With the holiday season really kicking off today, I decide last week I would offer Creative Chaos for free through KDP Select today (11/19/12) and tomorrow. I scheduled my free promotion on the KDP select dashboard and then wanted to be sure I really got the word out and contacted 10+ sites that either list free books on their website or send out an email to their database. After doing my research here is the list of sites that I contacted about my free book promotion to help get the word out:
As it would appear, all of my effort to make sure the potential of my free promotion was thwarted by none other than Amazon itself. When you schedule your promotion, it is supposed to begin at midnight (or rather 12:01 am) Pacific Standard Time the date of your promotion. For me this should have been at 12:01 on 11/19. However it took until noon PST time before Amazon listed Creative Chaos as free in the Kindle Store. Oddly enough, when I looked at my KDP Select Dashboard all signs indicate that my book was currently running a free promotion. However, because my book is not listed as free in the Kindle Store, I will not be promoted by these sites that I spent a good chunk of time contacting.
As a KDP select member you have to agree to not list your book in an electronic form on any other site for 90 days and in return Amazon will help you market your book. I ran a free promotion back in June (you can read about it here) and actually had a good experience. I had about 8,600 books downloaded and my book got up to the #36 spot on the Top 100 Free Books. The promotion ran a little long, due to the “system lag” Amazon says you have to allow for. I was a little surprised that the lag ran about 12 hours but since I’d stopped promoting my book as free it didn’t really affect me. I emailed Amazon about this issue and even though it said a response could take up to 24 hours they got back to me right away!
Despite that situation I never suspected that there would be an issue with my promotion actually getting started today. I have emailed Amazon twice, tweeted the KDP Select twitter account and haven’t heard a word from them. Next I took to the KDP Select message board to find out if other authors had had the same issue and how they resolved it. So far, no advice just another author experiencing the same issue unable to get any resolution.
This debacle makes me strongly reconsider my participation in the KDP Select program and hesitant to run future promotions with Amazon. At least they seem to have finally gotten it taken care of, now I’ll just have to wait and see if I missed out on all of the free promotions I had worked hard to obtain.
Kate, I’m so sorry it happened that way. It sounds very frustrating! I hope you’re still ultimately successful with it. I’ll do a quick post on my blog.
{{{Hugs}}}
~Erika
Kate, here’s the link to my post if that’s okay: http://www.scrapbookobsessionblog.com/2012/11/19/scrapbook-novel-creative-chaos-by-kate-o-lynch-is-free-for-kindle/
I know it’s not as good the free kindle book sites but I do reach a lot of scrapbookers. Hope it helps!
~Erika
I don’t mind at all! Thank you so much for posting about it and helping me spread the word!
Hi Kate! A mutual friend (Ashley) referred me to this article, and I’m glad she did. Love your site and this post! I will definitely need to keep the time lag in mind when I do a free promotion on KDP. Thanks for the heads up.