survive good times and bad. She lived part of one winter with trappers in the Louisiana Swamps, volunteered at a sister of Mercy Mission in Colon, Panama–and had one of the most interesting conversations in her life with an old man and his dog as they sat on a bench waiting for a train in the Village of Versailles. Right this minute Jackie is sitting still to write another romance -but her passport is up to date–handy for when the travel bug nips her heels once again. Who knows? She might end up in your neighborhood one day. Jackie loves, coffee, tea, cats, gossip and all things Southern.
