My Personal KDP Select Promotion Experiment.

First off, I would like to thank everybody who commented/gave me feedback on the KDP Select Promotion Survey results. The post caught fire, and even after it left the front pages of Reddit and Kindle Boards, it still continues to get views pretty frequently, which is amazing.

Also, considering it was so popular, I'll probably look into doing another poll sometime later this month. Obviously, people enjoy numbers and pretty graphs.

Just to get an idea: this weekend, I got three new followers on my blog, 3 comments on the blog (very rare for me), a few more on Reddit and Kindleboards, and ~500 views on the survey post on Friday (and many more yesterday). Also, the link was retweeted about four or five times on Twitter (also rare for me), and I received another like or two on Facebook.

Again, I can't thank everybody enough, especially those who spread the link around.

Anyways, yesterday, I did my own personal KDP Select Experiment, one that probably won't interest everybody as much, but is nevertheless interesting (at least to me). I put everything - meaning The Dowry, Family History Part 1 and Family History Part 2 up for free. Of course, there were some qualifications, to make sure that one didn't get more exposure than the other.

• I told nobody - this was completely unadvertised.
• All books were free on March 3rd, 2012.

Also, here's what I expected to happen.

• The Dowry, of course, would kill in the free downloads (just like in the past).
• Family History: Part 1 would get about a third of the downloads of The Dowry.
• Family History: Part 2 would get hardly any downloads.

The results were not what I expected. Not at all.

The reason I assumed that The Dowry would do so well is because it's always done the best during free promotions. Of course, maybe I just happened to put it up during all the right time frames; however, you can't argue with facts. The first free promotion I ever did, I did with The Dowry, and it got over 800 downloads between the US, UK, Germany, and France. The very next day, I put Family History: Part 1 up for free, and it received a measly ~250 downloads. When I put Family History: Part 2 up for free a few weeks later, it received even fewer downloads.

(An aside: if I learned anything from my KDP Select poll, it's that I suck at giving away books, at least compared to others.)

What actually happened (and note, apparently, Amazon is a little slow on the uptake today, so I'm actually STILL having people download things for free! Tsk tsk, Amazon!)

In the US:

• Family History: Part 1: 332 Downloads (as of 10:55 am MST)
• Family History: Part 2: 287 Downloads (as of 10:55 am MST)
• The Dowry: 85 Downloads (as of 10:55 am MST)

In the UK:

• Family History: Part 1: 25 Downloads (as of 10:58 am MST)
• Family History: Part 2: 27 Downloads (as of 10:58 am MST)
• The Dowry: 19 Downloads (as of 10:58 am MST)

Germany:

• Family History: Part 1: 4 Downloads (as of 11:00 am MST)
• Family History: Part 2: 5 Downloads (as of 11:00 am MST)
• The Dowry: 1 Download (as of 11:00 am MST)

Those results are very different from what I expected. My only real hypothesis for why this might have happened this way is because people were excited to see they could get an entire series free, and not just one or the other. Plus, I actually only just put The Dowry up for free last Saturday (in the US, it received about 219 downloads), and maybe most people who were going to get it had downloaded it already. It's tough to say.

Either way, I'm pretty happy with the results. I'm even okay with the fact that people are still downloading the stories for free (but seriously, tsk tsk, Amazon). More exposure for me!