KDP Select does it help?

Having just had my novel Cappuccino Heaven free for 3 days on KDP select I am willing to share the experience with you in the hope that the more we know about this new marketing tool from Amazon the better.

I was not interested at all when I first uploaded my book last month, thinking why should I give my book away for free?

I had invested money in a professional cover and paid someone to format the book properly so readers would not be frustrated with blank pages, I had written 88,000 words, a full novel and felt that all that all my hard work deserved some kind of payment no matter how small. Here is the link to my book so you can see I really do have a well-made cover!

http://www.amazon.com/Cappuccino-Heaven-after-death-ebook/dp/B007IGMZRA/ref=sr_1_28?ie=UTF8&qid=1334055613&sr=8-28

Then a month later I changed my mind and decided to give it a try, anything that helps promotion is a good thing and sometimes you have to give something to gain more back, that's business.

Deciding to do the promotion over the Easter vacation was a risk, many people are away and that would mean fewer downloads, but I went ahead with it anyway. The result was that I had just under a 1000 downloads, Easter Monday being the lowest and my book ranked at 1 in the afterlife fiction section for a while then going down to 2. It was pleasant to see that even knowing it wasn't through sales.

I am not going to bore you with Rank figures, I'm sure you can gleam enough of those from other bloggers.

My point is this, with the massive amount of Authors, me included, going for the new KDP select programme could this mean fewer downloads as the programme continues Having conversed with other Authors some of them well-known on Amazon the consensus of opinion is that they are also getting fewer free downloads on their promotion days as well.

KDP select has only been going a few months so it's new but will Amazon offer something else when they see the programme becoming saturated, for example free promotions targeting Genres rather than everything, just an idea...

As of this moment two days after my promotion ended I've had less sales than I had before! I don't see this as a major catastrophe, more people know me now, those who will actually read the book remains to be seen as does the hoped for reviews, but out of a 1000 readers if a quarter of them like the book and tell others then it has been a success.

Will I do it again? Probably, I have a sequel to the first book coming out soon and may just promo the first one again with my last two days.

Will I re-enrol for KDP select again. Probably, whatever the divided opnions it's a marketing tool that can be very powerful in getting your name and work out there.