Kindle Scout pros, cons and surprises
Kindle Scout holds an awesome promise, a great publishing contract and amazing marketing, but so far marketing for the program is as exhausting as a marathon. I was on the fence about whether or not to try it out when I came across a blog by Martin Crosby on Indies Unlimited. Martin had a great experience with the program and even got a call from an agent out of his participation.
When I went to the site to fill out the Scout paperwork I was given an option to promote my current works, which really tipped the scales in favor of trying out Scout.
After just three days I have had a few surprises, read the list below to get an idea of what I've learned so far.
Pros
- Quick marketing feedback. The marketing tools on Kindle Scout give you a daily update of where your traffic is coming from so you know what's working and what's not.
- Easy to use. The paperwork for Scout was very fast. Once I filled out my application and submitted my book the process took only two days and I was up and running.
- the communication from the Scout team was very quick. They sent me links to my books to help me prepare for my launch day.
- So far I spent the majority of my time in hot and trending.
Cons
- When I signed up for Scout I expected the contest to drive traffic to my existing books, so far it has had no effect on my current offerings. I typically sell at least 2 books per day at $2.99 and have around 1000 pages read, when running no promotions. That has not changed since the start of the competition.
- I expected the contest to generate more views to the page. So far the traffic driven to the site has been roughly 50/50, so on the first day I had 80 views and over 40 of them came from my own efforts. I ran a major campaign the second day of the competition and spent the entire day in the hot and trending category but once I fell off, all views seemed to fade away.
Suprises
- The updates only come in the morning around 7 a.m. I kept checking my stats the first day and it said I had zero views. I was starting to panic until I realized Kindle Scout only updates once per day.
- A lot of the votes come from authors helping other authors. When I tried to figure out how my fellow authors were marekting, many of them had started thier novels in the program WriteOn from Amazon and they were helping eachother out with votes. I had no idea before the competition that program existed.
- Many of my fellow authors have extremely large followings. I had a list of 400 newsletter followers, but once I entered the competition I found that some of my fellow authors had really large fan bases. And by large I mean some as large as 10,000, whew.
Conclusions
-I'm really going to have to hustle to make it through these next 26 almost 25 days.
If you want to check out my Kindle Scout Entry you can do so here: Divine Hotel
