Seven Ways to Promote Your Book on Kindle Scout

 

I am winding down my 30-day promotional campaign for my new book, The Depth of Beauty, on Kindle Scout.  That’s the program where readers go to the KS website, sample the book and hopefully nominate it for publication by Kindle Press. Here’s my link: http://amzn.to/1ElzAQL

The selection committee at Kindle Scout doesn’t spell out what you need to do in order to have your book pass muster with them.  I assume you need a lot of nominations, even though I’m not sure what constitutes “a lot.”  But according to those I’ve talked to who pay special attention to the program, more votes doesn’t always mean a successful campaign.

In the absence of a concrete standard for acceptance, I can only surmise that more votes won’t hurt.  So I embarked on a six-part promotional program to get the word out:

1. I sent emails to friends and family (of course!), but also, readers of my previous books whose emails I had collected. I explained the program and specifically what I needed them to do. I also encouraged them to vote for other books along with mine, since every eligible voter (a person with an Amazon account) can nominate three books at a time (alas, only once per title!). In each case I asked them to pass along my request to others.

2. I blogged about it (as I’m doing right now).

3. I put a link to the nomination page prominently on my website.

4. I created and scheduled tweets that have been sent out ten times a day (roughly every two and a half hours), and I’ve tried not to repeat them more than once. Over a 30-day period, that’s a heck of a lot of tweets! Having written headlines and advertising copy for many years, I considered it another assignment and had fun seeing how I could get my points across in 140 characters or less (much less, if I used a jpeg of the cover, which I did at least a third of the time).  I also used many quotes from the book, and in the process, realized that if someone read all the tweets in the same sequence as they appear in the manuscript, they’d have an excellent grasp of the story from start to finish. Hmm, does that mean the story could be trimmed down even further?  Oh, I don’t want to go there…

5. I worked with Melrock, a social media marketer , to create Facebook ads which I sent out to several dozen author groups. I picked that target audience because I figured they might be interested in helping a fellow author. I also posted my Kindle Scout nomination request on my own Facebook page and “boosted” it so that it would go out to more than just a fraction of my page followers.

6. A while back I had scheduled a virtual book tour for another of my novels, The Lair. It so happens the days of the tour, September 21-25, coincide with the last five days of the Kindle Scout promotion.  Fortunately I was able to add a small blurb about voting for The Depth of Beauty to my media kit; hopefully it will show up on many of my tour stops. You can click on the Tasty Book Tours widget on the right hand column above to see which websites are going to feature The Lair on each day of the tour.

7. I read in a blog by Jim Jackson http://bit.ly/1fIxHSd that one author offered an incentive of a free short story to anyone who voted for his book and shared his posts on Facebook.  I didn’t do that, but it sounds like a pretty good idea!

My promotion has about a week to go and I have no idea if my efforts are going to pay off.  If they do, fantastic; if not, I’m a silver lining-type person: at least I will have promoted a damn good book heavily for a month.  I’m bound and determined that sooner or later, readers are going to discover it!

Are you considering placing your book in the Kindle Scout program?  If so, what types of promotional techniques are you going to try?  I’d love to hear from you.