Deal or Dud?

One of the perks of enrolling your ebook in Kindle Select is that you can also register them for Kindle Monthly Deals.
 
These are like Kindle Countdown Deals, but they run for a month rather than the normal maximum of 7 days.

And you can't just ask for it. Your book has to be selected for a deal - 

The author has no idea when they will happen, they just get an email saying their book has been nominated and, if selected, they get another email saying when the deal will start, which is usually the 1st day of the following month.
 
But the author doesn’t have to accept the deal and whether they should or not is the subject of debate in some Facebook groups. Authors aren’t sure if they are worth the loss of royalties inherent in discounting their book to 99p (or 99c, or whatever),
 
The time authors normally want to provide discounts is when they are launching a new book and want to garner some interest in their existing books by running a promotion, in the hope that new readers will buy into the new book as well.
 
It’s a well-established marketing strategy and is known to work.

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But if you are being offered a Kindle Monthly Deal at a time when you aren’t marketing a new book, is there any point in accepting the deal?
 
That was what we wondered when a book by one of our authors was selected for a deal for February.
 
It was actually a second bite at the cherry, because the same book had been nominated for a deal in January but hadn’t been selected for the deal that month. That was convenient because it had given us some time to consider the pros and cons and advise our author accordingly.

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The selected book is Book 1 of a 9 book series and if the deal created enough interest, we could hope for some good read through rates further down the line.
 
Unfortunately, while Amazon are happy to discount the book for a whole month, they do little or no marketing for it, so it is up to the author or, as in our case, the publisher to invest in the marketing in order to make the best out of the opportunity.
 
And this is the dilemma faced by most Indie authors when offered a Kindle Monthly Deal. Can they afford to invest in marketing in order to capitalise on the deal?
 
For us it wasn’t too difficult a decision. We had run Kindle Countdown deals for the same book on several occasions and always got a good read through rate, so we believed we would get a good enough read through rate this time to justify the marketing costs.
 
But it wasn’t guaranteed. There was still a risk. Running a marketing campaign for the 28 days of February wasn’t going to be cheap.
 
But we decided to take the chance anyway.

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So, we set up some Facebook ads for the book to start on the first day of the deal and run for the full month. We already run ads for the book on Amazon, so there was no need to do anything additional there.
 
In addition to the ads, we put together some social media promotional posts as well, using our usual channels, as they are free, so we may as well use them.
 
And then we waited to see what would happen.
 
The most obvious thing was that we got significantly more sales for the book during the month than we would usually get. To be precise it was 5 times more than we would get for the same book in an average month and double what we got for the month when we ran our last Kindle Countdown Deal.
 
But what about payback – would we get the read through levels we needed to pay for the marketing and leave us in profit?
 
The answer to that was immediate.

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Sales of Book 2 of the series started to increase above the average level from about halfway through the month, as early readers finished Book 1.

​Towards the end of the month, we started to see an increase in sales for Book 3 and, as we moved into March, we started to see the same trend for books 4 onwards. As this blog post goes live, I can tell you that we have run into profit and sales are still rising.
 
But there is a knock-on benefit that has to be taken into account.
 
As we have mentioned before, the Amazon algorithm loves an upward sales trend, and a Kindle Monthly Deal provides that. If the algorithm sees a book that is selling, it does its best (within the rules laid down by Jeff Bezos) to help it sell more, because that helps Jeff Bezos to make more money.
 
What the algorithm does is include the book in the “recommended for you” and “also bought” carousels that a lot of readers use to find their next book. So, the Kindle Monthly Deal has created momentum that is going to carry the book forward for several weeks into the future.
 
And the other thing that the algorithm does is push the book towards KindleUnlimited readers, so you get an increase in KENP reads off the back of the deal.

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If you are the author of standalone books, you will be wondering what this might mean for you. Unfortunately, as we were marketing a series, we can’t answer that.

​But if you have more than one title in your catalogue, it would make sense for satisfied readers to go looking for more books by you if they have enjoyed the discounted book.
 
But if you don’t have any other titles, then there isn’t really any way to make a profit on a Kindle Monthly Deal. You might be able to break even during the campaign if your marketing budget isn’t too extravagant. But you may also gain from the momentum that we mentioned above, which may mean you make a profit further down the line.
 
However, we wouldn’t want you to think that the profit is guaranteed. Much will depend on how much you spend on your marketing and how targeted it is. If you only have one book out, this is not a time for a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” approach to marketing (if there is ever a time for it nowadays).
 
So, if you are offered a Kindle Monthly Deal, please do give it serious consideration, but make use of data to inform your decision. We would not have been so confident about accepting the deal had we not previously seen such good results when running Kindle Countdown deals, or if we hadn’t seen good read through rates for the series in general.
 
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