To be fair, they had bigger things on their minds (harvest and market stalls) but between them they failed to allay my confusion. I scribbled vague numbers and arrows on to scraps paper for twenty minutes, before bringing in my support team – The Farmer, The Engineer and The Gallivanting Granny. A dizzy spell ensued, which necessitated the use of smelling salts. I read the blog of a fellow author who had scheduled Kindle Countdown Deals to run simultaneously across multiple time-zones. Sorry, but it’s no use looking to me for help with this.) (I’ve emboldened the numbers to allow you to share my hysteria, not as a useful aid to your own cross-time-zone promotional dilemmas. Gotta be possible right? Flappy panic two. Luckily I’ve got 7 days of Kindle price reduction to span a 5 day BookBub promotion. As someone who still hasn’t grasped the intricacies of changing my clocks twice a year, this could be a disaster. My Kindle Countdown must be scheduled in GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and I’m living in BST (British Summer Time). Simple for some maybe, but my brain was having none of it.īookBub stipulate that the e-book must be available across all platforms (phew again) at the promotional reduced price ( £0.99 in my case) at 12.00pm PST (Pacific Standard Time) and that price must be in place up until 11.59pm on the day the deal ends. The next flappy panic involved TIME ZONES. Phew! It would have taken me more than half an hour to work that out for myself. So your book will not show as eligible for the deal if you are sitting outside of their criteria. That’s a pretty specific set of rules, but luckily KDP enforce them for you. Also there are price criteria, and you must be willing to discount your book by a minimum of £1 ( $1 US). The price of your book must not have been changed in the 30 days prior to the Countdown commencing, and the Countdown must conclude 14 days before your enrolment period ends. If your book is enrolled in KDP Select you are permitted to run one Kindle Countdown Deal, lasting a maximum of 7 days, during your 90 day enrolment period. I have to admit that it was luck rather than planning which enabled me to do so. (July’s marketing tick-box checked retrospectively). Having successfully straddled that hurdle, I decided to complicate things for myself by running a Kindle Countdown Deal concurrently with the promotion. The information was easy to find in their FAQs (in my haste for rapid solutions I also fired off an email to the BookBub partners, who I’m pleased to say were quick to get back to me.) The first flappy panic – the question “when do you want your deal to end” – involved a trawl through the BookBub Ts and Cs to find out if there were any rules governing this. (Ideally within half an hour, as I’d promised the Gallivanting Granny that I would take her to market. Clearly I wanted to seal the deal and get my $40 off in rapid quick time. A mere seven days from receipt of the acceptance email, with seven days prior payment required. My promotion was scheduled to begin on August 20th. To my utter surprise and delight the book was accepted! To be frank, submitting to BookBub felt like an easy way to tick off a checkbox, with no further effort required when my submission was rejected. My personal Magna Carta carries an edict which states that I must embark on at least one marketing foray each month. A Bed of Barley Straw has limited reviews, and the e-book is only available on a single platform (yes, it is Amazon, no surprises there). Reading the BookBub submission guidance, I didn’t rate my chances. It was that despair, however, which urged me to bung off a submission request for a BookBub UK Featured Deal. No surprise then that I have witnessed a drop in sales: For the last few weeks I’ve been flat-lining with only the occasional one-or-two books perking up the sales chart and keeping me from despair. I’ve been so stuck into writing my new novel, and with harvest upon us as well, that I have to confess to my marketing efforts throughout July and August have being poor (verging on dismal).
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