Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Would you regard KU as being a good system for publicising indie books? They do seem to form the majority of its content.
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No. I tried it out on first of series and a non-series book. The visibility rules are pretty much the same as non-KU books. You need to take out ads, you need a higher ranking to get shown and you need the borrows to get in the "he bought/he read" sections. So if you are "from the ground up" with a title, KU, like any other marketing tactic might work to get visibility, but for the most part you really have to work visibility from the first day of publication and hope to make some of the lists (top in any of the categories, or hot new best sellers). When Executive Retention and Sick Days came out they both made the "hot new sellers...wait. Retention did, but I am not sure Sick Days did--it was Lunch and Retention that made the list.) When you get on these lists, the sales feed themselves for a while. This is still true, but it is much harder to make the lists--you have to have multiple days of good sales to get that high in the ranking. (There's more competition to make the lists, indies all know about the lists and authors are much more active in marketing--as are small pubs and trad pubs.)
When you are in Select you can do the Count down sale OR 5 free days. I hear from most authors that 5 free days does more for visibility and that can help with KU reads, which can feed on itself to a certain extent.
In the old days selling 60 in one day of any book was enough to create a "long tail" so your visibility would be up for as long as two weeks. Amazon's algos now take into account such a "one day" boost and basically ignore it. They know we are taking out ads and ignore that in the popularity lists/contests. One of the things I've talked to advertisers about is they assume there is still a "tail" on sales--but there isn't. It's about a two-day sale period where the visibility is high enough to help juice sales. The ranking will do well very fast if you I sell that many--but it will come back up just as fast. That is different from older algos.
Many authors try to stagger ads to get the most bang for the buck when they do a sale or free, but the problem there is that the same people who sign up for one bargain list are often the same ones signing up for the others--you end up sending ads to the same people over and over.
I found little to no benefit to KU because the majority of my sales are at Google and Kobo these days. No way did KU even begin to make up for the lost sales there.
I know some authors do really well in it and don't want to rock the boat by changing. I agree with that. If something is working, don't go out of your way to change the visibility. I am quite sure I tried it far too late in the game to be effective (late last year). Like most programs, the best benefit is early--Amazon shows benefits that convince more authors to join. Those benefits taper off naturally as more join because of the competition, but I think Amazon also does less for the authors when they reach a point where they think they have enough authors.