Well, it does really!
It’s been 6 months that I deactivated my account on kobo.com and some other online book stores to go all the way with the amazon.com kip select program, this will get me access to the vast KDP market for e-books, free promotional offers that I can run and a whole host of other benefits including more royalty and thus more income from sales of my books. But this is an exclusive offer, I am not able to sell from any other market place on the web. I decided to go for the exclusive deal. In six months I ran a free book offer for five days on all my new books, I stuck to my book blogger reviews. I noticed a tend the sales of my books had increased three folds but all the books were selling for free, therefore I was making no money the free book offers were a hit with 20 books being given away free in a day. Let me share some figures in the last five months I have sold 266 free books through the KDP select program using the free book promotion offer, do you want to know how many paid books I sold for which I will get royalty to guess what the figure is a puny 30 books that were sold for money. Although on a slightly brighter point the number of pages reads from my books went up considerably about 1350 pages were read from my various books and yes people are reading the Malayalam edition of the books with a few dozen being taken for free.
Compare that to six moths further back I sold 45 books paid and royalty received. But then the pages read were less than a 100 or so. But yes one other cost of mine has reduced I have stopped getting reviews from book bloggers and saved money there instead I have used the free book promotion tool of KDP and given away free books at no cost to me. Remember I was shelling out Rs 500 plus book cost to get a review from one book blogger per book. I think I can say that using the free book offer tool I managed to save at least Rs 6000 a month from my book blogger review cost.
I did run a promotion on my blog which cost me Rs 10,000, I quiz question the winner gets cashback on their Paytm when they buy my erotica book. We have had a dozen entered and the people can be contacted and sold over the mail or the phone.
So going with KDP sect helps you in reducing your promotional and book review cost as their promotional offers help in giving the readers a free taste of your book. But that’s about it they do not really lead to an increase in sales, however, they do lead to a substantial increase in the number of pages of your book read and you get paid for that too under the program. So go form it go for KDP elect all the way. If you do not get the desired sales over a sustained period you can always reject the exclusive offer and take your book to other online stores the exclusive deal has to be renewed every three months.