The Other Times Of Caroline Tangent has been selected by Amazon as one of their UK 99p Kindle Monthly Deals for all of May. This means that my novel will be included on Amazon UK’s featured pages for their Monthly Deals and it should (hopefully) also be in some of their promotion emails.
What do I Expect From This?
I have no idea what impact this will have on sales but it will be interesting to see! I will write a follow-up post at the end of the month to publish the results. I also don’t know whether any such ‘sales spike’ will be continuous for the month, or whether extra sales will fade away after the first few days – I suspect the latter. I guess (and this may be stating the obvious!) it also depends how well one’s book sells at the start, because of course, Amazon’s algorithms keep you in the spotlight the more you sell.
(I do actually wonder whether the Amazon Daily Deal might be better for sales spikes (?) as such deals are only for one day and there is therefore more “urgency” for readers to buy a very limited deal. That is what happened when I was accepted for a BookBub Featured Deal.)
The deal is only for the Kindle version, and only in the UK. But it will be interesting to see if it has any impact on sales in the US/elsewhere (roughly half my Kindle sales come from Amazon.com), and/or any impact on my UK paperback sales.
One other thing I am bracing myself for is that if many copies are downloaded, then, ironically, it is entirely possible that my average review rating could potentially go down. This theory is based on feedback I’ve read from other authors, and I think is quite possible because people buy 99p deals without thinking so much about doing so (“99p? Great, click – buy!”) but when they come to read it, it might well be something they wouldn’t normally like and so there is the potential for lower ratings. OTOH I also tell myself: have faith! Believe that (enough) readers will like it! So far, my Amazon and Goodreads ratings show they have.
Being Selected by Amazon
I’ve been trying to work out how many books are selected every month for Amazon’s Kindle Monthly Deal. One blog I read said 600-800 books, which as far as I can tell seems about right. When I look at the current UK Monthly Deals, there are five pages of sci-fi novels, so that’s about 50 books just for that category.
What is interesting about Amazon’s Kindle Monthly Deals is that you have to be selected by Amazon for inclusion – i.e. you can’t pay/automatically be in such deals. You can nominate your book in the KDP Marketing resources, but that “doesn’t guarantee enrollment.” So (at least to me!) it is quite flattering to be asked if I wanted to include my book in the deal – but I may well be overembellishing this!
But in case it helps other authors consider if their books could be selected by Amazon, what I can tell you is this:
- I had, a few months earlier, reached number one on Amazon’s Time Travel charts in the UK, Canada and Australia as the result of a BookBub Featured Deal. And while I presume Amazon didn’t know the specifics, they/their algorithm might have noticed that, and the fact that it happened when the book was reduced to 99p;
- My book has sold steadily since publication eleven months ago, and although it has only climbed the charts significantly during the BookBub deal, it has remained constantly in the top ten to twenty thousand UK Kindle books (sometimes going higher, and sometimes lower).
- At the time Amazon first emailed me to ask if I wanted to be considered for the deal, I had just been shortlisted for the UK Selfies Book Awards. I suspect this is a coincedence, assuming Amazon’s selection is based on an algorithm?
The Results
We shall see what happens over the coming days/weeks (and months in terms of reviews), and I will report back in a separate post.
In the meantime, if you’re interested, then please do avail yourself of this great deal and buy a copy for yourself!