I hate bullying.

Amazon.com has, of late, not had the reputation of being a friendly player in the marketplace. First they had their price match app on smartphones that allowed people to walk into mom and pop stores, scan a product and find out that it was cheaper on Amazon.com. The user got to save a couple of dollars, Amazon got some free market research data and mom and pop stores made a little less money.

Fair? No, but life isn’t fair and the marketplace sure as hell isn’t fair.

My book (SHORTCUTS – Book 1) came out on Amazon.com on Dec 19th, 2011. I chose to release it on Amazon.com first because they are the biggest ebook and ereader retailer in the world and they had the easiest system to work with as a self-published author.

Amazon.com is currently pushing their new KDP Select program for authors. In exchange for agreeing to exclusively list your book (in digital form) solely with Amazon.com for 90 days, you can get it included in their Amazon Prime Lending Library (members can borrow the book for ‘free’ as part of their paid membership and authors get paid a share of a pre-determined pot of cash for that month) plus more importantly you get the opportunity to offer your book for free on Amazon.com.

I agree, it’s weird to think that in return for exclusivity you get to give away something you made for free.

However, one of the biggest hurdles to success as a self-published author is marketing. Traditional marketing costs a lot. The big benefit of agreeing to the exclusivity of Amazon.com’s KDP Select is that you get to price your book for $0.00 for up to 5 days within that 90 day period. It has been proven time and time again that free ebooks on Amazon get downloaded… a lot. Then those books potentially rise in the bestseller list and more people find out about them, which increases the potential for sales later on.

I’ve decided to gamble on KDP Select with ‘SHORTCUTS – Book 1‘. I’m going to offer up some free download days in the next week.

Will it work? I don’t know, but I’ll post my results here as they happen.

‘SHORTCUTS – Book 1‘, as of 3:59PM EST on Sunday, January 1st, 2012 is currently #77,063 in the Amazon Kindle Book Store out of 969,964 ebooks available.

UPDATE

JAN 2nd, 2012

8:00AM EST: 5 hours into the first free download day and the book is now #12,945 out of 969,954 ebooks available.

8:30AM EST:  #5,532

12:30PM EST:  #3,157

1:30PM EST: #1,869

4:30PM EST: #1,629  (#95 in Children’s Fiction, #98 in General Fantasy)

9:22PM EST: #1,265 (#82 in Children’s Fiction, #73 in General Fantasy)

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JAN 3rd, 2012

9:00AM EST: 1,205  (#73 in Children’s Fiction, #66 in General Fantasy)