Amazon Australia Kindle Ebooks

I received an email from Amazon this morning stating that my books were now available on Amazon Australia.

Being Hamish https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00E0NVLI8
When God Gets Bored https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00AA32BM2

Good news right? Well it should be, but I was a bit disappointed to see that they were priced at $3.99 not the usual $2.99 minimum.

Why the extra $1? Well no particularly good reason that I can see. To make matters worse, you can’t set a price below $3.99 for the region, which seems particularly troublesome. So whilst it is nice to get an Australian store-front, it isn’t something I’d recommend using until they put in flexibility with the pricing.

I’ve contacted Amazon but I doubt I’ll get much of a reply, let alone a change in policy. Whilst it is nice to have books auto-delivered to the kindle app, for now, the best option is still smashwords where you can pay nothing at all:

Being Hamish (pay what you want) https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/337925
When Got Gets Bored (pay what you want) https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/255287

Being Hamish – Promo Results

So the six day promotion has come and gone and the results are in. As posted earlier, this was all a bit of an experiment to try out Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and also Facebook’s ads.

The method was to give away “Being Hamish” for free for 5 days as part of the KDP program. Besides this blog and twitter, I decided to run a small facebook advertisement to celebrate the fact. The aim was to drive people to give the book a go and to hopefully enjoy it.

Here is the result of the campaign:

As you can see, a tick under 50k impressions resulting in 56 clicks. In total, I had 59 people take advantage of the promo to grab the book. It is worth sharing that this facebook advertising cost me about $19 for the run of the campaign. It isn’t nothing, but it was certainly low enough cost not to worry about the result at all.

Is 59 downloads a success? Well it is all relative. I had hoped for more, but I’m ultimately satisfied with the result and the lessons learnt. More importantly will any of those people read and enjoy the book? I most certainly hope so but it is impossible to tell. How does it compare to other ebooks on the market? Well of note this broke Being Hamish into the top 100 for “Coming of Age” novels. In fact it peaked around position 57 on the charts, which isn’t too bad at all.

Look out..umm Charles Dickens. I’m coming for you.

Would I do it again? I doubt it at this stage. Whilst the method used above has been proven as somewhat viable, I don’t believe it is necessarily worth it. A better test would be to see how many people would have “paid” after being presented with the advertisement and I suspect not a lot. Additionally the way the ads work is you compete for positioning based on how much you will “pay” when somebody finally clicks it. You can control this process well, but it does mean you could be spending a large sum on something that just isn’t going to earn a return.

Still, it was a fun exercise and I enjoyed seeing the clicks come in and spreading the good word a little. It was all relatively painless and quick to set up via paypal (with easy to set spending limits etc) so if you ever wondered if you should try it as well? I’d say give it a go.

Being Hamish – Being Free Promotion

As part of the adventure of Kindle Direct Publishing, it is time to try out their promotions. In particular this means that Being Hamish will be free on Amazon until the 6th of October.

As an experiment, I’m going to try a bit of facebook advertising to try to pick up one or two readers. It is all a learning experience at this stage, but hopefully it goes well enough. I’ve decided not to push anything through to the news feed, because that is something I personally hate to see. If people don’t block the ads, they’ll be there and somebody might click along.

So if you have a few kb spare on your device of choice, please feel free to check it out at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E0NVLI8 and help to spread the word.