KDP Select: MRS. LIEUTENANT Gets Second Chance

Four and a half years ago when my novel MRS. LIEUTENANT was named a 2008 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award semifinalist while I was in the midst of self-publishing the novel, I was not on any social media site.

Part of the competition was to get people to vote for your book. Each semifinalist was given a page on Amazon with the beginning of the novel. I had no one to vote for my book.

MRS. LIEUTENANT has been a labor of love for over 40 years, only 20 of which I actually worked on the book. The project stems from my first weeks as a new Mrs. Lieutenant in the spring of 1970 right after the Kent State shootings.

Twenty years ago two movie producers optioned the story, then told me I had to write a book before they could “shop” the project around Hollywood. By the time I write the first draft of the novel (to protect the innocent), they had moved on.

Then I wrote and rewrote and took courses and read books until POD (Print on Demand) made self-publishing the book a realistic option. (Note: Although the price BookSurge — now part of CreateSpace — insisted on for the paperback made it unlikely that many people would buy it from an unknown author.)

Even though Kindle had only been introduced in November of 2007, I knew enough to have the novel converted for Kindle. But not that many people could read a Kindle book then, nor did the free Kindle apps for almost any electronic device exist then.

Fast forward to November/December 2011 when Amazon introduced KDP Select.

In the following months I put new books on the KDP Select program but did not put MRS. LIEUTENANT on it because I would have to remove the ebook (by this time the novel had also been converted for Nook and iPad) from other ebook sites.

Finally I realized that I was cutting off my nose to spite my face (you know that expression, right?) and I put in the effort to remove MRS. LIEUTENANT from all other ebook sites.

Then I put MRS. LIEUTENANT on KDP Select (requires an exclusive on Kindle for 90-day periods).

And after testing out KDP Select with CIA FALL GUY and TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK, I’m ready for two free KDP Select days for MRS. LIEUTENANT on August 20 and 21.

Of course, this requires a great deal of work to list the book’s free days on as many free Kindle listing sites as possible. Now I am in the process of using lists from several sources.

One free list is https://katrinaparkerwilliams.wordpress.com/2012/07/30/kdp-select-free-days-promo-sites/

This list is one of those in G.E. Johnson’s “Get Connected: 101 Places to Promote Your Books Online.” I bought this ebook along with these two ebooks whose lists I am using: Dan Poynter’s “KDP SelectTM: Navigating Kindle’s Freebie Day” and Cheryl Kaye Tardif’s “How I Made Over $42,000 in 1 Month Selling My Kindle eBooks.”

Each listing possibility has to be read carefully:

Some require payment (I am usually passing up these), some require putting a link on your own website (I am passing all these up). Others require following on Twitter (of course!) and/or “liking” a Facebook Page (of course!).

Still others mention they favor books with lots of reviews and average ratings over 4.0. (MRS. LIEUTENANT is great with this requirement – at this writing 35 reviews and what looks like 4.3 star rating out of 5.0.)

One difficulty I am having with these lists is answering the genre question. Sometimes I write “military/women’s fiction” and sometimes I consider checking “literary fiction.”

And yes, it can be a full-time job getting ready for two free KDP Days. Yet I owe MRS. LIEUTENANT in Kindle format this effort. This is a story — a slice of women’s social history at the beginning of the women’s liberation movement in the U.S. — that I have wanted to share for 40 years.

And I hope you will calendar getting MRS. LIEUTENANT for free on August 20 and 21 at http://amzn.to/OXrBhh — and tell your friends!

(If you need to download a free Kindle app to read the novel on your PC or Mac or iPhone, here is the link to do this — http://amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771)

P.S. Eight or so weeks of effort and thanks to a very nice person at Amazon’s Author Central, MRS. LIEUTENANT’s Kindle version now has Kindle categories and, as of this morning, the two I want:

• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > Genre Fiction > War

• Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Fiction > World Literature > Jewish

Yes!

© 2012 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller is the author of fiction and nonfiction books/ebooks. A new nonfiction ebook of hers is TOP TIPS FOR HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK ON AMAZON AND FACEBOOK and her newest fiction ebook is the thriller CIA FALL GUY.

Click here to visit her Amazon author page at amazon.com/author/phylliszimblermiller

She also has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the online marketing company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com