If you're in the Kindle Select program (the Amazon exclusive thing), you know that you have 90 day windows in which to use their prezzies to market your stuff (i.e. free days or Kindle Countdown Deals). Each book has a start date and an end date to show you your window. It's all cool.
Except when you have a series and all of their dates are staggered around.
My Once Upon a Djinn series is staggered because I wasn't planning anything when I did my releases, so there's no cohesion within the series for Kindle Select purposes. WIOH, IDW, and WHTF are all kind of close together. Poor UWC is hanging out there alone. Which makes marketing a little sketchy sometimes.
So, I figured I'd take it out of the program until it got closer to the others. And that's where the issue came up.
Right after I set UWC to not be in the program - a program you have to be in to garner page reads through Kindle Unlimited - someone in the UK started reading the series in KU. They went through WIOH in a couple days and started IDW, which meant that they'd be getting to UWC shortly. Except UWC wasn't in the KU program anymore.
Blerg.
So, despite my idea to have the books be together as a series in the program, I had to put UWC back in right after I took it out. Don't want to disappoint the reader. Lucky for me, the whole thing is automatic. Once you click that you want it in Kindle Select, it's available for KU subscribers to read.
I guess there are worse problems to have than the one where someone is reading my series so I can't be all anal about dates and junk. I'd still like to have them be uniform, but c'est la vie. Wishing for the ability to do so is like wishing for no page reads. And that's just silly.
Do you get anal about stuff? Or is it just me?
No, I *need* to be anal about the business details! I'm not on top of it, but going to be trying harder in 2020. That's great about the UK reader!
ReplyDeleteI got lucky...somehow. All my Nightrider books eventually ended up close so when I took them off KU, I only had to wait on one. I don't plan on taking the Moonstruck books wide because I'm doing compilation books with bonus material that goes wide. Best of both worlds. Penumbra Papers was always wide too, and I sometimes wonder if that's why it never really took off--I didn't have that Amazon boost to begin with. Who knows? I hear arguments both ways. 🤷
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question, I only get anal when it's inconvenient. LOL Though I really should plan things better. I keep saying I'm going to do that "next" time. Yeah...about that... 🙄
I get anal about weird things, like when the salt and pepper shakers aren't aligned. It never occurred to me to worry about release dates, and that does sound like an important marketing tool.
ReplyDeleteUm, let's not talk about marketing, okay? As in, I keep forgetting to do any.