As you may or may not know, To Seduce an Earl was free for a few days last week on Amazon. How was this possible? Because I signed the book up to be in Amazon’s KDP Select. What is KDP select? If you sign up for this special program, the author has the opportunity to make their book free for up to 5 days in 3 months. They also get to share a “pot” of money with other authors, depending on how many times a reader “borrows” your book.
The people who can borrow from this library of books are those amazon members who are in the Prime Program. They pay around 70 something a year and once a month they can check out 1 book. I know, 1 book a month doesn’t sound that special. There are other benefits as well, although I’m not quite sure of them.
The problem? The author’s book can only be on Amazon for those 3 months, nowhere else. In those few days that I had To Seduce an Earl for free on Amazon, there were over 23,000 downloads of the book. No, I don’t get any money for those downloads. I wish! But now that it has switched over to paid, it’s selling much, much better and has been number 3 in historical romance for 2 days now.
So why would an author sign up for the KDP?
1). If their book isn’t selling well, or isn’t selling well on other book selling sites.
2). They want to get their book to as many possible “fans” as they can. 23,000 is a lot of readers who might come back for book 2 or who might go after my other books.
Of course the reason a person writes a book is because they love to write. But as an author our goal it to grow our readership. And of course, we want to make money so that we can actually write for a living.
Yeah, it stinks that the book isn’t on sites like Barnes and Noble, but unfortunately there are a lot of author’s who aren’t making much money on sites besides Amazon. For many authors, there isn’t much to lose. Of course the downfall is that you can’t have your book elsewhere for 3 months and you’re basically making Amazon a monopoly.
To Seduce an Earl has been in the KDP select for a couple weeks now and it has helped my sales. Will this surge in sales last the entire 3 months? Probably not. But we’ll see.
If you’re one of my readers, you know my books don’t typically fit into the norm, which is probably why some don’t sell well. To Seduce an Earl is about male prostitutes in Victorian England. There are a lot of people who would read that blurb and instantly be turned off. But with the KDP free days, I was able to catch hold of people who wouldn’t have normally read it, and gasp, they loved it and are eagerly awaiting book 2!
Because 
of To Seduce an Earl‘s success, I have decided to put another one of my books (which has gotten great reviews, yet hasn’t sold well) into the program.
If the book goes through as planned… Starting Friday and into Saturday, my Young Adult novel The Mind Readers will be free for Amazon Kindle. Sunday it will go back to 2.99 (or Free for Prime Members). If you’ve already read and liked the book, you might want to download this version as it has a few added scenes. This means that Thursday will be the last time to get the book on Barnes and Noble and other sites other than Amazon for at least for 3 months. Don’t worry, I will not do this with book 2, The Mind Thieves. It will be available at Itunes, B&N, Smashwords and Amazon.
