NEW AMAZON KINDLE PAPERWHITE VIDEO AND THE POWER OF ADVERTISING

Near the end of 2012, Amazon contacted me to ask if they could feature a page from my ebook, The Survival of Thomas Ford, in the new video advert for the Kindle Paperwhite on Amazon UK.

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kindle-Paperwhite-Resolution-Display-Built-/dp/B007OZNWRC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1357834972&sr=8-3

The video is at the top left there on the UK page where the Kindle Paperwhite is sold.

Page one of The Survival of Thomas Ford is onscreen from 3.00 to 3.06 in the video as the example of a UK book exclusive to Amazon Kindle Select.

Someone is shown reading page one of The Survival of Thomas Ford as the narrator says:

“…and then there are thousands of books you just can’t find anywhere else like more than 180000 titles exclusive to Kindle.”

It’s quite odd to see onscreen, a Kindle held by a hand resting on a turquoise towel, displaying Chapter One, page one, of your book, with the words alongside:

“180,000 + titles exclusive to Kindle”

It also made me remember that I had The Survival of Thomas Ford in Kindle Select but I hadn’t done a free promotion of the book since April 2012.

That free promotion had gone well, with $1600 worth of sales coming in over the two weeks following it.

I had felt cautious ever since April, though, hearing stories about KDP Select free promos no longer being effective, so I hadn’t wanted to try it again, perhaps not wanting to find out for sure.

But by December 2012 Christmas Spirit must have overwhelmed me, I signed The Survival of Thomas Ford up for a 5 day free promotion, from 21-25 December. 

This Free Promotion felt a bit different than the 2 day one I had done back in April 2012, and which I wrote about here in, A Note From Frankenstein’s Castle:

http://authorselectric.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/note-from-frankensteins-castle-by-john.html

This Christmas promotion there seemed a LOT more free books out there, naturally enough.

I soon realised that those 5 days are probably the most competitive of the year for a free promo.The Survival of Thomas Ford stayed in the Top 20 free UK books for most of the five days, though never quite catching up with Rosen Trevithick’s The Ice Marathon, which stayed just ahead every day, as though we were in a latter-day episode of The Wacky Races and I was playing Dick Dastardly to her Penelope Pitstop!

 

 

(Or maybe I was playing Muttley…Heh-heh!)

 

 

On 26 December, when The Survival of Thomas Ford went back to $2.99 I didn’t expect much to happen, as I had believed those stories about KDP Select no longer being effective.
But by 29^th December I’d had $900 worth of downloads.

By 31 December, though, I saw them slow down…

Until an idea popped into my head, which surely must have come from The Survival of Thomas Ford’s inclusion in the Kindle Paperwhite advert.
I started to look up info on Kindle advertising.

I’d made $900 in 4 days; so why not invest some of that back into my business of finding new readers for The Survival of Thomas Ford?

But how much money? And what ads could I get at a day’s notice?

I bought a Kindle Book Review Twitterlicious Social Media Buzz advert for $40

It appeared on 1/1/13

Here it is:http://www.thekindlebookreview.net/2013/01/01/exceptionally-detailed-and-hauntingly-suspenseful-thriller/

On the same day I bought a World Literary Café, Today’s Hot Titles ad, for $25, like the ones at the top of the page here:http://www.worldliterarycafe.com/

So I’d laid out $65 of the $900 I’d just made, on the two adverts.

By 2 January my downloads had picked up again, though, they had paid for the ads and I was back into profit, soon passing the $1200 mark.

I had reached new readers with this combination of free promo and ad promo, 13 new reviews came in, including:

5.0 out of 5 stars A DARK AND GRIPPING TALE, January 5, 2013

By the faunster – See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This review is from: The Survival of Thomas Ford (Kindle Edition)

This is the best novel I have read in a few years. I can’t believe I got it for free and found a consummate writer. This tale was nothing short of riveting. It is rich in character development, mood and atmospherics.It is a story of evil, greed, power that corrupts(not in a political context), and the domino effect of trying to cover
up the initial crime that may have been less serious than what follows. Folks, this is great literature and a first class story told by a magnificent craftsman.I have no interest whatsoever in the book, but I urge you to buy this one.

*********************

I did notice some differences in this KDP Select free promo, compared to the last one I’d done 8 months earlier: 

1)     More USA sales, so that I started to think in dollars and focus on USA ads

2)  Also, over $500 of the income was from KDP Select “borrows”…something, again, I could not have tapped into if I wasn’t exclusively in KDP Select with the book.   

Claire Ridgway’s meticulous links below were extremely helpful to me during the free promo and after:

http://www.interviewswithindieauthors.com/my-kdp-select-success-stor/http://www.interviewswithindieauthors.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/KDP-Select-Free-Promo-Report-Updated1.pdf

Thank-you to Claire for such a valuable resource.

This Christmas/New Year promo led to the 30000^th download of The Survival of Thomas Ford, so thank-you to each new reader who gave the book a try, and
All Best for 2013!

http://www.johnaalogan.com/

This post was first published on AUTHORS ELECTRIC, January 11 2013

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