Introduction
In this article, I’ll be talking to you about using Amazon KDP to publish your book and also a bit about marketing your book once it’s enrolled in KDP.
What is Amazon KDP?
Amazon KDP is a convenient way to publish books yourself. I’ve used it to publish four books already, and I’m currently working on a fifth. There are many great aspects of this service, including its ease of use and low cost for independent publishers. The main drawbacks are that you have to do all your own marketing, it’s difficult to get people to find your book, and finding reviews is also difficult. You can publish, but they may not come.
How do you get paid?
There are two ways to get paid through Amazon – through direct sales of your books and via the KDP Select Global Fund. Amazon takes a cut of each sale you make through their platform, and you can keep 35% or 70% of the proceeds depending on how you price your book.
The KDP Select Global Fund allows you to earn a share of the total proceeds when people use Kindle Unlimited or the Kindle Owners Lending Library to read books. At the end of every month, Amazon sets aside a pot of money to be paid out to authors via the KDP Global Fund. Your books have to be enrolled in Kindle Unlimited to get proceeds from this fund. The more pages of your books are read each month by Kindle Unlimited subscribers, the more money you make.
Other Things to Know
You can do free book promotions or Kindle Countdown Deals to market your book through Amazon KDP. Free book promotions allow you to schedule your book to be given away for free for up to five days in any 90-day period of KDP enrollment.
Kindle Countdown Deals allow you to choose a promo price and incremental price increases, up to the normal price, on a certain set of days. Customers can see what the normal price of your book is, as well as what the current price is, and when it’s going up. There is a “Countdown Deals” page where customers can find all books enrolled in this particular promotion at any given time.
You can also, of course, promote either of these promotions on your own through social media, your website, and other places.
Marketing your FREE ebook
This is not easy, but I’ve found a few things that have helped me get sales and reads for my books, including the following. Note that these are free ebooks, not countdown deals.
- One week before your promotion begins, create an email template with details about your eBook and send it to:
- Email webmaster@icravefreebies.com from http://www.icravefreebies.com/contact/.
- Email deals@dealseekingmom.com.
- Then send the same email template to these contact forms (just copy and paste):
- Email the website owner of http://kindlenationdaily.com/contact-us/, Steve Windwalker at KindleNation (at) gmail.com, (and also) hppress (at) gmail.com with information on your free ebook.
- Send an email to thedigitalinkspot (at) gmail.com (http://thedigitalinkspot.blogspot.com/p/contact-us.html).
- http://www.ereaderlove.com/contact-us-submit-a-book/.
- https://www.indieauthornews.com/p/contact-us.html (reads your ip – limited to 2 submissions per user per day).
- https://jungledealsandsteals.com/contact/.
- Finally, submit your free ebook to the following sites. I only include sites that do NOT require reviews and that are free at the time of writing, don’t require accounts, and take fiction and nonfiction submissions:
- 24 hours in advance, submit your free ebook here: http://ereadergirl.com/submit-your-ebook/.
On the days of your promotion, tweet about your free books or countdown deals.